121–130 of 273 posts
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?
Some of the marketing people on here will probably find that to be horrendous. Where is my relevant promoted content?!
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 a…
I expect you would get more complaints, saying it was stupid and didn't work. But it would be interesting to see the outcome.
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?
If you've ever implemented GA, you know that Google has put a lot of effort into making their implementation extremely efficient and asynchronous. I personally think they should be rewarded for being considerate towards users' time and resources.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the deactivation of Google Analytics impact the user negatively?
They don't get the privilege of having their data analyzed and used to market products back to them. Some of the marketing people on here will probably find that to be horrendous. Where is my relevant promoted content?!
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.…
The way I have done it is by installing unbound[0]. If you aren't using something else like dnsmasq, you will notice a speedup from the DNS caching alone. While unbound isn't supposed to serve authoritative answers (i.e.: don't use it to manage your zone) the possibility is there. The unbound-block-hosts script[1] can be used to convert Dan Pollocks' hosts file to the appropriate unbound syntax.
To avoid the timeout from localhost, my first approach was to setup a firewall rules that discards the request (the browser receives a connection refused message _immediately_)
Another way of proceeding is to setup nginx to serve a 1*1 transparent GIF for every request it receives. If you find nginx to be too big a dependency, there are alternatives such as pixelserv[2].
The issue is that you can't block a specific element, but you still catch a fair share of ads.
I have explored the possibility of running a http proxy to address this, but I haven't got around to it yet. (In addition, I'll probably need to MITM myself if I want to block elements in HTTPS; still needs some thinking :)).
[0] https://unbound.net/ [1] https://github.com/jodrell/unbound-block-hosts [2] https://github.com/h0tw1r3/pixelserv
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…
Hiding Twitter and Facebook log-in functionality on Medium is a feature not a bug for me. By including those javascripts, both companies can build up a history of the sites I visit.
So I gather this is more of a privacy+ad blocker rather than strictly ad blocker.
Does this also work for Firefox on Android? EDIT: it seems that it's not compatible with Firefox 35 on my Android. Oh well, more patience required :-)
Bluhell Firewall does work on Firefox for Android, if you're looking for an ad blocker while you wait for µBlock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
> You can't compare directly the figures between the browsers
Still, yes, Chromium uses more memory. A good part of this is because per-process tab. Once Firefox get the same per-process tab architecture, it will be easier to compare both browsers together.
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.
"Paying for it"? GA doesn't do much that a webmaster couldn't otherwise learn by analysing their webserver log files.