
UBlock Origin - grflynn
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/?src=search
======
decasteve
From the horses mouth [1]:

Main reason I published on AMO is because a feature which I think is important
was removed from uBlock (per-site switches). That both versions diverged
significantly enough so soon is not in my control.

When ABP added "acceptable ads" in their fork, they also created a demand for
a version uncompromised by the "acceptable ads" principle, hence ABE happened.
When uBlock removed the per-site switches, a demand was created for a version
of uBlock with the per-site switches.

This is the reality of GPL: anybody can fork and create their own flavor if
they disagree with the pre-fork version. This should not be seen as wrong when
it happens, it's expected. In the big picture, users win.

As far as trust is concerned, both versions can be trusted -- that should not
be an issue in either case: the development and source code is public in both
cases (every single code change can be easily browsed on github).

Edit: Notice that I still contribute fixes to uBlock since the fork, and also
try to deal with filed issues (those issues which are relevant to both
versions), so it's not like I am ignoring uBlock to the advantage of uBlock
Origin -- I also want uBlock to work fine for whoever uses it, I just strongly
disagree with the removal of the per-site switches feature.

[1]
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-966...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-96618444)

~~~
lentil_soup
Honest question, what's AMO?

~~~
fredmorcos
Addons.Mozilla.Org

------
tzs
Is there a good ad blocker that can be set to NOT block by default, and that
provides an easy, one button or so, interface to turn blocking on for the site
currently being viewed? I want to operate under a policy of giving new sites I
visit a chance to show me that they can advertise responsibly and blacklist
them if they show that the cannot.

All the ones I've tried so far (AB, ABP, uBlock) are strongly oriented toward
blocking everywhere by default and whitelisting sites that you do not want to
block on.

I suspect that most people who use an ad blocker do so not because of some
moral objection to the very concept of advertising to pay the bills so that a
site can provide free content to the general public. They use an ad blocker
because they got tired of sites whose ads do obnoxious things like block the
content, move the content around [1], make noise, put distracting animation in
your peripheral vision, and so on.

By blocking all ads by default, the current ad blockers break the feedback
loop that should be pushing sites toward ads that don't have the problems
mentioned in the previous paragraph.

[1] moving the content around is what got me to install an ad blocker.
Gocomics.com started doing ads that slide in from the left side, pushing the
comic you are reading to the right. If you have zoomed in to make the comic
more readable, this could push the right panel of the comic off the screen.
Since the slide in ads did not run on every page (and when they did run, it
was with a delay of a few seconds), you could not anticipate them and position
the zoomed comic appropriately.

~~~
bcoates
This is how I use uBlock, by disabling all the built-in filter selections and
blocking ad providers when I notice them doing something shady/annoying, or
going down in a way that hangs site loads.

Spoiler alert: you wind up blocking all ads anyway. There aren't any ad
networks that have anything approaching the standards and practices of late
night cable. If you don't believe me please run this experiment yourself.

------
fridek
Honest question - what business model for free content do you see other than
ads? I understand all the privacy and distraction issues related, but
increasingly many news sites I read feature only paid content. I suppose it's
connected to the rise of ad blocking.

At the moment I'm not hosting any content of such kind myself, but I wanted to
publish a game and I'm facing the same question. Should I sell my soul to the
devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids, or host
ads and risk not earning a dime because every single gamer I know is tech
savvy enough to have an ad blocker?

~~~
bobajeff
If you only see a choice between "Free to Play" or hosting Ads then you have a
problem greater than choosing your business model. You don't value your work
enough to consider it valuable enough to pay for outright. First, ponder why
that is, then address _that_ issue.

~~~
fridek
Because:

* it's not what I want - I prefer to deliver it for free and do not plan for it to become any source of income, just to not have costs scaling with popularity

* I don't need to sell it - I'm reasonably wealthy, with a good 40h/week job and salary. This is a side project and will loose it's charm when I convert it to a business project.

* it's hard - I work on a browser-based game (no easy to implement payment options)

In other words, it needs to be free for users and possibly earning just enough
to not cost me anything.

~~~
Matumio
What costs? Is hosting really so expensive, or is it something else? Obviously
you have invested a lot of time. Personally, I wouldn't think twice about
spending, say, $10 per month to publish something where I have invested the
equivalent of $100000 in unpaid developer time (and yes, I have done that,
although it's strange thinking of it in money when I did it for the
challenge). Maybe it's more a psychological issue (pay for giving something
away) rather than the actual cost?

------
nickysielicki
You should all check out umatrix if you have 15 minutes to spare.

Made by the same guy, it's adblocking and noscript done exactly how you want
it done. Block pulled-in third-party sites by default, accept all on the
primary domain you're looking at, and especially block from domains on a
blacklist.

It breaks on a few sites, but it's not in my way as much as noscript and it's
a 5 second job to get most any website to work. If you don't know how the web
works, you'll be frustrated. If you understand how the modern web works,
you'll wonder how you ever did without.

~~~
the8472
_> it's adblocking and noscript done exactly how you want it done._

it's good, but not _exactly_ how I want it done. Namely, it's not
hierarchical. E.g. I can say Site A may load frames from site B. But then site
B tries to load stuff in its frame and I have to set additional rules for Site
B. instead an forward pointer to "Site B default inclusion set" or something
like that would be useful.

Basically, hundreds of sites embed youtube. And on some (but not all) I simply
want to apply a "load the minimal amount of stuff necessary to embed youtube"
rule. If loads are conceptualized as a tree (A loads B loads C) a flat matrix
is not powerful enough.

~~~
tasqa
All scopes import from higher level scopes. E.g. bl.com imports from * and
www.bla.com import from * and bla.com.

I've made soem modifications to the * (global) scope to allow the minimal
version of youtube to load. So whenever I visit a new website youtube just
works.

~~~
the8472
That's not what I want because I only want to apply that to some sites.

I even wrote _" And on some (but not all) [...]"_ to make clear that global
rules are not the same as hierarchical matches.

------
mrmondo
How is this different from the normal / existing uBlock?

[https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases)

~~~
david_p
TL;DR: "uBlock Origin" (or "uBlock₀") is the version you want (maintained by
the creator of the project, up-to-date)

The original "uBlock" github repo was created by gorhill. Later, the repo was
handed to a contributor of the project (chrisaljoudi) who did nothing good
with it. Finally, gorhill forked chrisaljoudi's repo to create "uBlock Origin"
and resumed development.

~~~
onli
I don't think that this is actually true. Yes, gorhill started ublock and then
handed it over, but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some
changes (like a call for donations). I'm not aware he did anything bad, and in
the video he put up sounded just a bit unlucky, not like planning to do bad
things
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D1TpddtVUA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D1TpddtVUA)).
Or see
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/38lf1y/any_differen...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/38lf1y/any_difference_between_ublock_and_ublock_origin/crwhmwt),
where a made statement about feature-completeness caused a minor dispute.

Which version to run probably more depends on whether you want that per-site
switches feature.

~~~
justabystander
> but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes

Yeah, there's more to it than that. Gorhill started it as a free and non-
profit solution to help. He gave a lot of the credit to people maintaining the
block lists. When he got tired of dealing with it, he transferred
maintainership over to one of the devs that showed interest - chrisaljoudi.
Who promptly started to monetize it. Like how he stripped out the "No
donations sought" part of the readme
([https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/f256801344a517...](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/f256801344a5178261cad5130a7f4be1ec061343)).
And many of his changes were done to make his own contributions seem far
larger than they actually were in order to encourage donations.

The majority of chrisaljoudi's changes are churn to make the project look
busier than it actually is. For example, many changes are just committing
checksum updates
([https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/bb340ac92cc6a8...](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/bb340ac92cc6a823dd0f9187296051941af2c358)).
Which is already done internally from uBlock. And then there's the removal of
other developer's attribution. Which he thankfully stopped after everything
blew up. Or his personal site which initially gave the impression that he was
the sole creator of uBlock. There was a lot of online drama following it after
the maintainership was newly transferred
([http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/33sl39/maintain...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/33sl39/maintainership_transfer_of_ublock_post_mortem/)).
I know Reddit's not really an unbiased place from which to review, but there's
plenty of links on there.

I'm sorry, but people who ignore the contributions of others and immediately
scramble for donations
([https://donorbox.org/ublock](https://donorbox.org/ublock)) the moment
they're made lead maintainer don't really give me a good impression. There's
been a lot of discussion over the inflated amounts of those donations
([http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/39quzj/chris_aljoudis...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/39quzj/chris_aljoudis_ublock_not_gorhills_ublock_origin/)).
He's cleaned up a lot of the problems people complained about, but it doesn't
change the fact that his first priority upon receiving a position of authority
in a large, free, open-source project was to strip out attributions and
solicit donations. I'll give him credit for backpedaling and reforming, but
not much. It's easy to apologize when you got caught.

~~~
onli
Sorry, but that looks an awful lot like bad-mouthed rumours I don't like at
all.
[https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock)
mentions gorhill and ublock origin in a positive way and asking for donations
is totally fine - it would've been a bit strange if that was the first thing
he did after getting the project, in an extensive way, but I did not see that
while using the extension. Can't have been too bad. Seeking for donations is
especially a good idea since the original developer left the project because
it was too much work -> counteract that work with money.

And I saw the offers to give back the project, which does not fit at all to
the negative image projected here.

The donations sought are maybe a bit high (which only harms him, since less
people might donate), and the one thing that I also don't like. But even that
is nothing really bad, setting the current author is what needed to be done,
and finding a proper representation of the original author could be in another
commit.

There were big expectations that ublock would be totally great, than gorhill
left and the new developer (who acted not in a good way to prevent that) got
the fallout of the betrayed expectations. And how gorhill acted did not help
at all.

~~~
justabystander
> looks an awful lot like bad-mouthed rumours

Really? So if we look at the Git repo commit history, we'll see the transition
commit on April 1st
([https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/bc4b7fc4ea17c8...](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/bc4b7fc4ea17c8221c9c3b25aa621231c443d3e8)).
I'm pretty sure we can consider his first commit as demonstrating his
intentions if it departs significantly from previous project direction. And it
does - the very first commit after the transition was to start soliciting
donations
([https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/f256801344a517...](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/f256801344a5178261cad5130a7f4be1ec061343)).
Git repositories have some reviewable history to them, but I guess that's all
just rumours, right?

> Seeking for donations is especially a good idea since the original developer
> left the project because it was too much work -> counteract that work with
> money.

Perhaps. But in that same flurry of commits on his first day of project
ownership, he linked to a personal donation account
([https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/31a4a522814f06...](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/31a4a522814f06671e7dfe7bd6950c0ce2c5bbbb#diff-04c6e90faac2675aa89e2176d2eec7d8)).
All that's said on that page
([https://gratipay.com/~chrisaljoudi/](https://gratipay.com/~chrisaljoudi/))
is that he works on uBlock. Part of the drama was that it previously implied
more than just working on it - it was _his_. His wording has since given more
recognition to the contributions of others, thankfully. But Day 1 - he's
looking for donations, and its his project. Perhaps not terrible on any other
day. But taking an open and free project, slapping personal donation buttons
all over it, and removing attribution from other developers by manually
committing changes
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449876))
- this behavior turned a lot of people off to his project and leadership. He's
since talked about sharing those donations, which I think is good. I still
think it would be better to not solicit them, but I don't personally value his
contributions that highly any more. That's probably my own bias.

>
> [https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock)
> mentions gorhill and ublock origin in a positive way

Those changes are more recent, and came after a lot of public criticism. We
can see from the commits that those came in a month and a half after the
transition
([https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/823778274bfd47...](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/823778274bfd4769af668c9fa5fbc95902680a2c#diff-04c6e90faac2675aa89e2176d2eec7d8)).
Roughly 2-3 weeks after the video you linked. His first approach was
publicity, and then he took a less aggressive approach. Let's not whitewash
things when commit history shows that it's only 19 commits back (three of
those from other people) from the current mainline on Jun 7th. Normal
procedure when taking over project maintainership is to maintain - not
reinvent the image for donations.

I personally think he saw the opportunity to get some cash for not a whole lot
of work, which is a really attractive offer as a high school student. I don't
think it was _malicious_ , but I also don't think it was appropriate behavior
to take something that was created for free to help others and _personally_
monetize it the moment you got some authority over it. He found out that these
things are considered unethical and changed. That's good - and we don't have
to lynch him. High school kids do dumber things, and there's still room to
learn and grow. But they're not rumours - these things actually happened.

There's a reason people prefer the the gorhill fork. I don't think Ajouldi's a
bad kid, but I don't fault people for not trusting him after his very public
missteps. I think he'll do much better things in the future - and I think part
of that is him directly experiencing the fallout of a poor decision before
he's gotten a career that could be affected by it. I won't crucify him, but I
won't pretend he never did anything wrong just because he apologized.

------
StavrosK
I've tried uBlock a few times, but it's always been inferior to Ghostery. I
want to choose what I block on each page, e.g. sometimes I want to load
Disqus, sometimes I don't, etc. uBlock doesn't allow me to do any of that,
does anyone know a lighter alternative to Ghostery that will still have sane
lists and allow me to unblock elements on a per-page basis?

~~~
83a
i'm using [https://www.requestpolicy.com/](https://www.requestpolicy.com/)
(ghostery seems to phone home, requestpolicy not (afaik))

~~~
acheron
There's an opt-in option in Ghostery that reports usage info, but as far as I
know it doesn't "phone home" if you don't opt in to that.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, seconded, AFAIK it doesn't phone home if you disable that.

~~~
colinbartlett
Privacy-advocating browser extension stops violating your privacy if you ask
it to.

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
No. Sending of usage info is opt-in, not opt-out.

------
Kurtz79
Yes, it's great and I have been using it for quite a while (on Chrome as
well), but it's nothing new, unless I am missing something.

It would be helpful if the submitter also wrote a comment about the reasons of
the submission, when they are not immediately apparent.

------
skrowl
Love uBlock Origin. I upgraded from Ad Block Plus to uBlock (and finally
uBlock Origin) and was amazed at how much faster it is.

------
gluegadget
uMatrix for Firefox seems to be released as well:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/umatrix/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/umatrix/)

Policeman was the closest thing —that I know of— to uMatrix for Firefox users,
but —at least for me— Firefox is always complaining that Policeman is slowing
down the browser. And also, it's nice that you can easily import your Chrome
uMatrix rules to Firefox.

------
jedberg
If people who made ad blockers were ethical, they would make their software
easily detectable by the websites, so those websites could choose not to
service those users.

~~~
tho9Ohx1eo
If people who run ads were ethical users wouldn't resort to ad blockers.

See how easy that was? It's called bullshit logic.

~~~
jedberg
Except that the people who are running the ads aren't hiding that fact. The
people blocking them and stealing service are trying to hide behind their ad
blocker.

------
fapjacks
The amount of vitriol by pro-advertising forces in this thread are pretty
hilarious. As if the planet would stop spinning if people used adblock.

------
of
It's better to download ublock from their source repo here:
[https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases)

> Due to Mozilla's review process, the version of uBlock available from the
> Add-ons homepage is currently often outdated. This isn't in our control.

~~~
luxflux
Actually, this is about uBlock Origin (by the original developer), so it
should be:
[https://github.com/gorhill/ublock](https://github.com/gorhill/ublock)

------
snissn
The eff released their own ad blocker type tool available here
[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) and
it's great. It doesn't come with a singular list of sites to block, but
instead blocks domains that are seen across many domains.

------
iamcreasy
Why it removing the youtube logo on the top left corner? Just because it's
showing that youtube is streaming E3? :/

How do I let the extension know that some adds are part of the page?

------
hnama
i know ublock is on safari. but will we see a ublock origin on
safari?(specially after per-site switches)

~~~
ReddestDream
Same. I wish we could get a Safari version of uBlock Origin since it does seem
like in time it will be the clearly superior version.

Not to knock anyone working on mainline uBlock, but the frustrations of the
original developer (justifiable or not) have led him to discontinue
contributing code to mainline uBlock.

That's a serious blow to its development . . .

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38)

FYI, I would just use Chrome if it didn't just kill battery life on OS X.
Don't think I use Safari by choice here . . .

~~~
Nadya
You're in luck!

[https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF](https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF)

------
kissickas
I've seen comments on reddit saying that often legitimate "Pay Now" buttons
etc. are blocked by this add-on. Can anyone with recent experience weigh in? I
don't really feel like switching from ABP which I'm perfectly happy with
unless this is 99% kink-free.

~~~
mziulu
The add-on shouldn't block anything on its own, so if there's a problem it's
probably on some filter list that the user enabled. There's a pretty good way
to debug these situations though, the network request log (
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-
logger](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger) ). It will let you
see the history of requests for a given page, and one of the colums in the log
lets you fine tune what uBlock should do for that particular request - so, if
you see that something that you don't want to be blocked is filtered out, you
can reverse that and reload the page.

EDIT: in the latest release (0.9.9.0 at the time of this writing) the request
log will also tell you which list provides the rule that blocks a particular
request, it's pretty handy to debug this kind of issue.

------
abrowne
Another option for Firefox is the built-in "tracking protection". It is off by
default, but can be enabled via about:config (set
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true). Works on Android, too.

~~~
HunOL
And it breaks a lot of web sites.

~~~
acdha
Have you reported those? I've only encountered one and it was apparently fixed
awhile back.

------
DaFranker
Heh. Gotta love how the default filter already blocks ||sourceforge.net^

------
leke
I have uBlock installed from Allex Vallat. What is the difference?

------
Kiro
Relevant:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719926)

------
alexnewman
This is the main reason I've switched to Firefox on android

