Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
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.
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.
The fact that uBlock uses ABP lists is completely irrelevant. People choose uBlock because it uses compute resources more efficiently. Regardless of the list.
Haven't investigated it thoroughly, but if I recall correctly the adds on reddit.com are block by uBlock, but not by AdBlock Plus (unless you disable the "acceptable adds").
EasyList/EasyPrivacy are community-driven filter lists.[1] Whatever whitelisting in EasyList/EasyPrivacy is to address site breakage. Not addressing site breakage would lead to less people using these lists, and thus less people benefiting from the protection they offer (see graph at link below).
The "acceptable ads" fitlers are in a separate list, which is not part of uBlock Origin.[2]
Here are the benefits of using EasyList/EasyPrivacy (the "Easy mode" bar): https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode#. If you know filter lists which can accomplish the same protection with the same reliability at not breaking sites, I will be happy to use them in uBlock. Filter lists which lead to site breakage won't be used by a majority of users because the majority of users just want an install and forget approach. So the net result would be less people protected, the complete opposite of the goal I set for uBlock.
> 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
No, uBlock Origin depends on community-driven EasyList/EasyPrivacy, just like many other blockers: ABP, AdBlock, AdGuard, BluHell, Adblock Fast, etc.
[2] "Acceptable ads" list: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...
(Your response worries me in that it is an exceptionally convenient argument for sloppy developers not to fix their sites)
In the final analysis this question is equivalent to "Is it difficult to make a site that can have any piece of it fail to load or be removed at any time?" since website developers have no control over what may or may not make it onto the list of an adblocker.
Yes, these things can be worked around, but not every site maintainer will bother. (Especially since those adblock users likely don't earn them any direct revenue.)
I was making a $1000-range purchase on an ecommerce site that was utterly broken by my refusal to be tracked in intimate detail, and their product manager was basically, "eh." So I worked around it by catching the errors for them in the browser inspector. This is the type of breakage that site developers absolutely should be fixing.
When sites that require flash break, isn't that a win for the user?
Ad blockers don't just block ads.
- "Block any image on any domain that has `/ad/` in its path." (Encountered in certain local block list, not present in such pure form at time of writing.) Found this one while inspecting bugreport of our client who complained he cannot see some images on his presentation we maintained. Our CMS serves static binary data with "folderized hash paths" where occurrence of `/ad/` is not completely avoidable. Even now Easylist [1] inludes many general `adsomething` rules that FMOPW could do many false positives.
- "Block any flash that has `clickthru` parameter." This rule is still present in aforementioned easylist [1]: `.swf?clickthru=`, but amusingly is very easily avoidable (rule insists that this parameter is first). Back in times this parameter was de facto standard for embedded flash serving as hyperlink to tell it where to link to. Found this one when another client complained that his flash-based part of main navigation (supplied by third party studio) does not work.
- Even now the question "Have you disabled your adblocker?" often relevant response to general WTFs during web-development.
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).
They're ordinary users, and they use adblocking without even knowing it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/...
If the maintainers of ABE really want their users to switch to uBlock, they could push a final update that displays a notice about its own deprecation. There's no need to rely on the app store to do that.
But they're not doing it, and I suppose it's because even without further updates, ABE will continue to work perfectly fine for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to the article, it will work even better than before.
is ublock origin a single developer?
ah this helps a tiny bit more
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-uBlock-Ori...
but also adds more confusion as to which one to use
Do you use an app to manage your hosts file?
Peter 2001-12-01 13:07:33 PST
Will this really land by Dec 11?You'll need to set up Privoxy on a machine on your network (unfortunately the config is not the easiest to get to grips with) and then set up your devices to use it as a HTTP/HTTPS proxy.
If you have a VPN, you can configure clients to automatically use your proxy. For instance, on OpenVPN, add a couple of lines to the server.conf, using your own ip + ports:
push "dhcp-option PROXY_HTTP 10.8.0.1 4862"
push "dhcp-option PROXY_HTTPS 10.8.0.1 4862"I run it here on tomato and use something similar to: http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/auto-dl-hosts-f...
Jung would have something to say about synchronicity, I'm sure.
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.
YMMV, but it might be worth trying Firefox again.
Maybe it's just that Chrome has more users.
But the general sentiment four years ago, when I started MemShrink, was very clear that Firefox's memory usage was a problem. Every discussion thread about browsers on this very site would degenerate at some point into discussion about Firefox's memory usage. (Indeed, this was a big part of why I started MemShrink.)
That's no longer true. Comments about Firefox's memory usage are much rarer now. And when somebody does say that Firefox has bad memory usage, more often than not they'll get pushback from other commenters who have a different experience. Not to say that they're wrong or Firefox is perfect, but the situation is so much better than it used to be, particular when it comes to avoiding the bad memory spikes that cause the worst problems.
I've got it installed for development and I have no complaints, but now that I've got Chrome set up for syncing and all that it's just become my default. I'm sure I'll get annoyed at Chrome at some point and switch back.
But there were plenty of other problems fixed too. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for lots of details.
With that in mind, in the future perhaps you could think twice before posting snarky comments based on your experiences from five years ago.
In a rational universe that would be a reasonable request. Too bad we don't live in a rational universe.
Bad experiences weigh much more heavily on us than good experiences. For example, there is a chain of stores I won't go to, because I bought some inferior products from them over 35 years ago. Is that rational? No. But it is human nature.
> Zarro Boogs found.
I don't know what I expected -- there's no "Other > Desk furniture" in the products list of the public Bugzilla....
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.
So, you just made my life better, thanks :)
And thank you for making browsing the Internet awesome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198994
uBlock Origin itself has higher memory footprint, but given that it blocks more (using default settings), on average it will cause web pages to consume less memory, so eventually with many tab opened, uBlock Origin may end up being more efficient than Adblock Fast memory-wise.
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).
I haven't measured the memory consumption, but I havent had any noticeable issues so far.
Am I missing something?
thus, i find ublock (for ex) much simpler to deal with than ghostery.
And then it took another 15 months to get fixed because it was a significant and complicated change.
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.
Here is a point also: if you make a selection in one tab, and switch to another tab, the selection in the original tab persists. Yet in the other tab, the context menu is that of the page. This underscores the page versus selection semantics.
Yet, it would probably be more effective if the context menu were the same, just with certain things greyed out based on state.
For instance in, oh, Notepad on Windows (let's drag out that user interface superstars, why don't we) if you have text selected then the context menu enables Cut. If you don't have text selected, then Cut is still there, but greyed out. Hey look, it is that way in this very Firefox edit box that I'm typing in.
The fact that we don't see "Cut" in the page context menu is just as bad as that we don't see the backbutton when there is a selection. Seeing a disabled Cut lets us know that we can select something and then Cut will be available.
On that topic, here is another thing: the page context menu has Select All. That makes it clear that the context menu has a relationship to selections.
It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the problem is?
Suddenly, out of the blue, for no good reason, the user interface changes and my plan of action fails. No big deal but it is part of death by thousand papercuts.
The reason is so non-intuitive that people has made it all the way to reporting it on bugzilla[0] without clear steps to reproduce..! .
A second unrelated problem with your argument: "... It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well". For some of us FF/FF-flone users that is not a very convincing argument. : )
It's not entirely out of the question for people on HackerNews complaining about Firefox features to think about submitting patches.