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uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

addons.mozilla.org

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Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#391

Post by GekkePrutser »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #214
airstrike wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the blockers should be fully integrated into the browsers themselves in order to solve the trust problem s/solve/transfer

I assume browsers are trustworthy user agents. If this is false, we've already lost.

If you use Chrome, you've already lost. I mean seriously what do you expect if you use a browser from the #1 targeted advertising provider in the world?

If you use Firefox, perhaps... They are becoming like the others in their quest to become a corporation. Driven by marketeers and telemetry, selling ads to get by, paying their C-suite millions of dollars...

So in effect, yes. Most people have already lost. The rest of us are on the way there.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#392

Post by TameAntelope »

tomc1985 wrote: post #352
TameAntelope wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I hate it when people believe in the work they’re doing and are eager to talk about it. Just the worst.

Part of me thinks this would be a better place if everyone was prohibited from talking about themselves and their projects. Let the braggarts chest-thump on Product Hunt, that place is already a wasteland It's like everything tech has to be a dog and pony show nowadays.

Eh, I hear it, but I think it’s rare enough and so strongly filtered (/new is lousy with the corpses of the self submitted articles), it seems to be fine for now.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#393

Post by fhd2 »

throw872291 wrote: post #386
fhd2 wrote: post #384

Disclaimer: Former ABP developer. Mozilla worked surprisingly hard to make uBO number one - for years they've actively promoted it, marked it as recommended and similar things, added weird warnings for the unwashed masses of "unrecommended" extensions, made them harder or even impossible to install on some platforms. Generally incredibly shady practices I was shocked to see from Mozilla, who I thought had above avera…

Whoa whoa talk about AdBlock Plus and integrity! AdBlock Plus seems to whitelist your ads if you pay them millions [1][2]. The euphemism ABP (and their parent company Eyeo) uses is 'acceptable ads'. Acceptable to Eyeo I guess. It's opt-out at the users end. OP knows all about this [3][4]. I'm not a fan of some of Mozilla's policies but I'm thankful if it's true that Ublock Origin is shown preference over the shady, u…

I can't say much about recent years, given how I've left quite a while ago. But I do want to point out that ABP was always surprisingly upfront about Acceptable Ads (only users who cannot read could possibly miss it, it's prominent on every step of the funnel). And even though that may be hard to believe, they do take the criteria very seriously last time I checked, even doing a ton of user research, which surprisingly (to me) yielded back then that a lot of users feel bad about blocking all ads unconditionally and mostly care about not having stuff jump at them.

The only possibly shady thing you point out is that it's opt out, I get that. Especially people who want to block everything unconditionally might feel cheated because it's not called Adblock Minus.

What Mozilla did here, OTOH, I find shady because they're pretending to run an impartial addon store, when in practice some guy who wants to promote a specific extension (maybe that person feels like you, maybe he's a friend of gorhill - I have no way of knowing) can pull these kind of tricks.

But I suppose it's a case for Hanlon's Razor: They probably just don't have their stuff together about running any type of store the way the big guys do.

I'm still a proud Mozillian, I can find one thing they do shady without finding all of Mozilla shady, I realise it didn't sound like that above.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#394

Post by mkbkn »

Larrikin wrote: post #7

I prefer Ad Nauseum ( https://adnauseam.io/ ) because I don't want to just block the ads I want to ruin the profile ad companies have on me by having all the ads clicked as well.

How does it work in the front? Does it block ads and those blocked ads get clicked? Many times, it shows me no ads but it also displays 0 ads so nothing is clicked.

Do we have to allow it to display all ads on the page to let it click?

Sorry but it's somewhat confusing for me.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#395

Post by mkbkn »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #288
Larrikin wrote: post #7

I prefer Ad Nauseum ( https://adnauseam.io/ ) because I don't want to just block the ads I want to ruin the profile ad companies have on me by having all the ads clicked as well.

My main concern would be that that means loading enough for it to click on, right? Part of why I use uBo is to avoid loading any bytes over the network that I don't need, and avoid executing any JS that isn't useful.

In my experience, it happens in two ways. One is where ads are not displayed but AdNauseum tells me so and so ads are clicked. Second is where they are loaded (and hence additional bytes) and clicked as well.

Sometimes, no ads and nothing in Adnauseum as well.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#396

Post by hirorpt »

fhd2 wrote: post #384

Disclaimer: Former ABP developer. Mozilla worked surprisingly hard to make uBO number one - for years they've actively promoted it, marked it as recommended and similar things, added weird warnings for the unwashed masses of "unrecommended" extensions, made them harder or even impossible to install on some platforms. Generally incredibly shady practices I was shocked to see from Mozilla, who I thought had above avera…

To be fair you should mention uBlock, fake uBlock Origin with paid allowlist by default. There is hard evidence that this unmaintained extension, which is intended only to mislead users into installing it as uBlock Origin, is owned by eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#397

Post by bardan »

fhd2 wrote: post #393
throw872291 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa whoa talk about AdBlock Plus and integrity! AdBlock Plus seems to whitelist your ads if you pay them millions [1][2]. The euphemism ABP (and their parent company Eyeo) uses is 'acceptable ads'. Acceptable to Eyeo I guess. It's opt-out at the users end. OP knows all about this [3][4]. I'm not a fan of some of Mozilla's policies but I'm thankful if it's true that Ublock Origin is shown preference over the shady, u…

I can't say much about recent years, given how I've left quite a while ago. But I do want to point out that ABP was always surprisingly upfront about Acceptable Ads (only users who cannot read could possibly miss it, it's prominent on every step of the funnel). And even though that may be hard to believe, they do take the criteria very seriously last time I checked, even doing a ton of user research, which surprising…

If there was a whitelist toggle in the funnel clearly labeled "No, I installed an adblocker to block ads, not to be shown the ads your protection racket is paid to deliver" then it would be all cool.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#398

Post by throw872291 »

fhd2 wrote: post #393
throw872291 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa whoa talk about AdBlock Plus and integrity! AdBlock Plus seems to whitelist your ads if you pay them millions [1][2]. The euphemism ABP (and their parent company Eyeo) uses is 'acceptable ads'. Acceptable to Eyeo I guess. It's opt-out at the users end. OP knows all about this [3][4]. I'm not a fan of some of Mozilla's policies but I'm thankful if it's true that Ublock Origin is shown preference over the shady, u…

I can't say much about recent years, given how I've left quite a while ago. But I do want to point out that ABP was always surprisingly upfront about Acceptable Ads (only users who cannot read could possibly miss it, it's prominent on every step of the funnel). And even though that may be hard to believe, they do take the criteria very seriously last time I checked, even doing a ton of user research, which surprising…

The thinking is that when something says it's an adblocker, it has one job - blocking ads. ABP doesn't do that, hiding behind the euphemism 'acceptable ads'. It would be ok if they promote it as a 'selective blocker' instead of 'adblocker'. It would also be ok if they say adblocker and the acc. ads thingy is opt-in. If Mozilla did something to highlight something that had one job to do and did it, I'm thankful.

P.S: Ublock Origin is not just an adblocker. It can block various types of content.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#399

Post by josefx »

pmontra wrote: post #176
airstrike wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the blockers should be fully integrated into the browsers themselves in order to solve the trust problem s/solve/transfer

The browser owns the connection anyway and can do whatever it wants with the content. Of course trusting one party is better than having to trust two parties so we are back to do we trust the adblocker?

> Of course trusting one party is better than having to trust two

I wouldn't trust Google to block its own ads, it is much harder for them to intentionally fuck up a generic API that can be used by others without raising suspicion. Hence why everyone calls them out on the manifest v3 changes.

I also wouldn't trust Mozilla to invest the manpower to keep the plugin running and with them already including ads in the browser itself I would see another acceptable aids policy on the horizon.

For a job like this in specific I would rather trust someone whose goal is to provide a great internet experience over making money, I couldn't name a single browser vendor who would qualify.

Re: uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

#400

Post by throw872291 »

superkuh wrote: post #282
btdmaster wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Mozilla has kept the old webRequest API: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

I'm not talking about Google's Manifest v3 or anything recent. I'm talking about Firefox 57 (~2018) and onward when they abandoned XUL and all the extensions/add-ons had to be re-written as chrome-style web extensions. Unfortunately many of the most complex extensions could not and lost features at best.

If FF didn't do that, it would still be a security nightmare. XULs are available in some FF forks, which are security nightmares.
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