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Adblockers Performance Study

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Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#121

Post by simon_o »

gregknicholson wrote: post #88
pythux wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

I'm hoping that Firefox is once again seen as a viable alternative, that “power users” would consider switching to if Chrome falls behind.

Would love to switch back to Firefox, but the general UX is just too terrible.

I also lack the trust that even if they fixed the major issues (or even allowed fixing them yourself) I would be able to rely on things working in the mid-to-long-term.

Currently holed up on Vivaldi, where the things you expect out of the box, are in fact working out of the box (vertical tabs, mouse gestures, ...).

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#122

Post by Dahoon »

r3bl wrote: post #83
Dahoon wrote: post #76

So 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.

Scroll to the footer and you'll see that this is Ghostery's website. I wouldn't really call promoting their own product on their own webpage an ad.

They don't state they are testing their own product as far as I can tell. Strike one. They use a domain that says nothing about them being one of the tested products authors. Strike two. The whole thing is totally biased, testing apples against oranges and then posted to HN. Most papers would force them to have a "This is a paid ad" somewhere. Strike three and out.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#123

Post by Dahoon »

tyingq wrote: post #105
kakarot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Ghostery doesn't want their bias to be obvious to the non-discerning user because it's obviously an attempt to reclaim market share using dirty tactics.

Fighting one dirty tactic (manifest v3) with another, though. I'm more alarmed about the former.

How are they "fighting one dirty tactic with another"? Clearly they are saying that the whole thing isn't a problem at all! They are fighting for manifest v3 with dirty tactics if anything.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#125

Post by takeda »

jefftk wrote: post #96
takeda wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want to proxy your HTTPS traffic you add a local CA, and Chrome does not apply certificate pinning. Pinning is only for certs that chain back to the default CAs, specifically so people who need to proxy can do so. (Disclosure: I work for Google, though not on Chrome)

Sure, but then you're still at the mercy of the browser.

The API change is totally unnecessary, yet is happening despite many protests.

The concern is that it was performance and privacy issue, which looks like a total BS (even according to the link we are discussing).

The extensions are installed by the user, so what not let them decide what to do with their browser? If it's really a concern, I don't think anyone would oppose if google would educate user what API given extension is using.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#126

Post by takeda »

roblabla wrote: post #97
takeda wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I agree with everything except this. First, http/2 and http/3 absolutely do not prevent blocking. If blocking proxies don't support them, then they're the ones lagging behind. Secondly, most blocking software working on the network layer use DNS, which still work…

Both http/2 and http/3 made TLS mandatory.

The DNS part was already handled by someone else.

As for the MITM https you are at the mercy of the browser, they are depreciating the API they might restrict this as well if it will become the way to do filtering.

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