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µBlock for Firefox

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Re: µBlock for Firefox

#251

Post by bigbugbag »

danielsamuels wrote: post #108

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…

Great feature, I don't have twitter or facebook and I have to add separate extensions to block those annoying tracking features from every other sites.

To me any website that rely on facebook or twitter to log in is broken and I just don't use them.

I recently had one that required sending my info to xiti to display a js popup to log in with email. Too bad they lost a potential client for their service because their web page sucks and is designed with them in mind instead of the actual user.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#252

Post by scholia »

wtallis wrote: post #189
karon wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even possible? Firefox with blocker uses less RAM than without? Does it block elements from issuing requests?

One would expect any ad blocker that actually blocks ads to reduce memory consumption significantly. Ad blockers that merely hide ads exist and have succeeded in earning reputations as ad blockers despite only doing half the job.

True, but when I uninstalled Adblock Edge, I gained almost a gigabyte of memory in Firefox. (I'm now using Ghostery to block ads. It isn't as effective but I'd rather reduce the memory footprint.)

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#253

Post by findjashua »

sprokolopolis wrote: post #217
findjashua wrote: post #210

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.

Some of those share/tweet/like buttons can track you without no interaction, just by loading on the page. Removing them might be intentional for this reason.

True, but imho an ad blocker should just block ads by default. I'm not sure if I'm representative of most users, but I don't really care as much about tracking, just about ads cluttering the page.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#254

Post by findjashua »

quadrangle wrote: post #223
findjashua wrote: post #210

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.

this is just different filter presets. You can change the filters. In my case, I had ABP doing all that same blocking, only I had to opt-in, whereas with ublock that blocking is opt-out.

fair enough, but if you're going to compare ublock to ABP, as a user my expectations from it are going to be like those from ABP. By default it should work like an ad-blocker, with an option to block other stuff. For users like myself, who don't really care about tracking, just about ads cluttering up a page or delatying a video, blocking out stuff other than ads just 'breaks' the site.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#255

Post by nnethercote »

wtallis wrote: post #189
karon wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even possible? Firefox with blocker uses less RAM than without? Does it block elements from issuing requests?

One would expect any ad blocker that actually blocks ads to reduce memory consumption significantly. Ad blockers that merely hide ads exist and have succeeded in earning reputations as ad blockers despite only doing half the job.

Alas, it's not that simple. See these bugs about AdBlock Plus's effects on Firefox's memory usage:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1001426

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#256

Post by givehimagun »

jarcane wrote: post #59
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…

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.

Just installed on Firefox and it looks like Fanboy's social is no longer in the default list.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#257

Post by wtallis »

nnethercote wrote: post #255
wtallis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would expect any ad blocker that actually blocks ads to reduce memory consumption significantly. Ad blockers that merely hide ads exist and have succeeded in earning reputations as ad blockers despite only doing half the job.

Alas, it's not that simple. See these bugs about AdBlock Plus's effects on Firefox's memory usage: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1001426

That second bug is lacking in technical details, but the first one is clearly about the memory consumption of the CSS rules used to hide elements. If you only use rules that match URIs instead and not element ids, ABP is extremely efficient.

It's worth remembering that ABP only implemented the element-hiding feature so that things like inline text ads could be blocked, but now the popular rule lists are using a large number of broad rules to hide all kinds of elements, many of which could probably have been effectively blocked with URI-matching rules.

Additionally, it's very unfair to the ABP devs to be criticizing the performance or memory usage of ABP when the problem is really the memory usage of EasyList. Using a more restrained and targeted rule list makes the problems go away.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#258

Post by dsl »

Mandatum wrote: post #221
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.

Unfortunately HTTPS makes proxy-based privacy stuff unusable without invalidating your SSL/TLS certificate in the browser. Extensions are the only reliable method AFAIK for browsing ad-free, securely. That is, if you consider the extension secure.

Actually it can make your setup far more secure.

You could move all SSL validation off to your proxy, and generate certificates from your own CA on the fly. Then within your browser or OS you can remove everything except your own CA from the trust store.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#259

Post by wernercd »

INTPenis wrote: post #249
G2P wrote: post #209

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 pr…

I hear what you're saying but to me the advantage of ABP has been never having to see its preferences. I've used it for many years and I can't remember ever going into the preferences for any reason. I've said this before but being a habitual user of noscript I feel that all I really need from an adblocker is to skip those annoying youtube commercials. Everything else noscript handles pretty well. So I'll have to see…

You need to atleast go into the preferences to select extra lists (if you want them) and to disable whitelisted sites (also, if you want to do that since ABP enables "some" ads by default).

(I'd probably enable the whitelisted stuff... IF I wasn't more concerned about adware than anything else over ad-networks)

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#260

Post by kogus »

exadeci wrote: post #214
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.

Did you manage to make it work with skype ? (it seems that skype doesn't use the proxy parameters for ads)

I've found it effective to just watch Skype with Fiddler, and add whatever ad servers it touches to my hosts file, and redirect them to 127.0.0.1 Entries like this work for me:

  #BEGIN: Skype ad servers
  127.0.0.1       rad.msn.com
  127.0.0.1       a.rad.msn.com
  127.0.0.1       secure.adnxs.com
  127.0.0.1       m.adnxs.com
  127.0.0.1       ads1.msads.net
  #END: Skype ad servers
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