Ghostery does not support custom external lists, which is why it is useless
Adblockers Performance Study
71–80 of 126 posts
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#72This is great news, but I think most people already using ad blockers know that even slow ad blocker improves loading speed of web pages.
Even if blocking a request takes 10ms, it's still a win when it block something like a tracker which records every click and mouse movement on the page.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#73Ghostery does not support custom external lists, which is why it is useless
True,I can't using local AD list,it doesn't work like adp or ublock,which is not user friendly.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#74TIL: DDG has an adblocker. Good to know and I hope they can improve it.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#75Thanks for the interesting read! Just right off the bat, I’m a little cautious of benchmarks done by Ghostery that happens to show Ghostery is incredibly fast. Not that anything else stood out to me as suspicious, just a comment. Perhaps they are The fastest _because_ they are benchmarking and have fixed bottlenecks. Beyond all that, I’m a huge fan of ad blockers and use them as an attempt to reduce tracking and targ…
Thanks a lot for your comment. The project is open source and everything needed to run the study comparisons is available as well there: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker/tree/master/bench/com... We would be really happy to see people running the same benchmarks and try to reproduce the results!
Hi,thanks for this fast ad-block software.
After I give it a try,it does not provide an option let me subscribe easylist or something like that.Then I open a website,lots of ads are still there,right click on ad image,there is no option to remove them.
From a user opinion,it may not ready for everyday using.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#76So Ghostery benchmarks and is the fastest? Fine. But Ghostery does not belong in that test at all. Of course it can be faster. It misses a lot of the most important features! Like custom lists. Totally an ad.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, dislaimer: I worked on this study. Thank you for your comment. To me this reaction from the Chromium devs is missing one of the most fundamental issues. I'm not fundamentally against the declarative API because of technical limitations; I am against it because it is a strong innovation lock. The current extension ecosystem is flexible enough to allow hundreds (maybe thousands) of people to actively work on priva…
Speaking as a user (and early developer) of Safari's content blockers; I have almost never run into an issue with them. What kind of development do you fear will be stifled by Apple and Google not having incentives to improve the blocking (which I find somewhat strange in the former case, anyways)?
The sites that display ads, wants to make sure ad blockers can't block them.
Currently both sides adapt, if the way it works is locked down ad blockers quickly will become obsolete.
For example a whole ago most sites were creating popups with ads, after it became bad, browsers started blocking popups, initially by only displaying then when user actively clicks. So sites started opening a popup when user made a first click anywhere on the page, eventually browsers started blocking all popups and just notifying user that popup was triggered, giving them choice whether they want to see it.
This solved the old pop-ups, but because of that a new popups were created, that use CSS to show it within browser window covering the text. In addition to that, the CSS layers were used to implement other attention grabbing mechanisms, like ad that stays in place even when you scroll, or suddenly ad appears between text etc.
This was targeted by ad blockers, which constantly adapt. Most ads are served from different domains, since typically the ad content is provided by different company, but increasingly we see ads being served from the same domain as rest of the website, or website randomizes CSS component id etc.
What chromium authors are doing is to instead provide API for ad blockers to use and list their rules and let the browser do the blocking. Supposedly that's to improve performance. The problem with it is that it will essentially fix adblockers in one place, they no longer will be able to adapt, eventually new kind of ads will start to show up, that adblockers won't be able to block. And now with other changes that Google successfully pushed, such as https everywhere, http/2 and http/3 is nearly impossible to block ads through a proxy.
This is why I personally prefer to stick with a Firefox.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'm afraid of is the following: * The blocking engine operated by either Safari or Chrome is a black-box and independent devs will have a harder time understanding it, tweaking it, improving it, debugging it. * Chrome devs are now playing nicely and get feedback and propose some improvements to the APIs but there is no warranty this will happen again, or that they will invest time/energy in the future improving…
> Chrome devs are now playing nicely and get feedback and propose some improvements to the APIs but there is no warranty this will happen again, or that they will invest time/energy in the future improving this part of the browser. I think this is especially true. It is somewhat similar to many other Google products like Maps and Translate. They start as a good free product, but as soon as they gain enough traction t…
This is their long game. To me all the push Google did with https, and certificate pinning etc makes much more sense. I was wondering why they were pushing it so hard.
I mean after they essentially blocked ways to use proxy to filter the content, next logical step is to restrict API.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
- As pointed out in the previous comment, with DNS based blocking users often have to choose between convenience and privacy. As an example: Blocking ads on Youtube with DNS blocking is very hard, unless you block youtube* itself. - It does not give you fine grained permission: Like, if you only want to allow a particular third-party on a specific site. While DNS based blocking is fast but at the same time it is also…
Youtube is an interesting example, I use it less and less because of ads but can you block ads in it with anything? The problem for me is that I have several devices that do not run JS (like TV box) and do not use a browser for watching content. For this reason it is probably the only solution to block bad content on the DNS level. I like to pay for what I get (Netflix) and I reject the entire ad based surveillance c…
uBlock Origin blocks youtube ads, I haven't seen any for years.
However that doesn't solve the problem of the web player sucking. To solve that, your best option is mpv/youtube-dl.
Re: Adblockers Performance Study
#80> This work was motivated by one of the claims formulated in the Manifest V3 proposal of the Chromium project: "the extension then performs arbitrary (and potentially very slow) JavaScript", talking about content-blockers' ability to process all network requests. From the measurements, we do not think this claim holds, as all popular content-blockers are already very efficient and should not incur any noticeable slow…
> If a user doesn't have an obvious way to know it's the fault of an extension then Chrome gets the blame.
If the network or DNS or system is slow then Chrome gets the blame.
Perhaps they shouldn’t install anything if they’re incompetent to use it.