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uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

addons.mozilla.org

141–150 of 416 posts

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#141

uBlock Origin, with CNAME uncloaking is the most powerful ad/tracker blocking tool. Browsing Internet without it is often time a scary experience. It does block our [Wide Angle Analytics]( https://wideangle.co/documentation/track-with-custom-domain ) tracker about which we are open about. And ... we are not against. Every user should have a right to self determination and control when browsing the Internet. Our track…

This went from props to a sales pitch fast

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only marketers love ads in general. To the rest of us, it's just annoying noise, to be filtered.

From an older submission to Hacker News: "Appreciate marketing. It seems like bullshit, but it’s bullshit I don’t want to have to do. I’m glad someone else is doing it, I’m sincerely grateful for their efforts." [0] Software development is important, but marketing is also important, and it actually works. Most companies can't survive without effective marketing. [0] https://devjac.dev/posts/2021-05-29-my-personal-cre…

I don't think most marketers are evil, but as an industry marketing includes a lot of bad actors and boundary pushers that actively make the internet worse for financial gain. As a result I think it's fair for an individual to have an adversarial stance with "marketing" even if your employer's marketing department is pretty benign and helpful.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#144

How do people reach technical audiences on Google search when the said technical audience has Adblock installed? Do any founders or tech startups use Google Ads? I don't know any tech person that doesn't use uBlock Origin. I've seen people recommending StackOverflow ads to reach exact people that might be interested in your product, but I've never ever seen ads on StackOverflow - thanks to uBlock Origin.

If you want to get the attention of technical audiences, create great technical content. Blogs, YouTube videos, conference talks, etc. If it's good, your audience will spread it among themselves using their existing social connections.

If you don't have good content, then you don't get access to technical users who do everything in their power to avoid useless noise on the internet.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are sensitive to the danger of being nickled and dimed to death. And yet, people will sign up for multiple subscription services (Netflix, Disney plus, HBO max, Amazon prime, etc), which I consider to be the same as being nickeled and dimed.

Consider a Netflix like service where you paid $0.50 per show you watched. It happened seamlessly and you just saw a bill at the end of the month. Would you have the same video viewing habits? Services like this exist, but total revenue is so small they don't even register on most charts. People don't like it.

Well, I watch maybe 1 movie a month. So, .50 sounds pretty good.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#146
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started using https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/ which is a programmable, custom search engine that Google provides. I only include sites that I want to. For news, I have a separate search engine; for programming, I include Gitlab, Github, and others. It's quite nice, and you can share your search engines with others via a public URL. Another example is creating a "social media" only search engin…

> I have over 50 social media websites What are the others besides the usual 2-3?

https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock

My list is based on this project. It has over 200 items, many of which I was unaware existed.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#147
post #25

I think it's only a matter of time until adblock is legally banned. The current situation, where the vast majority of the internet relies solely on ads and an increasing number of people use adblock year over year is unsustainable. The system can support a certain number of free riders (people who consume the product but don't contribute back in ad eyeballs), but at a certain point the math will no longer work. Event…

I too fear AdBlock will eventually fail, not because it will be legally banned (on what basis??) but because Chrome will kill it and other browsers will die. You seem to welcome it; I think it would be a great catastrophe.

It's more likely governments will make it illegal to not use an adblocker. For example the security community is now having adblock installed on normie browsers as a matter of policy. If everyone starts doing that and the companies whose survival depends on ads react in a way that ends the free ride for the technical class, things will really hit the fan. Imagine all the smartest programmers in the world wake up one morning and are forced to use the unfiltered internet. We'd all switch to SerenityOS within the fortnight and the old regime would skulk along like a brainless beast for a few decades while Andreas Kling becomes emperor of the world.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#148

I have a dream that some day all browsers come with builtin uBlock. I wish I could install it for everybody. Browsing the Web and watching Youtube is such a different experience with adblock.

I think YouTube has an okay monetization policy, it's nowhere near as malicious as a random recipe blog with 19 ads and auto playing videos

Why is it that after 11PM YouTube will randomly show me ads that are entire movies long, like 90 minutes long? Do they think I am asleep and want to charge their ad client full price for the view?

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#150

Too bad modern Firefox doesn't actually have the support to run full featured uBlock Origin since they moved to the Chrome extensions model and threw away the entire Firefox add-on ecosystem. Actual Firefox forks like Sea Monkey and Palemoon still support the fully featured uBlock Origin.

How? Mozilla has kept the old webRequest API: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

Back in the day, Firefox plugins were able to execute shell commands, and had complete access to the OS of the user. Some people apparently miss this, but it was a key reason why I moved to Chromium based browsers in the first place.
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