µBlock for Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#21

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:18 AM UTC

ramadarata wrote: post #8

Ad blocking is theft. Period.

You could make a case that an ISP or proxy operator that replaces advertising with other advertising is stealing from the operator of the original website. But blocking ads is the same as not looking at ads in the paper. If you're not going to act on them or read them you might as well block them for the bandwidth savings and speed improvement. Besides that, not all advertising has your best interest at heart, there is quite a bit of malware that uses distribution via advertising networks as their vector onto your machine. So now adblocking has the perfect fig-leaf: it will keep malware of your machine. This makes adblocking mandatory within organizations if they're savvy about this, why take the risk of having to re-image a bunch of machines or allow a bunch of drive-by malware to gain a foothold behind your precious corporate firewall if you can simply block it at the source.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#22

Post by molticrystal » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:20 AM UTC

How is the performance for the firefox port? I might of missed it, but all I see are reports in comparison to adblockers on chrome.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#23

Post by sarciszewski » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:21 AM UTC

ramadarata wrote: post #8

Ad blocking is theft. Period.

Web pages are rendered by my web browser on my computer. Ad agencies do not have a right for their content to be forced upon me.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#24

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:21 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #16

ramadarata wrote: post #8

Ad blocking is theft. Period.

Where's the law that says I have to view web content as it's creators intend? You send me a stream of data, I decide what to do with it, what parts to render, what parts to ignore.

Hehe. Surely some DRM friendly folks dreamed about a personal computer platform where you would be forced to go through commercials as with television/video before accessing content.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#25

Post by anon4 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:24 AM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #11

Hopefully at some point someone will do something similar for element-level blocking. A lot of my custom ABP rules are actually blocking dynamic HTML slide-ins, overlays, animated carousels, etc.

If you just want to remove elements from the page, rather than block connections to third-party servers, I recommend Stylish. You can just write custom CSS rules and make those elements display:none. Alternatively, write a user script that does the same.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#26

Post by aerique » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:30 AM UTC

It isn't quite clear to me what add-ons this can replace. Obviously AdBlock, but perhaps also Ghostery and No-Script?

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#27

Post by Beltiras » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:30 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #16

ramadarata wrote: post #8

Ad blocking is theft. Period.

Where's the law that says I have to view web content as it's creators intend? You send me a stream of data, I decide what to do with it, what parts to render, what parts to ignore.

There's no law. I work at a newspaper. We are digitally aware and head towards a digital distribution. That means infrastructural changes and that costs money. Those advertisers pay the bills. They provide the means for us to reach you. Subscription models are (currently) not enough.

I'm not trying to guilt anyone into anything but this will be a an interesting field to watch in the coming years. How will journalism fund itself and maintain some semblance of integrity? If the ad revenues fall it will be a bumpy ride indeed.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#28

Post by rahimnathwani » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:32 AM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #7

From my experience of using this for a few weeks now on Chrome, I would recommend this over AdBlock Plus etc. I haven't done any specific performance tests and personally no numbers to back it up. However, I do have the subjective impression of improvement. I'm using it in combination with µMatrix.

> I'm using it in combination with µMatrix.

I'm curious: how do you use it? Do you have to mass-enable stuff using the 'power' icon, for many sites? Or do you just enable the things you know you need, on a per-site basis? Or are your default just good enough?

The reason I ask is that I was curious about it, so tried it out for a couple of days. I found many sites were not usable with the default settings, e.g. Udemy's login box didn't show up until I turned off µMatrix.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#29

Post by logn » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:35 AM UTC

aerique wrote: post #26

It isn't quite clear to me what add-ons this can replace. Obviously AdBlock, but perhaps also Ghostery and No-Script?

It's a replacement for AdBlock. JavaScript is not blocked unless it's part of an ad. The Easy Privacy list is part of uBlock by default, so there's some effective overlap with Ghostery but they're still different.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#30

Post by rmi_ » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:35 AM UTC

aerique wrote: post #26

It isn't quite clear to me what add-ons this can replace. Obviously AdBlock, but perhaps also Ghostery and No-Script?

There are lists available that block the same things as Ghostery. So yes, it does replace that.

Not NoScript, though.