Live data from Hacker News

µBlock for Firefox

github.com

111–120 of 273 posts

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#111

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…

And in response, blockers could then create lists of hashes of ads (pictures) instead of URIs and block those ?

That would burn bandwidth and loading time, since the only way to check the hash is to download the content. Part of the point of ad blockers is to stop the request for the ad as early as possible.

Regardless, it's easy enough to salt the ads for each request, thwarting hash checks.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#112
post #89

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...

I'd appreciate details of CPU consumption as well. Minute amounts of memory are of no concern for many people, but everyone prefers snappier browsing, every time.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#113

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.

Does the deactivation of Google Analytics impact the user negatively?

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#114

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.

> it entirely disables Google Analytics on every site.

Some might find being tracked across most of the Internet to be a privacy concern.

People put google analytics on their site because of the 'free' data they get from google, and I suspect most don't consider that there is a cost - it's just their users that are paying it.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#115

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…

There's already a couple of threads here discussing that uBlock is using different filters by default than other adblockers.

There's also a comment from the developer mentioning that the filter you mention has been turned off (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916774 ).

Here's a good guideline: uBlock is not yet the right blocker for people that don't want to configure anything. It's not clear to me that it is even trying to be that thing, but it's clear enough that it isn't there yet.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#117
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since most ads are effectively blocked at the domain level, I doubt your scheme would provide much bang for the buck.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#118
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluhell Firewall does work on Firefox for Android, if you're looking for an ad blocker while you wait for µBlock.

And so do Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge. The reason I am interested in this is because of much lower resource consumption than either of those. I haven't tried Bluehell Firewall though. Can you comment on its performance as compared to Adblock Plus/Edge?

Bluhell is touted as a lighter weight solution. I haven't taken measurements, but Firefox Mobile certainly feels snappier with Bluhell than with Adblock Plus/Edge.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#119

If the author is here, please turn off the counter by default. We're blocking distracting things in our browser, we don't need another pointless distracting thing in our browser toolbar.

Counter opinion: I like the number because if there's a website working not quite right, I can easily see the number and disable uBlock to test out if that's the cause.

But you can't, though. uBlock shows the total number of blocked items since you started Firefox. Not the number for a given page or site. Making it a basically superfluous mostly useless datapoint.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#120

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.

Does the deactivation of Google Analytics impact the user negatively?

Arguably the sites they visit will be receiving skewed analytics against their particular use-case, so the site owners won't cater to their needs as much. That said, I still block GA.
Post reply on HN