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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

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.

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.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Seems like an entirely reasonable comment to me.

Because the comment has nothing to do with the parent.

The fact that uBlock uses ABP lists is completely irrelevant. People choose uBlock because it uses compute resources more efficiently. Regardless of the list.

It's not irrelevant. People may assume they are switching to an entirely independent project when moving to uBlock, but a dependency has now been pointed out. Whereas previously, I may have assumed that if Ad Block ceased to be, or their servers were having problems I would be completely unaffected, now I know I might be. This is useful information for anyone who "switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back."

Because while some of the facts are true, most are are not and are baseless speculation. As it stands, the "acceptable ads" list is not in uBlock Origin.

Yes, you are right, but just to make this point clear: The whitelisting that occurs in EasyList doesn't allow ads to pass through and is in no way related to the "acceptable ads" feature in ABP. The whitelisting in EasyList is because some sites check for Adblock and blocked elements, so EasyList needs ways around that.

I'm not too sure if the "acceptable adds" whitelist is built in, they still allow you to turn "acceptable adds" off.

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 is maintained by ABP's parent company

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.

[1] https://forums.lanik.us/

[2] "Acceptable ads" list: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...

Honest question: is it really that difficult to make your site not broken by ad blockers?

(Your response worries me in that it is an exceptionally convenient argument for sloppy developers not to fix their sites)

Yes.

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.

JavaScript has had try/catch since forever though?

Ad blockers don't just block third party things though. Or even necessarily sane things. Our site is a classified ad aggregator. At the time at least, we learned that Adblock Plus would just blithely delete any element with 'ad' as part of its class. (A major section of our results page had the class 'ad block' (ironically) and was blocked.)

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.)

The most egregious site breakage from ad blockers is when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe or Google JS. Some sites have large amounts of content that is only loaded via three levels of third-party-JS indirection. Others will try to fire an event to Google Analytics on every click, but if GA doesn't load, an error is thrown that prevents the click's default action.

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 can't handle the absence of their Adobe

When sites that require flash break, isn't that a win for the user?

Adobe makes more than Flash. They have a number of user tracking, profiling, and A/B testing systems, plus an email delivery and segmentation system. Some or all of those things started as Omniture. Google also has Google Tag Manager, which is a third-party JS for injecting more third-party JS. When half your site's content is loaded by Adobe into "mbox"es, triggered by JS loaded by Google Tag Manager, it's a nightmare for real developers and end users alike even with everything working.

You expect people to go out of their way to support ad blockers???

Do you want your shop to work despite people blocking the tracking? Do you want to sell stuff in your shop or did you build it to track people?

Ad blockers don't just block ads.

Depends on what their business is. Apple's $99-a-year developer portal recently broke because I block Adobe's Omniture tracking. The same happened to me on an ad-free, crowdfunded news site that I've backed. In these cases, "does not work with ABP/ublock/Ghostery" is a valid bug report.

There are situations when it is difficult or at leas annoying: sometimes blocking rules are too loose that generates false positives. Few examples from my personal memory:

- "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.

[1] https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

If the site has a proper layout and the ad blocker does its job, i.e. blocks only elements with ads, you won't have to do a thing.

[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.

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).

Thanks for the data. As another uBlock user (who does not care about the split by the way) and as someone who is not a tech-bubble elite, I can tell you with much confidence, that there is no such thing as "ordinary users" when it comes to Adblocking.

I don't know man, plenty of people are fed up with ads (installing adblock isn't really technically challenging) and now there are plenty more non-tech people using adblock because of Apple.

I install AdBlock plus on all my family member's machines. That, and I also install NoScript.

They're ordinary users, and they use adblocking without even knowing it.

Noscript? It is a bold move to break more than half of the internet for them. Did they learn to use the Noscript-menu when something does not work?

Yes, I taught them what to do if the website doesn't work. They're surprisingly adept now at only accepting domains that look trustworthy, selectively. My parents being 60+ years old, I'm also amazed at it...

Adblock Edge also still has 0.71 million daily users despite the fact that it is no longer maintained. (The maintainers recommend uBlock Origin instead.) That's more than all of the uBlock add-ons combined.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/...

As a long-time Adblock Edge user, thanks. It's a shame they don't have a mechanism to alert users about that.

In the past, it was not uncommon for me to update Firefox, try to figure out why an add-on stopped working, and only then realize that the add-on in question hadn't been maintained for more than a year.

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.

I still don't get if I should be using ublock vs ublock origin

https://www.ublock.org/faq/

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 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?

Ideally in chrome.

uBlock can use disconnect's filter lists, its in the options. I'm not sure why you think disconnect is giving you a "free proxy", that doesn't seem to be a feature.

It runs anonymous search and returns the results from their servers proxied. It offers an actual VPN if i am not mistaken, as a paid service.

use tor, the latency is pretty low (at most it adds 500 ms)

I tried out ublock, didn’t seem to work on twitch.tv and a couple of other random things. So I moved back to ABP.

ensure you are using uBlock Origin, not just uBlock.

I use alternate host files.

I used to do that but found it ultimately too fiddly - like if you need to unblock a site manually editing your etc/hosts, then you have to get your browser to refresh it's DNS cache.

Do you use an app to manage your hosts file?

I use GasMask on OS X. Makes switching through host files a breeze.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/29949/gas-mask

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.

Nanny software you installed yourself? In any case, NumPy is on GitHub now.

Uninstalling uBlock, installing and setting ABP up takes less time than temporarily or even permanently disabling the blocking of SF by simply clicking on a button?

uBlock didn't start to universally block sourceforge, they just added sourceforge to their "uBlock filters - badware risks" list, which is justified imo. If you don't want this behaviour, just disable the list.

I'm always happy with the reminder that I happened to follow a link to sourceforge. I don't need anything there..

Couldn't you have turned off uBlock for that site via the toolbar button?

One doesn't even need to turn off uBlock if one disagrees with the wholesome blocking of sourceforge.net: right in the warning page, uBlock Origin offers the user to remove temporarily or permanently the wholesome blocking for the site.

An OT grammar note: if the sentence doesn't seem clear at first, it's possible "wholesome" should be "wholesale". I think.

Oops, right, I meant "wholesale".

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