Live data from Hacker News

µBlock for Firefox

github.com

41–50 of 273 posts

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#42
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'…

I haven't used uMatrix, since I use Firefox, but I can speak for RequestPolicy, which is kind of the same thing basically AFAICS. It's very very very rare that I end up whitelisting everything that's requested on a site. The more you use the extension, the more you learn to recognize what domains you need to allow in order to have the site working as intended, and this way you end up building your own whitelist: allowing requests from a domain is a one-time only thing most of the times (additionally, there's an extension you can install that syncs your whitelist to your Firefox Sync account).

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#43
post #26

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

µBlock does have an option to disable "first-party" and "third-party" scripts. It's configurable globally and per-site (per-site takes precedence).

I don't think it blocks Flash. I let the browser to that anyway, so for me this isn't a problem.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With respect, this is great for me. I would like to read articles that haven't been self-censored to keep potential advertisers happy. For me, journalism needs to figure out other funding models to regain some semblance of integrity.

Funding comes from 3 sources: Owners, advertisers and the public (either as donationware or subscription fees). Each one comes with a set of challenges.

Owners tend to exert some sort of editorial control, making the coverage slanted towards their end-goal.

Advertisers tend to be unpalatable to the reader, sometimes editorial control is a problem but that sometimes means there's an editorial problem (advertisers stop using a paper due to consumer pressure).

Subscription means your content is not as widely distributed as it could be. Yes we want to get paid but primarily journalists are in it to be read. Getting that many people to part with money is also a hard problem when compared to the other two sources.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#45
post #39
post #5

I have been using µBlock for 3 weeks now.(previously adblock plus). There is one irritating thing it has that almost makes me go back to adblock again. It is often blocking the false positives. So if developer has named one of their assets file with social media names like "twitter/facebook/etc", it blocks the file right away. Since it does not have custom configuration options for each site, you can either disable µ…

Similarly, it blocks all FB, Twitter buttons across all websites and there seems to be no way to white list those across all websites. Am I missing something?

Well, this in itself seems like a good reason for me to install it.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#46
post #39
post #5

I have been using µBlock for 3 weeks now.(previously adblock plus). There is one irritating thing it has that almost makes me go back to adblock again. It is often blocking the false positives. So if developer has named one of their assets file with social media names like "twitter/facebook/etc", it blocks the file right away. Since it does not have custom configuration options for each site, you can either disable µ…

Similarly, it blocks all FB, Twitter buttons across all websites and there seems to be no way to white list those across all websites. Am I missing something?

Go To Preferences, Third-party filters, and uncheck "Easy Privacy" list. It should bring back the social buttons (everywhere).

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#49

The GitHub site also states that it's available for Chrome, Opera and Safari (not yet in the extension gallery). Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cjpalhdlnbpafiamej... Opera: https://addons.opera.com/en-gb/extensions/details/ublock/ Safari: https://chrismatic.io/ublock Haven't tried it out myself yet but it's nice to see effort put into lowering the memory & CPU usage of such blockers.

Thanks for those links. While the earlier versions for Safari (like v0.8.2.0, found here https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/117) work well on Safari 5, these new versions on your Safari link do not. They crash the browser during installation.
Post reply on HN