Which add-ons are you referring to? AFAIK the big 3 are AdBlock (Plus? There's so many jeez), uBlock (and Origin), and, in a distant third, Privacy Badger.
uBlock Origin is apparently now the blessed alternative and is OK for blocking most ads, but I immediately found a few potential tracking issues with its default lists, and its UI is awful.
Ghostery also isn't blocking various trackers effectively now, even though its UI still claims it has detected and blocked them. I can't 100% guarantee that's FF42 if Ghostery also updated its lists at almost exactly the same time, but that's when I saw things like Facebook Connect start hitting FB servers even though it's supposedly blocked.
This is almost a brand new machine, BTW, which just happened to update FF and lead to changes in the plug-ins a few days after initial set-up. There's relatively little chance of odd things going on or historical baggage distorting these results.
Bottom line: The day I bought the machine and installed FF and my usual set up add-ons, my browsing experience was fine, and then a few days later FF updated to 42, and my browsing experience immediately sucked.
I am curious: what are these "few potential tracking issues" specifically?
Whatever default lists uBO is using, unlike with ABE (which is essentially ABP filtering engine), users have the last words in what is blocked:
- The `important` filter option can be used to override exception filters.[1]
- Dynamic filtering override all static filters.[2] For example, you do not need a special filter list to block Facebook everywhere, it's a matter of a few point-and-click to block it everywhere without any way for any static filter to counter it.[3]
* * *
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Overview-of-uBlock's-...
[3] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...
It's certainly possible to customise uBlock Origin to prevent these things. However, I couldn't immediately see any of the other suggested lists that would have blocked some of these potential privacy/tracking issues either, which suggests that not only do I need to manually block them if I want to stop the tracking, I also need to manually update those lists.
In contrast, with a couple of fire-and-forget plug-ins I've been installing as standard for years until recent FF updates broke them, I very rarely had to customise anything manually. They just worked as standard, and I trusted them to keep working and never noticed any significant problems, until now.
Fanboy's Anti-ThirdpartySocial is right there in the list of lists, under the Social header.
> In contrast, with a couple of fire-and-forget plug-ins I've been installing as standard for years until recent FF updates broke them
Ok, my answer was meant to address your point that uBO was no replacement for ABE, as you stated "uBlock Origin is apparently now the blessed alternative [to ABE]".
And it doesn't block any of the things I mentioned. The domain connect.facebook.com isn't in there, for example, and I ran into a page running a script from there within five minutes of switching to the new plug-ins.
Ok, my answer was meant to address your point that uBO was no replacement for ABE
Sorry, I'm not sure where I said anything like that. I explicitly noted that uBO was apparently being promoted as the successor to ABE, as you seem to have noticed. I just also noted that the plug-ins I've got running now aren't as good in some respects as the ones that worked just fine for a long time until recent FF changes.
Here (my emphasis):
> Adblock Edge was discontinued a little while back [...] uBlock Origin is apparently now the blessed alternative [...] but I immediately found a few potential tracking issues with its default lists [...]
"but", implying Adblock Edge somehow did not have the "few potential tracking issues" you said you found in uBO.
Hope it's clear.
"Anti-ThirdpartySocial" aka "Anti-Facebook List" list https://www.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-antifacebook.txt
> ||connect.facebook.com^$third-party,domain=~facebook.net|~fb.com
> ||connect.facebook.net^$third-party,domain=~facebook.com|~fb.com
> ||facebook.com/connect/$third-party
Is that not what you are looking for?
I misunderstood before and at the time I read "Fanboy's Anti-ThirdpartySocial" as "Fanboy’s Social Blocking List" not "Anti-ThirdpartySocial (see warning inside list)", perhaps because the latter sometimes seems to change its name to "Anti-Facebook List" for reasons I haven't identified. The former does block numerous Facebook addresses, just not that one.
I'm not sure any of this really invalidates my original point, though. Two weeks ago my Firefox had a couple of privacy/blocker extensions installed, and with no real configuration beyond ticking the "everything" boxes in the Ghostery wizard, they blocked pretty much everything that bothered me. Today, with FF42, neither of them works any more.
Apparently the new version involves figuring out which of the almost 50 lists that are suggested but not active by default in uBlock Origin are needed to get a reasonable level of blocking. I dare say almost no-one is actually going to get that right reliably even if they want to. And while I might have guessed to just activate everything under the social heading to block Facebook Connect (at least if I'd realised something related to Facebook wasn't already blocked by default), I have no idea which of those lists to even check to see if I can disable the various web font resources that involve tracking.