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µBlock for Firefox

github.com

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Re: µBlock for Firefox

#101

Post by gorhill »

whizzkid wrote: 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…

> It is often blocking the false positives

It's the filter lists. Use the same filter lists with any other blockers which support ABP-filter syntax, and you will get the same result.

> named one of their assets file with social media names like "twitter/facebook/etc", it blocks the file right away

I have removed Fanboy's Social Blocking list from the pre-selected lists since a while now.[1]

I have to say that I had assumed -- wrongly obviously -- that all users knew that what is blocked or not depends completely on what filter lists are selected. So in your case it would have been a matter of un-selecting Fanboy's Social Blocking list.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/ce04053ae3054ff287a...

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#102

Post by gorhill »

odiroot wrote: post #52
whizzkid wrote: 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…

Same here. I only use it because it has lower resources consumption but it annoys me when it blocks Disqus even though I have added their domains to the white list.

Embedded Disqus works fine from here. If you have a URL where there is a problem, enter an issue on Github [0] -- and enumerate which filter lists you have selected.

Usually it all comes down to the filter lists, in which case I redirect to EasyList forum [1].

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues

[1] https://forums.lanik.us/viewforum.php?f=64

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#103

Post by mih »

chippy wrote: post #96
mih wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few sources actually. Beware, some of them can be too restrictive. If the hosts file is too big, it can also impact performance. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip (too restrictive) http://hosts-file.net/download/hosts.zip (ad-servers n tracking only) http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.asp http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&showi... http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts.win http://www.malwared…

curious about the performance issue. Would the impact on performance be larger than a similarly sized block list in a browser plugin? I have a netbook, so always want to keep an eye out on performance. I wonder if there's a GUI application which enables these hosts sources to be tweaked, searched, whitelisted etc

I use this on Windows. For a large hosts file (several megabytes), I find the DNS client service hangs until it reads the whole file. Further, there is also a noticeable delay in the order of a few seconds until the hostname is resolved. For smaller files, I find there is no noticeable lag. Can't offer you any numbers though.

Hostsman (http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman) on windows is the my choice of a frontend for hosts management. It's free but not open source.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#104

Post by Anthony-G »

mwj wrote: post #48

How does this compare/contrast with Privacy Badger?

Good question. It's a pity that the only response was a flag-killed irrelevancy. Only last week, I downloaded and started using Privacy Badger as an alternative to Ghostery. I'm liking it so far but my current laptop is 7 years old and only has 1GB RAM (running LXDE) so resource consumption is my main concern after safe-guarding my privacy.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#105

Post by fpgaminer »

Drakim wrote: post #75
fpgaminer wrote: post #71

It seems like, if one were an evil web developer, one could thwart blockers like these with a few nasty tricks. Server-side: on each request of a resource, salt all linked resource URIs and encrypt (after the host name) before sending the final document to the client. The resources can still be fetched, because the server can decrypt any requests, but the client has no way of knowing whether a particular resource is…

If the resource names are still "static" your resources can still be blocked. But if they are altered slightly every time, you may also thwart caching, right?

Right, which is why I added the bit about salting the URIs before encryption. The salt could be per request, per session, or rotated after some period of time (say once per day). If only rotated once per day, it would still thwart ad blocking, but have less of an impact on caching. It would turn into an economic question of whether the extra ad impressions are worth the extra bandwidth.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#106

Post by sjwright »

Amazing work.

One concern is that the EasyPrivacy‎ list -- which is in my opinion overly aggressive -- is enabled by default. Most pertinently, it entirely disables Google Analytics on every site.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#107

Post by mike-cardwell »

UserRights wrote: post #79
jkot wrote: post #47

Use /etc/hosts blocking if you are worried about CPU and memory. It also works on rooted Android devices.

Blocking at the DNS level produces a lot of requests to 127.0.0.1, which can be quite annoying e.g. if you are using a local webserver for development. Also if you do not have a local webserver on 127.0.0.1 the browser still will wait for answers to your request, what can be an annoying experience. Would be interesting to measure how much CPU and memory actually is wasted with many tabs waitung for elements from 127.…

If you choose to send the blocked requests to an IP address where you also choose to put a web server, then what do you expect? There's nothing stopping you from sending blocked requests to 127.0.0.2 and configuring your dev web server to listen on 127.0.0.1.

"the browser still will wait for answers to your request" - Shouldn't have to wait. You should get a near instant rejection if you attempt to connect to a TCP port on your local host and there's nothing listening there... Unless you screwed up your firewall.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#108

Post by danielsamuels »

I tried this out for a couple of weeks after the "Adblock makes things slower" article came out, and I found it was blocking more stuff - but not necessarily the right stuff. I was finding that sites were breaking, stuff was disappearing and it was because of uBlock. I think I was trying to log into Medium and the Twitter and Facebook had been hidden, literally breaking the functionality of the site. That's not what I want from an adblocker.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#109

Post by zobzu »

msl09 wrote: post #89
molticrystal wrote: post #22

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.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-version:-benc...

Wah Chromium uses way more ram than Firefox. 425M (firefox+ublock) vs 1.04G (chromium+ublock)

in all cases memory is reduced :)

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#110

Post by agumonkey »

ky3 wrote: post #70
agumonkey wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant, the ad is the product.

More like the ad is the anti-product, the POS you have to pay to get it taken from under your nose.

Or maybe 'meta-product'. They're still getting money for it. Getting money for a description.
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