
µBlock for Firefox - aerique
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
======
gorhill
Well while this is being seen by many, I just want to take the opportunity to
reiterate what is said in the README of the project:

> Without the preset lists of filters, this extension is nothing. So if ever
> you really do want to contribute something, think about the people working
> hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which were made available
> to use by all for free.

Specifically, EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Fanboy Social, Malware domains, and a
many more are the basis of many other blockers: Adblock Plus, AdBlock,
AdGuard, BlueHell, and many others I am sure.

It seems such a tedious amount of work to maintain these lists, this needs to
be acknowledged -- none of the above blockers would do very well without these
lists.

------
G2P
I've been using this port instead of Adblock Plus for a few weeks. I like the
low overhead, but usability is bad.

\- It's hard to list what filters are applied (though not impossible, if you
like pain: hunt for the right icon using hovertext, find an empty page, hunt
for icons again this time without hovertext; one icon will trigger something
that will fill up a log, but it stalls a few seconds first and there's no
progress indication).

\- The big green “power” icon is the wrong metaphor. IMHO uBlock should just
stop using icons.

\- ABP has simple and obvious text menus, uBlock fails at making its features
discoverable. This despite ABP being much more feature-complete.

\- There's no way to enable and disable filters from a page.

\- There's no easy way to reach uBlock preferences (though not impossible, if
you click random areas of the main panel)

\- There's no rule editor. ABP's rule editor makes the simple cases easy and
the tricky ones possible.

\- The element hiding picker is unusable. The ABP picker is well polished, but
ABP also integrates with the Firefox developer tools. That simple feature
makes it unnecessary to code a custom picker.

~~~
INTPenis
I hear what you're saying but to me the advantage of ABP has been never having
to see its preferences. I've used it for many years and I can't remember ever
going into the preferences for any reason.

I've said this before but being a habitual user of noscript I feel that all I
really need from an adblocker is to skip those annoying youtube commercials.
Everything else noscript handles pretty well. So I'll have to see if uBlock
can do that for me.

~~~
wernercd
You need to atleast go into the preferences to select extra lists (if you want
them) and to disable whitelisted sites (also, if you want to do that since ABP
enables "some" ads by default).

(I'd probably enable the whitelisted stuff... IF I wasn't more concerned about
adware than anything else over ad-networks)

------
mdellabitta
I decided to dump extension-based privacy stuff and installed Privoxy instead.

I used to have Ghostery, Disconnect, ABP, and some other things running
simultaneously. When you think about it, that's a lot of JS running and
iterating the DOM multiple times every time you load a page.

Now there's a single, purpose-built, standalone process written in C doing it.
Not going back.

~~~
notsony
Any issues connecting to sites over SSL using Privoxy? I'm thinking mainly of
banking web-sites.

~~~
Nanzikambe
I've used Privoxy since late 2002 on a Linux gateway box - never had a single
issue with SSL.

In fact the only issue I've _ever_ had was building it an forgetting to enable
threaded mode ..

------
danielsamuels
I tried this out for a couple of weeks after the "Adblock makes things slower"
article came out, and I found it was blocking more stuff - but not necessarily
the right stuff. I was finding that sites were breaking, stuff was
disappearing and it was because of uBlock. I think I was trying to log into
Medium and the Twitter and Facebook had been hidden, literally breaking the
functionality of the site. That's not what I want from an adblocker.

~~~
losvedir
Well, as the README says, it's not an "adblocker" but a generic blocker.

Hiding Twitter and Facebook log-in functionality on Medium is a _feature_ not
a _bug_ for me. By including those javascripts, both companies can build up a
history of the sites I visit.

So I gather this is more of a privacy+ad blocker rather than strictly ad
blocker.

~~~
gorhill
Unfortunately, even with EasyPrivacy and "Fanboy's Social Blocking", you will
find that blockers (ABP, AdBlock, uBlock, etc) do not prevent 100% connecting
to Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot.[1]

This is one of the reasons I see dynamic filtering as a key feature: users
have the last word, not the filter lists.[2]

For example, I currently block all Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, and any of
similarly ubiquitous domains by default using dynamic filtering, so that I
have now 100% certainty that no connections to these domains occur on any
page, while such certainty is not possible when relying solely on the filter
lists.

[1]
[https://www.diffchecker.com/pz6rv6lq](https://www.diffchecker.com/pz6rv6lq)

[2] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-
filtering:-qu...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-
filtering:-quick-guide)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _do not prevent 100% connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot_ //

Sounds like more of a job for a filtering proxy or hosts file.

~~~
gorhill
uBlock will do it for you _while_ keeping the point-and-click ability to un-
block on a per-site basis. For example, a site which breaks if it can't
connect to Facebook.[1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bzB6tESynM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bzB6tESynM)

------
whizzkid
I have been using µBlock for 3 weeks now.(previously adblock plus). There is
one irritating thing it has that almost makes me go back to adblock again.

It is often blocking the false positives.

So if developer has named one of their assets file with social media names
like "twitter/facebook/etc", it blocks the file right away. Since it does not
have custom configuration options for each site, you can either disable µBlock
or go with the crashed site.

Not all the sites are written professionally by experts, and this becomes an
issue when you are trying to purchase stuff from small online shops. (to
support local sellers)

I am too busy for a pull request these days, but maybe this will be fixed soon
by someone else. My point for µBlock is for now 5/10.

~~~
jarcane
µBlock enables Fanboy's social blocking list by default. If you want your
Twitter/FB buttons and so forth back, you can turn it off in the subscription
options.

~~~
muppetman
It hasn't blocked them by default for a while now. It used to though.

~~~
jarcane
Both the Chrome and Opera versions did for me, and quite recently too: only
switched on Chrome about a month ago at most, and I've only even had Opera
installed for about a week.

------
fpgaminer
It seems like, if one were an evil web developer, one could thwart blockers
like these with a few nasty tricks. Server-side: on each request of a
resource, salt all linked resource URIs and encrypt (after the host name)
before sending the final document to the client. The resources can still be
fetched, because the server can decrypt any requests, but the client has no
way of knowing whether a particular resource is an ad or not. That thwarts URI
based filtering. To thwart DOM filtering, randomize element classes and ids.

Though impractical, I thought it was an evil/funny idea.

~~~
Drakim
If the resource names are still "static" your resources can still be blocked.
But if they are altered slightly every time, you may also thwart caching,
right?

~~~
fpgaminer
Right, which is why I added the bit about salting the URIs before encryption.
The salt could be per request, per session, or rotated after some period of
time (say once per day). If only rotated once per day, it would still thwart
ad blocking, but have less of an impact on caching. It would turn into an
economic question of whether the extra ad impressions are worth the extra
bandwidth.

~~~
wampus
Since most ads are effectively blocked at the domain level, I doubt your
scheme would provide much bang for the buck.

~~~
fpgaminer
The idea is that the ads would be served from the original host. Combined with
encrypted URIs and the ad resources become indistinguishable from content
resources. Thus thwarting blocking. As others have pointed out, yes this evil
trick is incompatible with existing ad networks (which use their own domains).
But it wasn't my intention to put forward a viable idea. Just an interesting
one (namely, ciphering URIs to prevent blocking).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How would the ad network verify metrics under such a regime?

~~~
Kliment
That's their problem. If they have to spy on me to "verify metrics" they can
go fuck themselves.

------
Direct
This is awesome! I recently read this ticket[1] mentioning that porting of
µBlock seems to be a starting point for gorhill to port µMatrix. In my perfect
world, I would be using Firefox with nothing but µMatrix, as it is right now
I'm having to use Chrome with µMatrix and sadly can't get rid of µBlock until
µMatrix can hide blocked frames. Still, getting closer to that perfect world!
The work done by gorhill is amazing.

[1]:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/73](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/73)

~~~
mcovey
Check out Policeman:
[https://github.com/futpib/policeman](https://github.com/futpib/policeman)

It's similar to uMatrix and is under very active development.

------
misterdai
The GitHub site also states that it's available for Chrome, Opera and Safari
(not yet in the extension gallery).

Chrome:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cjpalhdlnbpafiamej...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm)

Opera: [https://addons.opera.com/en-
gb/extensions/details/ublock/](https://addons.opera.com/en-
gb/extensions/details/ublock/)

Safari: [https://chrismatic.io/ublock](https://chrismatic.io/ublock)

Haven't tried it out myself yet but it's nice to see effort put into lowering
the memory & CPU usage of such blockers.

~~~
Logmix
Thanks for those links. While the earlier versions for Safari (like v0.8.2.0,
found here
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/117](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/117))
work well on Safari 5, these new versions on your Safari link do not. They
crash the browser during installation.

~~~
anon1385
Seems to be this issue:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/547](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/547)

------
JohnTHaller
If the author is here, please turn off the counter by default. We're blocking
distracting things in our browser, we don't need another pointless distracting
thing in our browser toolbar.

~~~
sergiotapia
Counter opinion: I like the number because if there's a website working not
quite right, I can easily see the number and disable uBlock to test out if
that's the cause.

~~~
JohnTHaller
But you can't, though. uBlock shows the _total_ number of blocked items since
you started Firefox. Not the number for a given page or site. Making it a
basically superfluous mostly useless datapoint.

~~~
eyko
On Safari and Chrome, it displays the number of filters applied on the current
site. This is (super) useful. If on Firefox you're getting a global count then
that's a bug (so please report it on Github).

Perhaps changing the color from red to something more "off" (grey?) would help
distract less.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Useful why? It's blocking stuff, that's great. I don't care how many things it
blocks on a specific page. It make no difference to me while browsing. The
little counter changing just looks like an annoying animated GIF in the corner
of my browser.

I get that a subset of users would derive some pleasure at knowing how many
things are blocked on every single website they visit or users who'd like to
use it to troubleshoot a specific page that doesn't load when blocking is
enabled (in which case having a quick right-click toggle to turn it on so
users can use it to troubleshoot would be ideal), but I'd wager that most
users do not. Users that want it on can turn it on. (cue subset of users
responding that they either 1. enjoy seeing the count or 2. use it to
troubleshoot the rare page that doesn't load as a result of blocking)

~~~
lqdc13
This is super useful feature for debugging. Happens sometimes that something
goes wrong and an ad is regenerated after being blocked. So the ad blocker
would block it again, thus generating an infinite loop that can take up all
the memory (if the ad blocker saves any information about the blocked ads on
the current page in memory) and crash your machine in less than a minute in
the worst case. In the best case it would just lock up your browser window and
you wouldn't know why. Knowing the number of ads blocked would quickly help
debug such situations.

~~~
dserodio
This is a very specific corner case, which doesn't justify the default
settings

------
molticrystal
How is the performance for the firefox port? I might of missed it, but all I
see are reports in comparison to adblockers on chrome.

~~~
msl09
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-
version:-benc...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-
version:-benchmarking-memory-footprint-of-the-early-preview)

~~~
zobzu
Wah Chromium uses way more ram than Firefox. 425M (firefox+ublock) vs 1.04G
(chromium+ublock)

in all cases memory is reduced :)

~~~
gorhill
I did warn on that page:

> You can't compare directly the figures between the browsers

Still, yes, Chromium uses more memory. A good part of this is because per-
process tab. Once Firefox get the same per-process tab architecture, it will
be easier to compare both browsers together.

~~~
wooger
Yep, Chrome / Chromium are now the #1 reason to bump my ram to 16GB. While
using a laptop for coding / VMs etc. I still find my browser eating more ram
most of the time - it simply doesn't handle paging out gracefully, and is
horrific for my uses with < 4GB ram on any OS.

------
barrkel
Hopefully at some point someone will do something similar for element-level
blocking.

A lot of my custom ABP rules are actually blocking dynamic HTML slide-ins,
overlays, animated carousels, etc.

~~~
anon4
If you just want to remove elements from the page, rather than block
connections to third-party servers, I recommend Stylish. You can just write
custom CSS rules and make those elements display:none. Alternatively, write a
user script that does the same.

~~~
loosescrews
ABP prevents unwanted crap from being downloaded.

------
chdir
Can someone familiar with the code explain what's the difference between this
& adblock/disconnect etc. Why is this lighter? (a little technical algorithm
difference would be good to know)

~~~
edwintorok
I think uBlock only injects the CSS rules needed, not 14000+ like ABP:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/161#issuecomment-52...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/161#issuecomment-52638574)

------
bsder
Does this work on any of the mobile browsers? I'd kill for something to block
stuff properly on mobile.

~~~
dpifke
I just tried and was unsuccessful at installing it on Firefox for Android.
(Fails to install silently after download.)

That said, Ghostery (and for that matter, HTTPS Everywhere) both work great.

------
neuronic
From my experience of using this for a few weeks now on Chrome, I would
recommend this over AdBlock Plus etc. I haven't done any specific performance
tests and personally no numbers to back it up. However, I do have the
subjective impression of improvement.

I'm using it in combination with µMatrix.

~~~
rahimnathwani
> I'm using it in combination with µMatrix.

I'm curious: how do you use it? Do you have to mass-enable stuff using the
'power' icon, for many sites? Or do you just enable the things you know you
need, on a per-site basis? Or are your default just good enough?

The reason I ask is that I was curious about it, so tried it out for a couple
of days. I found many sites were not usable with the default settings, e.g.
Udemy's login box didn't show up until I turned off µMatrix.

~~~
mziulu
I haven't used uMatrix, since I use Firefox, but I can speak for
RequestPolicy, which is kind of the same thing basically AFAICS. It's very
very very rare that I end up whitelisting everything that's requested on a
site. The more you use the extension, the more you learn to recognize what
domains you need to allow in order to have the site working as intended, and
this way you end up building your own whitelist: allowing requests from a
domain is a one-time only thing most of the times (additionally, there's an
extension you can install that syncs your whitelist to your Firefox Sync
account).

~~~
the8472
> the more you learn to recognize what domains you need to allow in order to
> have the site working as intended

Sites using cloudflare are a major issue here, specifically their cryptic
subdomains. If someone were to hide an ad network behind those they would be
hard to tell apart from the rest, at least for humans.

~~~
mziulu
Yes this is true. If a site is not working and the only reasonable domain to
allow is something from cloudflare, I resort to allowing it temporarily. Not
many ways around that, I think.

------
commentereleven
They claim that when the extension gets added to addons.mozilla.org, it would
start to auto-update.

~~~
ecaron
Auto-updating is possible even without using addons.mozilla.org, sites like
Pinterest do it all the time for their plugin.

Mozilla rolls that option into their CFX builder -
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/SDK/Tools/cfx#cf...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/SDK/Tools/cfx#cfx_xpi) \- the update file just needs a consistent place to
live. I use CloudFront for it.

~~~
cpeterso
Unfortunately I doubt the auto-updates will work when the add-on's .xpi URL is
not stable because it includes uBlock version number. He might be able to
workaround that limitation by hosting a stable .xpi URL on a github.io
website.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/download/0.8.5.7/...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/download/0.8.5.7/uBlock.firefox.xpi)

------
unethical_ban
I like it, but so far anyway, I'm not feeling discernible differences in
performance. That's just me though!

I would like to see something akin to Ghostery's interface where I can see
exactly what trackers/ads are hitting me at a site, and whitelist by domain.

------
teamhappy
Does anybody know if I really need the "Malware domain list" if I have
Chrome's malware and phishing protection activated at the same time? Sounds
like they might contain the same sites anyway.

------
hit8run
Under OS X I like [https://glimmerblocker.org/](https://glimmerblocker.org/)

Glimmerblocker works on operating system level and you don't really need an
adblocker in your browser.

------
lars_francke
I've never had an (Ad) blocker as I'm relatively happy with most sites but
there are some that are not behaving well.

When I last looked (at least two years ago) there wasn't a single blocker that
supports a blacklist-only mode. Meaning: Allow everything unless I block a
certain domain.

Does anyone have an idea if something like this exists now?

~~~
exadeci
Well if you disable all the filters of Ublock and add your block list to the
"My filters" tab that should do what you want :)

~~~
lars_francke
Thanks but that's not what I'm looking for.

I don't want to maintain any block lists myself. I want to use all the 3rd-
party Filters available but I only want them to be active on certain spammy
websites. As far as I can tell ublock doesn't let me do that either.

------
tux
Installed it in Firefox 35 and Chromium 39 on Arch Linux, now browsing is
noticeably faster :-) Whooohooo!

------
louhike
I haven't been able to do performance tests, which is supposed to be the best
advantage of this extension. But at least, it seems to block ads properly on
Chrome.

Has anybody made some tests outside of the developers of the extension?

------
mwj
How does this compare/contrast with Privacy Badger?

~~~
Anthony-G
Good question. It's a pity that the only response was a flag-killed
irrelevancy. Only last week, I downloaded and started using Privacy Badger as
an alternative to Ghostery. I'm liking it so far but my current laptop is 7
years old and only has 1GB RAM (running LXDE) so resource consumption is my
main concern after safe-guarding my privacy.

------
codychan
I tried this for Chrome for a couple days and found that it really didn't
block too much ads(I can say none ads were blocked) comparing to ABP.

------
tux
Awesome exactly what I was looking for. Because AdBlock Plus is extremely slow
at times. Also uBlock provides many more filters. Thank You!

~~~
dserodio
The official XPI are here:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases)

~~~
tux
Thanks :-) Will check it out.

------
bad_user
Does this also work for Firefox on Android?

EDIT: it seems that it's not compatible with Firefox 35 on my Android. Oh
well, more patience required :-)

~~~
threedaymonk
Bluhell Firewall does work on Firefox for Android, if you're looking for an ad
blocker while you wait for µBlock.

~~~
notfoss
And so do Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge. The reason I am interested in this is
because of much lower resource consumption than either of those.

I haven't tried Bluehell Firewall though. Can you comment on its performance
as compared to Adblock Plus/Edge?

~~~
threedaymonk
Bluhell is touted as a lighter weight solution. I haven't taken measurements,
but Firefox Mobile certainly feels snappier with Bluhell than with Adblock
Plus/Edge.

~~~
notfoss
Thanks, I'll give it a try.

------
aerique
It isn't quite clear to me what add-ons this can replace. Obviously AdBlock,
but perhaps also Ghostery and No-Script?

~~~
logn
It's a replacement for AdBlock. JavaScript is not blocked unless it's part of
an ad. The Easy Privacy list is part of uBlock by default, so there's some
effective overlap with Ghostery but they're still different.

~~~
gorhill
You can control javascript execution when enabling "advanced user" mode:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-
filtering:-qu...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-
filtering:-quick-guide)

------
jkot
Use /etc/hosts blocking if you are worried about CPU and memory. It also works
on rooted Android devices.

~~~
UserRights
Blocking at the DNS level produces a lot of requests to 127.0.0.1, which can
be quite annoying e.g. if you are using a local webserver for development.
Also if you do not have a local webserver on 127.0.0.1 the browser still will
wait for answers to your request, what can be an annoying experience. Would be
interesting to measure how much CPU and memory actually is wasted with many
tabs waitung for elements from 127.0.0.1.

It is the better approach to not let these requests happen right in the
browser, what this plugin does, if I get it right.

A warm and big THANK YOU to the developer of this great software, it is so
important and good to see that many developers are helping users to protect
against the morally challenged who are stealing the privacy of millions every
day.

~~~
marios
DNS blocking works quite well. It's also very effective if you can set it up
on your gateway so that it blocks ads/malware for all devices (PCs, phones,
tablets ... even your guests will get adblocking for free!). However, while
the /etc/hosts trick works I don't think it's the best way. The reason is that
while parsing a plaintext file is easy and generally fast, it doesn't scale
well especially when you have to traverse several megabytes of it for _every_
DNS request.

The way I have done it is by installing unbound[0]. If you aren't using
something else like dnsmasq, you will notice a speedup from the DNS caching
alone. While unbound isn't supposed to serve authoritative answers (i.e.:
don't use it to manage your zone) the possibility is there. The unbound-block-
hosts script[1] can be used to convert Dan Pollocks' hosts file to the
appropriate unbound syntax.

To avoid the timeout from localhost, my first approach was to setup a firewall
rules that discards the request (the browser receives a connection refused
message _immediately_)

Another way of proceeding is to setup nginx to serve a 1*1 transparent GIF for
every request it receives. If you find nginx to be too big a dependency, there
are alternatives such as pixelserv[2].

The issue is that you can't block a specific element, but you still catch a
fair share of ads.

I have explored the possibility of running a http proxy to address this, but I
haven't got around to it yet. (In addition, I'll probably need to MITM myself
if I want to block elements in HTTPS; still needs some thinking :)).

[0] [https://unbound.net/](https://unbound.net/) [1]
[https://github.com/jodrell/unbound-block-
hosts](https://github.com/jodrell/unbound-block-hosts) [2]
[https://github.com/h0tw1r3/pixelserv](https://github.com/h0tw1r3/pixelserv)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Am I reading right - serving data for responses on localhost is "cheaper" (for
some value of cheap) than letting those requests fail? Or does it just return
faster, is it faster than using firewall rules?

Why serve a gif, why not a single byte or something? Does the browser require
the data to be parseable?

Sorry, lots of questions.

[http://proger.i-forge.net/The_smallest_transparent_pixel/eBQ](http://proger.i-forge.net/The_smallest_transparent_pixel/eBQ)
gives info on smallest gif/png/jpeg files which might be useful.

~~~
marios
No, certainly not cheaper (for any value of cheap). I haven't measured but I
can't see how it would be possible, as in the first case the network stack
takes care of it (in kernel land) and in the other case you have to go all the
way back to userland.

The reason I tried the transparent GIF trick is because some sites have frames
with ads and whatnot and having the firewall refuse the connection will result
in having an error message displayed in the browser. Not really aesthetically
pleasing. While I don't care, because I know the reason it is displayed; some
less technical people might start thinking their Internet is broken.

In addition to that, the GIF results in a cheap form of "element hiding" since
you end up replacing a 50 _50 banner with a 1_ 1 transparent square. Now that
you mention it though, I wonder what would happen if I set the server to serve
a null byte for instance.

------
pwr22
Is this considered stable now? Last I checked it had some problems, if fixed
already that is awesome

------
leke
This came just in time. My Firefox was crawling with ABP. Now it's flying
along again.

------
ecaron
Personally, I hope that this doesn't get added to addons.mozilla.org. Their
arbitrary human-control editor policy would be the best thing to cause
stagnation of innovative plugins such as this. If the author goes the self-
hosted route, automatic updates are still achievable (and can even occur
faster.)

+1 for not having this in AMO!

------
danieltoomey
My version of firefox (34.05 on mac) says the tool is corrupted

~~~
titolibowitz
try installing it from here:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases)

worked for me.

------
simon_vetter
is this on addons.mozilla.org? I couldn't find it there.

------
webwanderings
Please get us uBlock for Chrome on Android and iOS.

~~~
austinsharp
I'd recommend Javelin Browser[0] on Android.

[0] [http://javelinbrowser.com/](http://javelinbrowser.com/)

------
HeXetic
It would be nice if the link was to the top of the page, or the start of the
Readme, instead of to #installation. A bit presumptuous there.

------
findjashua
ublock doesn't work on quite a few sites, whereas I've never had an issue with
adblock. Couple of examples off the top of my head:

1\. giphy: it removes the share and twitter buttons

2\. doesn't block ads on hulu

There were others as well that I seem to be forgetting (I remember having to
disable it on quite a few sites). Good intention (lowering memory
consumption), but the execution still has some way to go.

~~~
quadrangle
this is just different filter presets. You can change the filters. In my case,
I had ABP doing all that same blocking, only I had to opt-in, whereas with
ublock that blocking is opt-out.

~~~
findjashua
fair enough, but if you're going to compare ublock to ABP, as a user my
expectations from it are going to be like those from ABP. By default it should
work like an ad-blocker, with an option to block other stuff. For users like
myself, who don't really care about tracking, just about ads cluttering up a
page or delatying a video, blocking out stuff other than ads just 'breaks' the
site.

~~~
quadrangle
Why should it have to have those same assumptions and defaults? In my view,
it's fundamentally better to block that other shit too.

------
topdownjimmy
> ...the inalienable right to privacy.

Yes, you have a right not to visit any website you don't want to.

~~~
perlgeek
If all websites declared all privacy violations up-front, that might be a
viable solution.

~~~
topdownjimmy
Turn off cookies and JavaScript.

~~~
TheCraiggers
>Turn off cookies and JavaScript.

In your first comment, you seemed to be against altering the presentation of
websites; you offer a binary choice: go to the site, or do not, based solely
on the content. Seemingly advocating that sites should be accepted or rejected
whole-cloth with no modification. Yet here, you seem to be just fine with
blocking Javascript and cookies, despite the fact that both these technologies
are often used as part of ad services to generate revenue.

So which is it?

~~~
topdownjimmy
I'm not against altering the presentation of websites at all; I use Ghostery
myself (plus Greasemonkey etc.). I just think it's dishonest to pretend that
this has anything to do with rights violations.

------
hurin
I'm curious as to what drives the creation of this multitude of add-blocking
projects? What is their income model and what supports their development?

~~~
beagle3
The obnoxious and spying nature of ads.

~~~
hurin
... I'm not asking about why you'd want one. - I'm asking about why you'd make
a new one and who would pay for your work on a new one when others already
exist?

~~~
beagle3
But that is the same question. Not everyone is trying to maximize their wealth
all the time.

Do you ask "why did Linus write Linux when there were other operating systems
available at the time and no one was paying him for it?" or similarly the
Atheos.cx guy? Gnome when there was KDE? Gimp when there was Photoshop?
Facebook when there was MySpace?

~~~
quadrangle
The last one isn't comparable to the others. The original Facebook made by
that other guy Aaron Greenspan arguably was just someone doing something
because it was useful. Zuckerberg and co. made what is today's Facebook
specifically to gain profit and power.

But your point is well-made otherwise. The answer to "why?" for uBlock and
others is "because people care enough to do it."

------
sjwright
Amazing work.

One concern is that the EasyPrivacy‎ list -- which is in my opinion overly
aggressive -- is enabled by default. Most pertinently, it entirely disables
Google Analytics on every site.

~~~
Rovanion
Does the deactivation of Google Analytics impact the user negatively?

~~~
oconnore
They don't get the privilege of having their data analyzed and used to market
products back to them.

Some of the marketing people on here will probably find that to be horrendous.
Where is my relevant promoted content?!

~~~
sjwright
If most geeks end up blocking GA (in most cases without realising it) then the
audience of geek-focused content might end up being severely under-reported to
publishers. This will only accelerate the mainstreamification of our culture.

~~~
oconnore
You ought to be supporting publishers that are important to you with your
dollars, not with HTTP requests to Google Analytics.

