µBlock for Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#201

Post by mdellabitta » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

notsony wrote: post #161

mdellabitta wrote: post #156

I decided to dump extension-based privacy stuff and installed Privoxy instead. I used to have Ghostery, Disconnect, ABP, and some other things running simultaneously. When you think about it, that's a lot of JS running and iterating the DOM multiple times every time you load a page. Now there's a single, purpose-built, standalone process written in C doing it. Not going back.

Any issues connecting to sites over SSL using Privoxy? I'm thinking mainly of banking web-sites.

I don't recall any problems, but I use Foxyproxy to connect to it. In the worst case, you can just toggle it off quickly for that site, then turn it on again.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#202

Post by jarcane » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

muppetman wrote: post #195

jarcane wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

µBlock enables Fanboy's social blocking list by default. If you want your Twitter/FB buttons and so forth back, you can turn it off in the subscription options.

It hasn't blocked them by default for a while now. It used to though.

Both the Chrome and Opera versions did for me, and quite recently too: only switched on Chrome about a month ago at most, and I've only even had Opera installed for about a week.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#203

Post by mdellabitta » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

X-combinator wrote: post #192

mdellabitta wrote: post #156

I decided to dump extension-based privacy stuff and installed Privoxy instead. I used to have Ghostery, Disconnect, ABP, and some other things running simultaneously. When you think about it, that's a lot of JS running and iterating the DOM multiple times every time you load a page. Now there's a single, purpose-built, standalone process written in C doing it. Not going back.

All I notice is that websites like Wired.com load faster with a ad-blocker.

Privoxy blocks ads, too.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#204

Post by lqdc13 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:16 PM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #194

eyko wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Safari and Chrome, it displays the number of filters applied on the current site. This is (super) useful. If on Firefox you're getting a global count then that's a bug (so please report it on Github). Perhaps changing the color from red to something more "off" (grey?) would help distract less.

Useful why? It's blocking stuff, that's great. I don't care how many things it blocks on a specific page. It make no difference to me while browsing. The little counter changing just looks like an annoying animated GIF in the corner of my browser. I get that a subset of users would derive some pleasure at knowing how many things are blocked on every single website they visit or users who'd like to use it to troublesh…

This is super useful feature for debugging. Happens sometimes that something goes wrong and an ad is regenerated after being blocked. So the ad blocker would block it again, thus generating an infinite loop that can take up all the memory (if the ad blocker saves any information about the blocked ads on the current page in memory) and crash your machine in less than a minute in the worst case. In the best case it would just lock up your browser window and you wouldn't know why. Knowing the number of ads blocked would quickly help debug such situations.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#205

Post by exadeci » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:18 PM UTC

lars_francke wrote: post #200

I've never had an (Ad) blocker as I'm relatively happy with most sites but there are some that are not behaving well. When I last looked (at least two years ago) there wasn't a single blocker that supports a blacklist-only mode. Meaning: Allow everything unless I block a certain domain. Does anyone have an idea if something like this exists now?

Well if you disable all the filters of Ublock and add your block list to the "My filters" tab that should do what you want :)

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#206

Post by 01Michael10 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

mdellabitta wrote: post #156

I decided to dump extension-based privacy stuff and installed Privoxy instead. I used to have Ghostery, Disconnect, ABP, and some other things running simultaneously. When you think about it, that's a lot of JS running and iterating the DOM multiple times every time you load a page. Now there's a single, purpose-built, standalone process written in C doing it. Not going back.

I agree, you had to many things running... What is the advantage of Disconnect when have ABP and Ghostery installed?

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#207

Post by driverdan » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:47 PM UTC

mdellabitta wrote: post #156

I decided to dump extension-based privacy stuff and installed Privoxy instead. I used to have Ghostery, Disconnect, ABP, and some other things running simultaneously. When you think about it, that's a lot of JS running and iterating the DOM multiple times every time you load a page. Now there's a single, purpose-built, standalone process written in C doing it. Not going back.

What about when you're doing development work on a site that uses content you'd normally block (Analytics, ads, etc)? When I spend a day working I don't want to have to toggle Privoxy every time I want to search for something.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#208

Post by exprL » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

gorhill wrote: post #163

exprL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#cpu The details of the benchmark (if you want to reproduce) are in the spreadsheet linked in the caption.

I was aware of the contents of the front page, having skimmed it again today (and read more carefully before, although with little interest for Chromium extensions). I'm only interested in performance characteristics in Firefox, but am unlikely to test this myself before it arrives in AMO.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#209

Post by G2P » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

I've been using this port instead of Adblock Plus for a few weeks. I like the low overhead, but usability is bad.

- It's hard to list what filters are applied (though not impossible, if you like pain: hunt for the right icon using hovertext, find an empty page, hunt for icons again this time without hovertext; one icon will trigger something that will fill up a log, but it stalls a few seconds first and there's no progress indication).

- The big green “power” icon is the wrong metaphor. IMHO uBlock should just stop using icons.

- ABP has simple and obvious text menus, uBlock fails at making its features discoverable. This despite ABP being much more feature-complete.

- There's no way to enable and disable filters from a page.

- There's no easy way to reach uBlock preferences (though not impossible, if you click random areas of the main panel)

- There's no rule editor. ABP's rule editor makes the simple cases easy and the tricky ones possible.

- The element hiding picker is unusable. The ABP picker is well polished, but ABP also integrates with the Firefox developer tools. That simple feature makes it unnecessary to code a custom picker.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#210

Post by findjashua » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

ublock doesn't work on quite a few sites, whereas I've never had an issue with adblock. Couple of examples off the top of my head:

1. giphy: it removes the share and twitter buttons

2. doesn't block ads on hulu

There were others as well that I seem to be forgetting (I remember having to disable it on quite a few sites). Good intention (lowering memory consumption), but the execution still has some way to go.