41–50 of 91 posts
I'll go against the grain and say this is not a security threat. if missing ublock is a true security concern you shouldn't be using chrome. Because the opposite is not true - that chrome+ublock is keeping you secure from tracking. We just don't want to see ads. Isn't that enough?
The article is about blocking ads that contain malware (which are surprisingly common). Preventing tracking is a whole different ballgame that isn't covered by the article
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Not a big deal on the desktop and a small deal on the laptop, ad blocking gives a noticeable performance gain on Android. Years ago when I had one of those Intel Atom netbooks you could tell a pretty big difference since it was pretty RAM constrained.
This is unpopular every time I say it, but by in large people just shouldn't be browsing the web on mobile. Every single aspect of the experience is worse, and is likely to continue to get worse over time: - tiny phone screen - objectively worse mobile-site - far worse touch-screen-based UI - the entire iOS side of things has far fewer choices for any sort of effective ad blocking Is it possible for a savvy technolog…
I'll go against the grain and say this is not a security threat. if missing ublock is a true security concern you shouldn't be using chrome. Because the opposite is not true - that chrome+ublock is keeping you secure from tracking. We just don't want to see ads. Isn't that enough?
Think of those "click here to OPTIMIZE YOUR PC" adware junk you'd prefer anyone you provide tech support for to never see
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It's crazy the mental gymnastics people will go through to justify not using Firefox. They should just be honest and say they're too lazy to switch.
I've been using Firefox for nearly 15 years and there's technical reasons, too. Mainly memory leaks (which I haven't noticed for a few years anymore) and loading just "feels" slower. Webrender with GPU acceleration helped but it was much more complicated poking at about:config than it "just working" Recently, I've noticed a "this SaaS only works in Chrome" trend again. Usually that means "only works in Blink" but it…
I'll go against the grain and say this is not a security threat. if missing ublock is a true security concern you shouldn't be using chrome. Because the opposite is not true - that chrome+ublock is keeping you secure from tracking. We just don't want to see ads. Isn't that enough?
> if missing ublock is a true security concern you shouldn't be using chrome Dude there are ads on every browsers. And the goal here is to protect her from malwares, not trackers (well at least that's not a priority).
Given how intransparent the programmatic advertising industry is and how often malicious actors have abused such advertising networks to spread malware... there is no distinction to make.
I guess it would be easy to block ads via a proxy? An http proxy in Python is just a few lines of code. It could simply drop the requests to known ad servers. And in Chrome, there is a setting to use a proxy. So all one had to do is run ./my_ad_blocking_proxy.py and set the proxy in Chrome to something like 127.0.0.1:8080?
Good idea! But I'll have to install this on my relative's computer or router, that's not as convenient as a browser extension
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It's crazy the mental gymnastics people will go through to justify not using Firefox. They should just be honest and say they're too lazy to switch.
I've been using Firefox for nearly 15 years and there's technical reasons, too. Mainly memory leaks (which I haven't noticed for a few years anymore) and loading just "feels" slower. Webrender with GPU acceleration helped but it was much more complicated poking at about:config than it "just working" Recently, I've noticed a "this SaaS only works in Chrome" trend again. Usually that means "only works in Blink" but it…
"There are a few alternatives available. Unfortunately, moving to Firefox may not be a viable option for her, especially given Mozilla’s recent behavior." The world has gone crazy. So this relative has casually used the most bloated spyware disguised as a browser for literally a decade, but she can't switch to firefox because 'Mozilla’s recent behavior'.
This is such an unfair comparison, where Google made billions on your user data and Mozilla is barely living off the scraps.
Clearly we should support Mozilla and not Google here.
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No, it takes way more than that. That's basically what running a Pihole does, which barely blocks anything these days. Good ad blocking requires you to be able to look at decrypted HTTPS traffic and remove content from the DOM, including stuff added after the fact by Javascript. That's why uBlock Origin works better than Adguard (which is a https MITM ad blocker) and why Adguard works better than Pihole (which doesn'…
Ok, but the proxy could insert JS code into the html page which does what uBlock Origin does, couldn't it? This would give the same flexibility without the need for a browser plugin.
Afaik uBlock benefits from some browser APIs that can do things like prevent content from loading before the add-on is injected into the page so you'd lose some coverage there. I imagine it'd also be fairly difficult to intercept all outgoing web requests (to selectively block them) which a browser is fairly well positioned to provide an API for.
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Advocating for the entire browser landscape to be taken over by Chromium is definitely not a middle ground. It's letting the world's largest ad company be the dictator of the web.
I never advocated for that. There's nothing saying a fork has to be 100% in sync with upstream and can cherry-pick what parts it wants to keep. Besides that, there's other Blink-based browsers which are very similar but another level removed from Google Using a fork to work around Google marking addons are malicious seems like a middle ground between "living with ads" and "using a whole new browser the author has pol…