Extensions: Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... Opera: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/ublock/ Microsoft Edge: https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge#microsoft-edge
1: https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.giorgioc...
tl;dr Gorhill started uBlock, got fed up & gave it to chrisaljoudi, later did a reversal, forked the project and continued with maintaining that fork, only now his version is called uBlock Origin.
However, it's not that "the original author wasn't able to get it back". He is too proud of himself to admit the big mistake it was to give up the project to a random greedy teenager (who after the drama offered to give it back), so he decided to stay with the Origin name.
The result of this is that said teenager still makes a profit off the brand name (see ublock.org). People see that page and happily give him money thinking that they are helping the world.
By the way, it's also worth noting that the greedy teenager inflated his Github commits with minor changes and by hijacking the authorship of some commits, so that people would think that he did more than he actually have done (he can't really do much), and donate more to him. Eventually he just stopped making commits at all (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors), since people will still donate just for thinking that his domain is legit.
The moral of the story is that uBlock Origin is a good extension, but its developer, despite being talented, can't be trusted to be here tomorrow. He can just have a tantrum and delete the entire project or give it up to some other random teenager again.
Even using a name like "uBlock Next Generation", which is less ambiguous than "uBlock Origin" and suggests "this is the new project", would still cause confusion. People unfamiliar with the project history would just call it "uBlock", leading to the same donation problems.
"Tantrum" exists only in your head. Be judgmental as much as you wish, bottom line is that you know nothing of me or my private life.
No, uBlock Origin was the original. The fork was confusingly also called uBlock. Origin==original.
See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/06334a190ea9589e983... (or Wikipedia)
> https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/06334a190ea9589e983
This all adBlock making money by blocking ads and then showing their own ads is becoming ridiculous and unethical.
So what does Adblock stand for now ?
That qualifies as Open Source under any reasonable definition of the word [1]. So being Open Source is no argument for or against either Adblock Plus or ublock origin, because both are.
Then you have a gazillion of "Open source licenses", that can be less "free" to more "free", like BSD, GNU, MIT, Apache, the free source license, ...
Same thing it did years ago when it decided that an Adblocker should default to allowing "Show Ads" for any advertiser which paid them a blood ransom: PROFIT
I think they've mentioned that a site owner signs up on AdBlock Plus marketplace to sell ad space on their _own_ site.
It will be just another ad marketplace with one exception: AdBlock will make sure that these ads are shown to people who uses the extension. They also promise to allow only "acceptable ads" on the marketplace.
Do you think there is some ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't "ethical"?
The same way a person who downloads an antivirus expects it to block viruses.
Performing the exact opposite of the stated and expected purpose of the application, for money, is a violation of trust. There is an implied belief that a product should do what it claims (and its name clearly states a purpose -- ad BLOCK), and the plain English reading of the title makes that pretty clear.
Imagine a virus scanner that only blocked those viruses that didn't pay up.
Surf the web without annoying ads!
Can block tracking, malware domains, banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube
Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites (configurable)
It's free! (GPLv3)- Users want ads to just go away, period, the end.
- The devs want ads to be nice. So they swat down the nasty ones and permit the nice ones.
Ransomware was probably the wrong way to do that, but I can see why it was superficially appealing. "We check your ads for niceness, and then permit them. We won't give our effort away for free", being the idea behind it.
The utter shit people run on major sites these days is so patently offensive ("Single Mom's Weight Loss Trick!", "Get Government Money Tomorrow!") that I keep a blocker on for my own sanity. I'm consistently appalled at the extremely low quality advertising that supposedly reputable properties put on their sites.
Give me good ads, please. Don't give me garbage.
I see few to none on Firefox, but even with a firewall hosts blocklist, Chrome/Android shows the bottom-feeder stuff on, again, supposedly reputable publishers' sites: TIME, CNN, Salon, Vox, and more. And the only impression it gives me is that thes companies have to be absolutely desperate to let that crap darken their pages.
You're right, it's absolutely insulting. To both the reader and the sites running the spots.
If advertisers take a sudden "nice" approach, I'll keep blocking ads for another decade or so and see if the trend lasts. That's all I feel I owe them at this point.
They're experimenting with a new and better way to power the exact feature I installed the software for.
No trust is being violated here.
Replacing Ads with other ads is worse because you're not only depriving a content creator of revenue but then profiting off of their work. You could argue that it amounts to theft.
Is using fast-forward on your DVR unethical?
Is skimming past the ads in a newspaper or magazine unethical?
Is it ethical to let your eyes glide past the ads shown in a browser?
Is it ethical to read books from a free library rather than buying the right to read a copy from a store?
TV is paid on viewership numbers. Newspapers are paid on circulation. Gliding past ads on a site is factored into the CPM values. Books in a library are paid for and covered by the first-sale doctrine.
You don't think people who change channels to avoid ads/who use DVRs is factored into the price per viewer for TV ads?
Your individual impact might be harder to track than with ad-blockers, but on the aggregate you are driving down the price per viewer by switching on channels during ads, using DVR, etc.
(Imagine a world where 100% of people used a DVR and skipped ads. Obviously the price of TV ads would plummet. By using a DVR you are contributing to making our world, that world).
So if I had the free time, I would consider attending in order to ask pointed questions and warn other people away.
I think we're at a very Napster moment for content websites.
Additionally you can use things like Patreon or Google Contributor.
It is everyone's duty to burn all books, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of books contain hostile, abusive, invasive, and/or subversive content.
This is made apparent by:
>loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.
More importantly, if the sole concern is "hostile payloads" then the acceptable ads program should be exactly what you support. I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup, and I support ABP in pushing more publishers towards acceptable ads.
But what about data or privacy?
>I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup
The concern there would be privacy/tracking via advertisements. I readily admit that is a silly argument if one is already using Facebook. I do not have a Facebook account. I do not know when, if ever, Facebook will extend their advertisements to be used on partnered sites instead of internal-only. I can block them in advance even if I may never see them at all.
If it means we go back to the days where people spent their own money to create pages because they were passionate about a subject, I'm fine with that. I miss that era. It sure beats advertisers thinking they are entitled to know where you go when you browse around the web.
The difference is that you're not having someone sweep the grocery store and remove all free sample ladies before you enter it. Ignoring a free sample lady is akin to ignoring an ad on page.
The primary difference though is that the lady doesn't take a photograph of you, follow you around the store noting everything you stop to look out or put in your cart, and then follow you out to the parking lot and go to the next store with you.
I'm not saying that what content owners or advertisers do is right or ethical, just that at it's core blocking the ads is unethical as well.
What gives Ad Block Plus the right or qualification to determine that my ad is a "bad" ad?
Why should ABP have the ability to suppress editorial or advertising content on my website, replace it with it's own advertising content and not share revenue with me?
Ad blocking itself may be considered a ethical issue as well, but it's a different ethical issue. With blocking, the decision is ultimately made by the end user. With ad injection, ABP is making itself a third party stakeholder.
I'm a happy Adblock Plus user and I like this move.
Advertising, in general, does not bother me. I occasionally even find it valuable. Ads on sites like Google and Facebook are perfectly fine by me—I just don't want big, animated ads or (more frequently) broken ones which prevent me from reading content. In fact, I already go out of my way to disable ABP on sites where the ads are acceptable.
Contrary to what people on HN believe, advertising is not inherently evil. Most people are perfectly fine with ads so long as they're not invasive.
Honest question - don't the sidebar ads (on the right) on Facebook look ugly and intrusive to you (more so since they also change often)?
Apart from Facebook tracking, I block ads on Facebook because of these too.
Not at all. I honestly don't even understand how you could think they are.
They're literally just a (static) image and a few lines of text.
Heck, I often even find Facebook ads to be inherently valuable. Most of them are for services I use and like.
I would guess most people have this idea (in most cases illusion) that advertisers are not able to manipulate them. I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit. I do not know if they are evil, but I think it is fair for me to try to avoid those kind of people.
I certainly don't pretend that advertising has no impact on me.
I also don't think I'm a mindless drone who does whatever advertisers say.
Advertising is not zero sum. It can be effective and good for the consumer. For example, I have Charles Schwab account because I once saw it in a magazine ad, did some research, and have been a happy customer ever since. Both Schwab and I won, even though they "manipulated" me into learning about their excellent offering.
> I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit.
You should probably never leave your house then, because almost every person in the world is trying to (subtly) manipulate you. Manipulation isn't evil.
However, a lot of adverts are subterfuge these days and I did fall for one (to shame it, it was TrackR Bravo, which works nothing like its advertised, to make matters worse it was part of a present), so one does need to be careful.
This is a fine stance to have, but I don't see how it relates to the context of ad-blockers. It's a simple enough just to not visit websites that display advertisements. Why would you need an adblocker for that?
Because there are websites with content other than advertisements I am interested in.
Now, I think Facebook, Google, other advertisers and content providers using these ad networks have made the (moral) rules of the game quite clear. They try to extract as much net value from every transaction with me as is even remotely legally and technically possible. And they make massive investments on the technology that is trying to maximize this value extraction. Why should I feel bad playing by the same rules they have created?
(Note that in practice I am not as ideological as my arguments here are. I have e.g. chosen to disable the adblocker for some websites instead of paying for subscription to support them somehow. Reason for this is the fact that it is much easier to turn off the adblocker than hassle with payments.)
Most people on HN make their living off advertising I would wager!
...not that Edge isn't hilariously un-fun to use, even with an adblocker...
That's even what they show in the chrome/firefox store images, it doesn't make much sense to me that it adds several seconds to Firefox startup time
Am I missing something ?
Be skeptical of claims which come with no technical details whatsoever to help you reproduce it?
That is the purpose of the built-in logger[1]. By default uBO is not setup to block other extensions' network requests, or those made by the browser itself, one has to configure it explicitly for this to happen[2].
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger
2. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Behind-the-scene-netw...
Well, not all my addons - turns out though my Scriptish has been installed since Firefox 3 (now at 45), it wouldn't reinstall after removal for compatibility problems. Not sure why that wasn't automatically detected, and that may have been the performance issue
It loads quite fast on Firefox, see https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Launch-and-filter-lis... -- see "Setup time" graph, typically less than half a second on Firefox.
It's like using two antiviruses to be more safe. I believe ublock already takes care of trackers by default, and if not, just add the tracking list.
For example, some sites won't let you in until you unblock ads. With an extension you can use the in-browser UI to whitelist that site, with a HOSTS file you'd have to figure out exactly which domains got blocked, then update the HOSTS file, and finally restart the browser & flush the DNS Cache Resolver for it to take effect.
Again, it works, it is just a bad user experience.
I think I'll be the judge of that, given that I'm the "user" in this "experience" ;) It works just fine for me.