
Opera browser built-in ad blocking, now in beta - riqbal
http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-blocking-now-beta/
======
SCdF
I'm really beginning to wonder where the ad-blocking wars are going to leave
us.

If I ran some kind of online content, and it was clear the majority of my
money was made in advertising, and that the majority of my money was being
eroded by ad blockers, I feel like the natural next step is to fill your
content with ads that are simply not blockable.

I've started seeing this with YouTube videos, where people quickly (or not so
quickly) plug audible at the start of their videos. I have no doubt that
"native" advertising is becoming both more frequent and more insidious
(because obvious native advertising doesn't work as well as non-obvious).

I have to be honest: I'm not really a fan of this future. I think the right
future is either a) paid content (which very few people will go for) or b) ad-
supported content, but those ads aren't evil animated audible malware vector
infected boxes of non-relevance. This leaves a chance that the content will
actually _be_ content, and not some headphone review that you're entirely
unsure who has paid for the existence of.

Perhaps instead of having massive blocklists with the occasional white-listed
website, there should be some kind of automated sin-binning, where websites
(and ad agencies) that have proven to behave themselves (non-animated,
relevant, safe advertisements) are allowed through while dodgy scum gets
blocked for N months or until they have a proven amount of time where they
have shown themselves to be safe.

This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not
really sure how to solve that. I don't see how you can. I see the future for
that being more and more walled gardens so you can be tracked server side,
which is also entirely undesirable.

~~~
wlesieutre
Honestly, I'm a bigger fan of plugging Audible in a youtube video than the
current advertising situation. It's a lot more like newspaper or TV
advertising, in that the person making the video has set a price for it,
vetted/approved each ad, and made sure it's targeted at their general
audience.

It doesn't let 3rd parties serve me arbitrary javascript for tracking, it
doesn't give me drive-by malware, and it generally isn't selling me penis
enlargement or _one weird trick_ to lose weight.

~~~
mavhc
Except that after the 2nd podcast you ever listen to you're either already a
customer or you hate the ads for repeating.

Still waiting for good, useful ads, that are code-free. But if your product
was the best it would be reviewed as such anyway, so ads are pointless.

~~~
wlesieutre
I still don't have an email newsletter, but I don't hate MailChimp's ads. And
if somebody came to me and said "Hey, you know about computers, how do I set
up an email newsletter?" I'd probably point them to MailChimp (it's the only
service I know by name). They're getting plenty of brand recognition even if I
don't use it myself.

I'd even say I miss the Tiny Letter ads in 99% invisible.

------
mapleoin
_The exception list now contains only four websites that offer a very good
experience to their users with ads on._

They say that now, but what about a year from now? Look at the scandal around
the original Adblock extension. Everyone wants to maintain their own
whitelist. I suppose this is the new monetization strategy? Pay us to
whitelist you?

~~~
Mithaldu
I remember when they wrote a great URL blocker which was blazingly fast and
very easy for the user to edit and came with zero opinions.

It was built in the browser's engine core, had some UI elements to help add or
remove things quickly, but at the end of the day was just a text file in your
profile.

I remember it because it's what Opera 12 has, which is still my main browser
to this day.

Edit:

!!!

As
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397230)
points out, this new ad blocker is even worse than anyone could think: It has
literally no user interaction, except from adding websites to a whitelist.
Other than the whitelist it has exactly two settings: On / Off

If it's blocking something on a website where you don't want it to block, but
also want to block ads? Tough luck. If you're on a website where it's failing
to block something you want blocked? Tough luck. If you want to block
something that's not an ad? Tough luck.

It's depressing how far Opera ASA has fallen.

~~~
ikeboy
What about security? Checking Wikipedia says there's only been two updates
since 2013.

~~~
Mithaldu
CVE has no known issues for Opera 12.18 and they recently upgraded the SSL
ciphers to conform to modern standards.

------
mrweasel
Microsoft is also adding adblocking to Edge, which makes you wonder if the
sites that rely on ads for finance their operation is designing a "Plan B".
Granted it's not the two biggest browsers, and Google isn't likely to add ad
blocking to Chrome, but still the it must make some sites rethink their
business plan.

~~~
manuelflara
Actually, I read Google won't be too late to the party adding ad blocking to
Chrome. Of course, with their ad networks whitelisted by default. To be
honest, I think if they haven't done this already is because it would be such
a monopolistic move. Most AdBlockers come with Google adsense whitelisted, but
imagine if Google did that themselves. But considering not only how widespread
the use of ad blockers is, but also how other browsers are soon going to ship
with an ad blocker built in, now they'll be able to do it without anyone
complaining about it.

~~~
true_religion
What Google would have to do is participate in some sort of standards body for
ads, like the IAB except with the sole purpose of determining "compliant" ad
companies vs ad companies who will be blocked by default.

If they can get enough buy in, then they'll implement adblocking in Chrome
while saying "we're not using monopoly power, we are simply implementing the
standard X that Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Firefox have all
implemented before us".

------
mtgx
They need to clean up their menu a little. Why is there the News, History and
Speed Dial option in there if I already have them on each new tab?

Otherwise I love this new feature and that they adopted CT, but I think I
speak for many people when I say that I'm a little worried about the
trustworthiness of their new Chinese owners.

A quick Google search about them doesn't inspire confidence:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919554/tencent-qihoo-
antimal...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919554/tencent-qihoo-antimalware-
firms-are-accused-of-cheating-stripped-of-rankings-in-antivirus-tests.html)

EDIT: Did a few tests on several websites. It seems for those that those that
are lighter on ads like WashingtonPost, it can make the loading time 15-30%
faster, while for the heavier ones like iMore, TheVerge, BusinessInsider, it's
50-75% (depending on the ads they show at the time, I assume). The heavier
ones would even take over 30 seconds to load without ad-blocking. I'd say for
most sites you should see a ~50% faster loading with this enabled.

I hope they include tracking-protection option as well in the future, as
Firefox did. Then those features need to come to mobile, too. I don't think
Firefox has implemented TP on mobile either yet.

------
jlarocco
As a former long time Opera user, I'm a little sad to say I don't trust Opera
to block ads for me. uBlock Origin does the job just fine, and my gut feeling
is Opera will have a whitelist or not block everything. Ever since they
switched to being a Chromium skin, I just don't trust them.

I'm also curious how this compares against uBlock Origin. I know uBlock uses a
lot less memory and seems a lot faster than ABP for me, and it's curiously
missing from their comparison.

------
Fiahil
Wonderful!

Is it possible, like ubo, to block specific elements on the page that are not
considered 'ads' by default? (like those annoying modals asking you to
subscribe)

~~~
blinky88
In the Opera blog, some dev said that it's coming in a couple of weeks

------
gorhill
One thing I do when I benchmark is to provide all details so that other people
can try to reproduce -- anybody can investigate the figures I report.

There is not enough details for me to reproduce here: no sample of which web
pages were used in the benchmark, no work on settings used on various
blockers. Why is it so difficult to obtain such key information?

I really doubt uBlock Origin's ("uBO") default settings were used given the
reported timings (because 6s to load a web page).

Also that uBO is reportedly only 0.2 sec faster than ABP hardly make sense to
me, _especially_ on any Chromium-based browsers.

In any case, for those who want to make comparisons for themselves between
blockers, here are online tools:

To measure average page load speed:
[http://www.raymondhill.net/ublock/pageloadspeed.html](http://www.raymondhill.net/ublock/pageloadspeed.html)

For examples, the page-load-speed tool reports ("Average (valid)" values):

[http://www.rollingstone.com/](http://www.rollingstone.com/):

\- Opera 37 + native blocker enabled: 1482.75 ms

\- Chrome 51 + uBlock Origin + default settings: 1729.20 ms

\- Chrome 51 + ABP + EasyList/EasyPrivacy minus "acceptable ads": 2467.17 ms

[http://techcrunch.com/](http://techcrunch.com/):

\- Opera 37 + native blocker enabled: 1959.10 ms (noticed ad placeholder left
behind)

\- Chrome 51 + uBlock Origin + default settings: 1316.90 ms

\- Chrome 51 + ABP + EasyList/EasyPrivacy minus "acceptable ads": 2063.76 ms

And another tool, to find out what is _not_ blocked (also a rather important
aspect of any blocker): [http://raymondhill.net/httpsb/har-
parser.html](http://raymondhill.net/httpsb/har-parser.html)

For example, comparing what was not blocked on TechCrunch with Opera 37 native
blocker and uBO + default settings:

[https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/585534/14185866/b...](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/585534/14185866/b2309870-f749-11e5-8c37-2008e3f2ec10.png)

------
amelius
A good ad-blocker should imho always keep a "shadow" DOM, so that

1\. the ad-blocker does not interfere with the normal operation of the website
(or webapp), and

2\. the website can never detect that an ad-blocker is running.

I'm not sure whether Opera does this.

~~~
angry-hacker
The website can always detect an adblock.

Just set a variable inside the ads.js and if it's not present, the ads are
blocked. (or the file didn't load).

~~~
amelius
No, the idea is that the ads.js runs on the real DOM. The shadow DOM is a copy
of that DOM minus the ads. This is the DOM shown to the user.

~~~
tokenizerrr
Then you would still get tracked. Half the point of adblockers is prevent the
ad networks from tracking you.

~~~
amelius
To prevent this, the browser could use a fresh cookie every time you visit the
site, except for sites you whitelist.

------
esaym
Hmm, I haven't used Opera since about 2004. How is it on Linux platforms? I am
getting tired of Firefox eating all my ram, and I've never been crazy about
Chrome.

Edit: Seems like it is just a different wrapper around the Chrome internals:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28web_engine%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28web_engine%29)
Does it do anything differently (or better) than Chrome or FF?

~~~
shwetank
Maybe take a look here
[https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/3xb7n6/how_ex...](https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/3xb7n6/how_exactly_is_opera_different_from_chrome/cy4b15i)

------
joosters
What is their policy with analytics and tracking, beacons, etc? These are some
of the most problematic and worrying add-ons to web pages for me, and yet very
little gets talked about them. In theory, a well-designed browser (and well-
written web pages) can still make all the 3rd party analytics requests without
slowing down web site load time (e.g. they can be deferred until the page is
loaded), and yet they are the things that I want to block most of all.

------
digi_owl
Frankly the advertisers, and the sites that depends on them, lost the day they
started doing anything but static images and text.

And after a few hot clickfraud cases, we have massive scripts being downloaded
for each ad to track validity of "impressions".

------
godzillabrennus
Too bad they didn't do this years ago and adopt the Adblock plus revenue
model. They might still be a standalone company.

~~~
eli
You think many publishers would have paid to be whitelisted in Opera even at
the height of its popularity? Not so sure about that. I think it's kind of a
sleazy business model anyway.

------
known
[https://code.google.com/archive/p/qtweb/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/qtweb/)
has built in
[http://qtweb.net/pages/ibr9700.html](http://qtweb.net/pages/ibr9700.html)

------
kbart
How stable is Opera nowadays? I'm lazily searching for a replacement for
Firefox, which even fully updated, keeps crashing on all my platforms
(Android, Linux, Windows) at annoying rates.

~~~
angry-hacker
I'm using now Vivaldi, but I think it's safe to say the current Opera is the
most stable Chromium fork out there.

------
Cyph0n
Looks like a good feature. Anyone here using Opera regularly? How is it on OS
X? I use Chrome mainly, but I'm currently in the process of moving to Safari
on El Capitan.

~~~
jacek
I switched from Firefox to Opera on Linux. Opera is faster (especially cold
start), has great support for high resolution screens, support for touch
input, access to Chrome extensions and built in flash. The best browser for
Linux IMHO.

~~~
Mithaldu
You can get all of that as well by just using Chrome. Opera 15+ is just a fork
with a bunch of custom changes.

~~~
jacek
I know. I just don't like Chrome's UI and it's heavy integration with Google.
I am trying to rely less on Google. I have switched to a different email
provider, DDG is my default search engine and I use Owncloud for contacts,
calendar and files.

~~~
Mithaldu
Good reasons. Just be sure to keep an eye on things due to the upcoming
purchase by Qihoo.

------
lol2016
Have all major trackers enabled on "start-page" per default, talks about ad-
blocking with a mouse click - facepalm

