What people doesn't know is that uBlock makes use of EasyList as one of its default block lists. EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company. That list itself has built-in whitelist that could not be turn off without revamping the list itself. That list contains upward of 60k of rules and no one has time to evaluate that for free.
uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day, uBlock is still relying on ABP for its blocking rules--which is no guarantee at all.
edit: lol why are people downvoting me for pointing out that uBlock is relying on ABP? uBlock never acctually claimed to not having acceptable ads. By using ABP's EasyList, they could already be running an "acceptable ads" whitelist.
[Here's a comment that I made on this topic on my blog back when this was discussed in July, which is still relevant. The numbers have probably changed a bit, but I doubt enough to affect my point. (The link is https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/07/01/firefox-41-w...).]
I’ve seen variations on this comment many times in discussions of this post. It’s totally wrong-headed.
There are ~70x as many AdBlock Plus users as there are uBlock users. Unless you personally convince all 20 million AdBlock Plus users to convert to uBlock, they won’t see any benefit. (And good luck explaining to them the uBlock vs. uBlock Origin split! What a mess that is.) Meanwhile, when Firefox 41 comes out in September, all 20 million of those AdBlock Plus users will immediately benefit, without having to lift a finger, thanks to Cameron’s patch.
Sometimes it’s worth thinking outside the tech elite bubble (the one where “everybody knows uBlock is better”) and thinking about ordinary users in the real world (where most people haven’t even heard of uBlock).
Do you have any tips for performance. I use chrome and ublock, umatrix and disconnect. Disconnect is a few second penalty but worth it for a free proxy. However, I am not sure whether ublock runs before uMatrix, or how much that matters. I was hoping to find a few great regex heuristics to speed things up and procide better blocking. I personally don't use 3rd party block by default because honestly why bother, sites display so shitty you might as well just noscript and whitelist.
tldr; parent or anyone interested do you have suggestions surrounding:
> good filter configurations in ublock
> whitelist & regex config
> use uMatrix?
> how to optimize for performance?
I switched back to ABP when uBlock started universally blocking Sourceforge. I understand Sourceforge has engaged in a number of very shady practices lately, but I need Numpy for my job and I don't have time to work around nanny software.
ABP memory usage in Chrome made me switch to router-level ad blocking. Added bonus: it works on mobile too. I have weird page renderings sometimes, and whitelisting a legit site is a pain, but it's overall a huge value to off-load the blocking to the router.
This is Mozilla jargon. Anything that is tracked in Bugzilla is a "bug". I've opened bug in Bugzilla to change the chair at my desk, for example (I work at Mozilla).
Cem Kaner said that all the pedantry about whether or not something is a bug is irrelevant. He says a bug is anything a user perceives as wrong.
I used to worry about calling things not-really-bugs, but when I adopted his viewpoint it gave me a better perspective on what's important in software.
There are minor benefits without ABP. For each page/iframe that is created, we can avoid running the CSS cascade (and share those data structures) for the UA style sheets. It's saves something like 100 KiB per document.
If other add-ons insert a common style sheet into all documents (it's plausible Stylish does something like this? though I've never checked) then we'll again be able to avoid running the cascade and having duplicate data structures for the cascade across different documents.
I honestly use use Ghostery which blocks all trackers. It prevents a lot of ads from loading/working because they often have to redirect to serve me the right one (which Ghostry prevents). Waaay less of a resource suck.
On your typical 50-100MB web-appy page (e.g. gmail) a couple MB is a few percent.
On about:blank, which is normally a few hundred KB, a couple MB is several thousand percent.
So if a page has lots of subframes and those subframes don't have much in them, you get large wins. The canonical things that have lots of subframes are techcrunch and the like, which have "like" buttons for several different social networks and whatnot all over them. Each of those "like" buttons is a separate iframe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7 has some relevant numbers for techcrunch; the difference there was 300MB vs 520MB or so (which means that the page has about 100 iframes, of course).
My one huge problem with Ghostery is that it doesn't appear to provide any way to pinpoint the source of an ad. I only want to block intrusive ad providers, but the only way to go from "see an annoying ad" to "block its provider" in Ghostery is to play trial-and-error with potentially dozens of different trackers, blocking and reloading one at a time until the offending ad goes away. In ABP, you could do this with a couple of clicks.
It's been known for 14 years that sharing this data might help some pages. But it was only last year that it became clear that it would provide big wins in a compelling use case (i.e. for AdBlock Plus users). See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c8
And then it took another 15 months to get fixed because it was a significant and complicated change.
Wow, that's quite weird. Not just the back button but refresh, bookmark (star icon), Save Page As ...
As I type this comment, I'm noticing that you get almost this same reduced context menu when you right click on the edit box (with additional items like Paste and Check Spelling).
Maybe the intent is that you don't unintentionally reload the page or back out when you're selecting.
But then Backspace will navigate back regardless of whether you have a selection, and the main navigation bar's back button also works.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethana|10 years ago|reply
uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day, uBlock is still relying on ABP for its blocking rules--which is no guarantee at all.
edit: lol why are people downvoting me for pointing out that uBlock is relying on ABP? uBlock never acctually claimed to not having acceptable ads. By using ABP's EasyList, they could already be running an "acceptable ads" whitelist.
edit 2: Here's the link to easylist for anyone that care to check out the included whitelist: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt
Warning, the list is over 1mb.
[+] [-] nnethercote|10 years ago|reply
I’ve seen variations on this comment many times in discussions of this post. It’s totally wrong-headed.
Here are the usage stats for these add-ons:
- AdBlock Plus: 20.3 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...)
- uBlock: 0.22 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock/statis...)
- uBlock Origin: 0.08 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...)
There are ~70x as many AdBlock Plus users as there are uBlock users. Unless you personally convince all 20 million AdBlock Plus users to convert to uBlock, they won’t see any benefit. (And good luck explaining to them the uBlock vs. uBlock Origin split! What a mess that is.) Meanwhile, when Firefox 41 comes out in September, all 20 million of those AdBlock Plus users will immediately benefit, without having to lift a finger, thanks to Cameron’s patch.
Sometimes it’s worth thinking outside the tech elite bubble (the one where “everybody knows uBlock is better”) and thinking about ordinary users in the real world (where most people haven’t even heard of uBlock).
[+] [-] unKlever|10 years ago|reply
tldr; parent or anyone interested do you have suggestions surrounding: > good filter configurations in ublock > whitelist & regex config > use uMatrix? > how to optimize for performance?
Ideally in chrome.
[+] [-] WatchDog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssalazar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9fb29947|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disillusioned|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtriangle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btgeekboy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r721|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eponeponepon|10 years ago|reply
Jung would have something to say about synchronicity, I'm sure.
[+] [-] bitwarrior|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] padenot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elinchrome|10 years ago|reply
I used to worry about calling things not-really-bugs, but when I adopted his viewpoint it gave me a better perspective on what's important in software.
[+] [-] kzrdude|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heycam|10 years ago|reply
If other add-ons insert a common style sheet into all documents (it's plausible Stylish does something like this? though I've never checked) then we'll again be able to avoid running the cascade and having duplicate data structures for the cascade across different documents.
[+] [-] dragon88|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorhill|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zurn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bzbarsky|10 years ago|reply
On your typical 50-100MB web-appy page (e.g. gmail) a couple MB is a few percent.
On about:blank, which is normally a few hundred KB, a couple MB is several thousand percent.
So if a page has lots of subframes and those subframes don't have much in them, you get large wins. The canonical things that have lots of subframes are techcrunch and the like, which have "like" buttons for several different social networks and whatnot all over them. Each of those "like" buttons is a separate iframe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7 has some relevant numbers for techcrunch; the difference there was 300MB vs 520MB or so (which means that the page has about 100 iframes, of course).
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] addicted|10 years ago|reply
I haven't measured the memory consumption, but I havent had any noticeable issues so far.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|10 years ago|reply
Am I missing something?
[+] [-] dexterdog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheezburgler|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eugeneionesco|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frandroid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcameron|10 years ago|reply
https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/ooIv1fwm
[+] [-] nnethercote|10 years ago|reply
And then it took another 15 months to get fixed because it was a significant and complicated change.
[+] [-] reitanqild|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
As I type this comment, I'm noticing that you get almost this same reduced context menu when you right click on the edit box (with additional items like Paste and Check Spelling).
Maybe the intent is that you don't unintentionally reload the page or back out when you're selecting.
But then Backspace will navigate back regardless of whether you have a selection, and the main navigation bar's back button also works.
[+] [-] thephyber|10 years ago|reply
It's not entirely out of the question for people on HackerNews complaining about Firefox features to think about submitting patches.
[+] [-] reitanqild|10 years ago|reply