321–330 of 523 posts
Don't get me wrong, I miss Chrome as it just felt like a_smoother_ user experience, and I fear for Firefox replaying Opera's history given that the rest of the industry has standardized on Chromium... but I love how pro-privacy Firefox is.
> The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store. Anyone know what this extra permission is and why requesting this extra permission would cause friction?
My guess is that it’s much harder to review WASM bytecode to make sure it doesn’t do anything sketchy.
When submitting to the Firefox store you need to send them your un-minified, un-obfuscated source, along with step by step instructions on how to build. If you get big enough they do review the code in surprising depth. The hash of the compressed file pushed for release, also needs to match that of the compressed file the reviewer can build.
When submitting to the Chrome store this is not the case. You can push up minified, obfuscated code and that's what the reviewers have to work with.
I'm not familiar with why WASM needs extra permissions for Chrome extensions. It might be that the increased complexity of reviewing bytecode does indeed introduce more risk for the user. The permission request might just be the Chrome store pushing acceptance of that risk to the user?
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Unless the ad provider proxy the site instead of the ads. That way they get more control/data.
It's only a matter of time before someone develops a wasm browser engine that renders to canvas and provides "trusted" delivery of ad assets over a websocket.
> At browser launch, Firefox will wait for uBO to be up and ready before network requests are fired from already opened tab(s). > This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers, i.e. tracker/advertisement payloads may find their way into already opened tabs before uBO is up and ready in Chromium-based browsers, while these are properly filtered in Firefox. > Reliably blocking at browser launch is especially import…
Mozilla and Firefox exists because it's developers wanted to create the best browser possible. That's why it had extensions before Chrome was even a thing and that's why ad blocking extensions exist almost as long as extensions have been a thing. Adblock emerged somewhere around 2002 which was very soon after the first OSS releases by Mozilla reached the 1.0 stage. Also Phoenix, Firefox' ancestor became a thing around that time. Tabs and extensions were some of the early things that made that popular. Ad blocking always was the #1 use case for extensions.
Ironically, that's why Chrome has extensions. The only reason it supports extensions is that not having that would have made it impossible to grab market share from Firefox (and Internet Explorer). Having support for both extensions and ad blocking were a hard requirement for Google despite its business model. But now that it is the dominant browser, that feature is no longer as important as it once was. So, Google has been slowly making it harder for extensions to interfere with their ads and tracking. They can't make it too hard or their market share will evaporate. But they don't have to be particularly good at it. And now that they have Android, they don't have to worry as much about losing market share. Android exists for the exact same reason. Chrome is losing relevance as a revenue stream as users consume more content on Android via "native" apps running in a virtual machine compiled against mandatory proprietary ad & tracking technology.
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> you can’t even reload the page for the user Can you explain why you'd want to do this? At first blush it seems like a terrible idea to allow extensions to reload pages.
I created an extension that flushes all cookies and local storage for the current domain; it then reloads the page so you appear to be a fresh new visitor.
Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think of it that way these days, it's fairly stunning on some sites to switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why it could no longer work with Safari fol…
Funny, I see the possible future differently. I am inclined to predict that the option to use ad blockers may come to an end because browsers and other software financed with online ad-derived revenue have full control over what extensions users are allowed to run. They have full control over that system for extending the functionality of their software. Whereas the system for supplying software with IP addresses sho…
Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think of it that way these days, it's fairly stunning on some sites to switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why it could no longer work with Safari fol…
Ads are obvious, they have to be for users to see them. You could probably use text classification and object recognition to filter ads effectively. And you could do it from the view layer where nothing on the page can tell they've been blocked.
This is also my tinfoily theory for why Chrome restricts the API's used by ad blockers. It's to prevent more effective blockers from being developed.
Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think of it that way these days, it's fairly stunning on some sites to switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why it could no longer work with Safari fol…
I think the future is machine learning based blocking. Ads are obvious, they have to be for users to see them. You could probably use text classification and object recognition to filter ads effectively. And you could do it from the view layer where nothing on the page can tell they've been blocked. This is also my tinfoily theory for why Chrome restricts the API's used by ad blockers. It's to prevent more effective…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny, I see the possible future differently. I am inclined to predict that the option to use ad blockers may come to an end because browsers and other software financed with online ad-derived revenue have full control over what extensions users are allowed to run. They have full control over that system for extending the functionality of their software. Whereas the system for supplying software with IP addresses sho…
It's ironic that the browser that presents the biggest red flag for removing user control of DNS is Firefox, with their push for DNS over HTTPS. It's true that you can turn it off (for now), but until Firefox baked DoH in, DNS was a sacrosanct user control switch mostly unimpeachable by corporate meddling.