Taking a break from Adblock Plus development
palant.de
palant.de
Today there are many alternatives to ABP. I am extremely grateful for his work. He's going on a well deserved vacation. I wish him success in his future projects.
(In case anyone wonders, I am not affiliated. Just a happy user of ABP.)
ABP may have packaged things up nicely, I dont remember that evolution of history. And they may have other good will now to balance out the "acceptable ads" monetization. But the tools to "fight back against abusive advertising" should be credited elsewhere, IMHO.
Sadly it is not much more than a reskinned Chrome, same with current Opera and Brave.
BTW, Opera offered "tabs" before it was a thing by making use of MDI. And it carried forward until they scrapped Presto.
Similarly Vivaldi right now offers to split the viewport into multiple areas to show tabs side by side.
Cons are that it's slower (not that noticeable for me anymore since latest stable) and doesn't have sync (is coming in next version).
For example Google has implemented a more restrictive policy regarding Flash in recent Chrome releases, and it has found its way into said browsers basically unmodified.
In reality everything relies more or less on Chrome and Firefox.
Nowadays, we're in a different world though. Multiple monitors is pretty much default for web development on PCs (not laptops/ultrabooks/tablets/smartphones though). Although newer Android versions also contain splitview.
there are people on Russian Opera fan forums still developing patches and improvements to that code base.
As for the current direct comparison: uBlock yields better performance and doesn't have a shady track record [1]. Other than "I've always used this" or "I benefit if other people use this" (ie. am affiliated which you're not) I just do not see your point. So could you explain us why you pick ABP over uBlock?
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-effic...
Care to expand on that?
It felt that way to advertisers especially when the fee was 30% of ad revenue rather than say, a processing fee for time spent verifying it met the criteria. A lot of them were more ok to ignore ad blocking before they were held to ransom.
Users were unhappy at an adblocker's default config allowing ads.
A feature being able to be turned off is a plus, but default features not in the interest of the user are a minus. Especially not when users don't have an easy way to opt-out.
If users reasonably want to only opt-in such a feature, you as developer should implement it as such.
When I first heard about it took me like 35 seconds to opt-out -- open options and unclick the little clicky box, easy peasy.
Having to go through settings in software when you install it, to get the software to work the way the average user wants it to, is annoying. An example could be removing a bitcoin miner from the software, or disabling ads in uTorrent, or disabling telemetry in Windows 10. Firefox as well, but at least they tell you about it right away, and they started doing it later. Not good, but less bad.
Why do software developers get away treating their customers like stupid sheep either wasting their time or getting their data? Ah well, at least in Europe we're getting GDPR.
It's not like they owe me anything, I downloaded their software for free and use it for free with absolutely no expectation other than "I'll use it as long as it works for me."
If it gets annoying I'll replace it with something that isn't just in this particular case it was a lot easier to click a box than search out a new adblocker.
> Why do software developers get away treating their customers like stupid sheep either wasting their time or getting their data?
Because they want to use Windows 10 or uTorrent or something with a bitcoin miner instead of searching out alternatives. Personally, other than ABP, I can think of no other cases of this happening on my stock (other than the chrome repo) Fedora box.
Glad we're getting GDPR in EU. I hope other countries like USA will follow suit. US citizens deserve such protection just as much as EU citizens. Not to mention the rest of the world. We'll have to see how it works out in practice though.
As for the owing and such regarding FOSS, that's related to warranty and such. That doesn't mean its cool to deliver the software crippled. Especially not without mentioning it is crippled beforehand. We got a word for that in the physical world: dishonesty.
Which is why you should use some due diligence before (and after) choosing which products you use. It's not like anyone's forcing you to sell your soul so you can find out your best friend's dog Fluffy just went to the groomers and here's the pictures.
I see this like those people who go and buy a house next to an airport then go crazy complaining to the city about airplane noise, they benefit from cheaper prices (because most people don't actually want to live next to an airport) but then feel entitled enough to feel everyone else should bend over backwards for their personal preferences.
> Glad we're getting GDPR in EU...We'll have to see how it works out in practice though.
Produce a digital wasteland IMHO...like the tariff wars that (partly) led up to the Great Depression.
In the previous century I did not expect any tool to send back data about usage (including my private data). Back then it was called phoning home [1]. It was very much frowned upon. Although, as the internet took off, it started to become more rampant as a way to verify software. For example, I remember a personal firewall trying to phone home to verify it was licensed which you could block with... itself. Later they fixed that, but you could just use a hex editor to fix that.
Nowadays we've migrated from pay to use model (proprietary software) to service for your privacy model (SaaS). We get disillusioned that things are free when in reality they're not. In the physical world, but more so in the digital world. We don't know how we are paying, and that's a problem. [2]
> I see this like those people who go and buy a house next to an airport then go crazy complaining to the city about airplane noise, they benefit from cheaper prices (because most people don't actually want to live next to an airport) but then feel entitled enough to feel everyone else should bend over backwards for their personal preferences.
No, those people knew beforehand what they were buying. We don't, else we'd change those settings right away. Claiming that people consent to their privacy being discarded is dishonest. They don't fully understand the effect of their actions. The developers do know, but they don't care, maybe cause they're aspies who can keep distance from that --I'm not sure.
As for people who live near an airport, I happen to know a tad bit more about that with regards to the airport near Amsterdam (I live near Amsterdam). It all depends on the flight routes (the lanes for landing and take off). For example, I don't hear any airplanes except in the summer because then that specific route is used more. Not every 15 minutes though like my aunt who lives a few km from one lane in the Green Heart on a boat with a beautiful land. With, during the summer (winter etc less), planes going over. Low. Every. 15. Minutes. It would drive me nuts.
> Produce a digital wasteland IMHO...like the tariff wars that (partly) led up to the Great Depression.
How so? Look back at what I wrote here [2]. Don't you think the GDPR will make it very transparent to users because they have to give their consent?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoning_home
[2] See other [2]
Not only the software developers and to why? Well because it works, because most act like sheep.
I wonder how much of that comes from having been dominated for century's by a religion who literally told (and tell) all the people that they are sheep, needings them as shepherds ...
In effect ABP was forcing itself in as a middle man and taking a fee from both the site owner and the advertiser. As an example, if I, your local newspaper, sell a placement to your local car dealership, ABP comes in and says "people won't see the car ads, but if you split the revenue you were going to get with me, I'll sell those placements to someone else for you." So let's say 10% of my visitors use ABP. I can now either lose it or get back some smaller percentage of it by paying ABP.
That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket.
In addition, when Eeyo made that announcement, they also announced that they were working with AppNexus and Google on the new exchange, which just wasn't true. Though I believe Google does pay to get some ads into the acceptable ads program.
If you're going to be in the business of blocking ads, stay out of the business of selling ads.
Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render.
The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.
I'm willing to concede that I assume a specific view of the nature of ad spots, but you're going to have to reeeeeeaaaaally stretch your argument to claim that this is the reality of the web. For the vast majority of people the browser is the renderer that happens to be customizable, not the arbiter of what is rendered, regardless of the browser's capability to decide.
Regardless, you don't have to accept the online advertising business model, even at a moral level, to acknowledge the shadiness of the other aspects of the practice that I pointed out.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19980210082938/http://internet.j...
Sure, and the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone either, but it did bring the concept to mainstream attention. Same goes for ABP
Need to see products in their zeitgeist. Not easy for everyone. Nostalgia comes into play, some people just weren't there or were too young (or have passed away).
You're sure that wasn't adblock? ABP is from 2006, and installing it wasn't easier or harder than adblock.
As for iPhone, that innovated the touchscreen, specifically it was the first (US-)mainstream application of a mobile device using a capacitive touchscreen. I wonder if we should also claim it innovated the removal of the user replaceable battery or the 3.5 mm jacket.
Furthermore, popularity isn't a good measurement of quality but that goes without saying.
He's not asking you to explain why you appreciate ABP.
He's asking you why you still use it.
On a philosophical level: I support the ABP strategy of "acceptable ads". I think it's a good way to legitimize the development of adblocking extensions. They also make it easy to disable those ads.
Technically: For a long time, ABP blocked more ads than uBlock. Maybe this is not as true today. For example: some adblockers didn't block ads in videos. I also appreciated the "Element Hiding Helper" extension (which has not been ported to webextensions). ABP was usually one step ahead of everyone else.
On performance: Firefox had ups and downs with regards to performance, and ABP was part of the problem. I remember reading a few blog posts from Firefox about the work they did to improve that. These days, I don't notice any difference, especially with Quantum/webextensions.
To be honest, pretty much the only ads I notice are sponsored results from Google (static text). I also use uMatrix for untrusted sites.
Google's AdSense has delivered malware in the past. And nobody is about to ban them.
It doesn't matter if it's just a "text ad" either. They allow a script, which means a malware payload can get delivered.
Google do a fair effort stopping malware, something like 400,000 malware ads try and host themselves through their network every day. But some do get through.
Is uBlock better? Yes, but uBlock probably wouldn't exist if ABP had not established the market and highlighted the need for ad blocking extensions.
Happy uBlock user (and happy former ABP user).
Dropbox innovated online storage, sure (my ISP already provided telent & SSH access in 90s and I could mount my homedir with SSHFS and WebDAV but sure, relatively small ISP in small country who didn't popularize it just like tons of other efforts did not). Dropbox caught the momentum. Who's to applaud for that?
Plus, first of all in order for the masses to use it securely it needs some kind of encryption for its storage. Other than that it was just a good UI for tools already in existence. WebDAV, SSHFS, rsync, or Coda (which you can see mentioned and ignored multiple times throughout the thread). For the encrypted content part, one could use GPG, but many other solutions exist as well. Now, if I was the NSA back in 2006, I'd invest in Dropbox via a proxy. Gives me free data to plow through which people otherwise store locally. And its data they want to save. Hah, I'll save it too! I knew about those risks before, so I wasn't raving about "the cloud" back in the days. Heck, I'm still skeptical.
What a lot of innovation has in common is that it succeeded to market itself. No, that's not something I have a lot of respect for indeed because I don't have a whole lot with things like marketing, sales, and popularity. Sue me. I'd like to look at the technical side of things and peek at the less popular gems (though on say Kickstarter I'm wary as well).
Parallel to that, it is often some kind of GUI which gets popular while it uses techniques from more abstract developments: libraries, smaller software research projects which got bought, CLI.
Which important features did ABP innovate? Seeing what it added to original adblock is lackluster. And even that original adblock isn't the first browser-based adblocker.
We're also talking about a time where the browser was the way to read the WWW and there wasn't a way to embed the browser in "an app" (an app? what?). Well, thinking a bit more about it, it was there (MSHTML for example). But it wasn't high quality. And you could block those ads via /etc/hosts
> Yes, but uBlock probably wouldn't exist if ABP had not established the market and highlighted the need for ad blocking extensions.
You mistakenly neglect to take into account that if ABP didn't exist, adblock wouldn't have been continued (ie. forked) by someone else. Parallel to that, if Linux didn't exist, the BSD lawsuit would've set that source code free, and it would've caught on from there. Its easy to say, in hindsight, "well that worked out well" but its equally easy to say "well if that didn't work out alternatively something else could've worked out". Without an in depth analysis on why that was so unique (we are talking about inventions then and patents more likely I am not going to buy your argument, sorry.
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The creator of ABP ("Wladimir"?) is a scammer, con man, and malware distributor.
He created an adblocking extension.
He then used the auto-update feature to update his extension to include "acceptable ads".
I was not warned about this. I discovered this accidentally after going into ABP settings.
"Acceptable ads" IS the antithesis of adblocking. Do you know the malware that masquerades as anti-virus software, etc., euphemistically called "potentially unwanted programs / PUP"? ABP is EXACTLY the same.
Vladimir gained my trust by providing an adblocking software. He then betrayed that trust.
He is a con man in my book.
/rant
Which should be opt-in. And if nobody wants to opt-in there is the problem; it's going against what the users want.
Most people never change default settings of software they install so "opt-in" may as well not have a way to "opt-out" except as a scapegoat to say you can.
You might as well just blame the browser vendor for not having a built-in ad blocker, URL rewriter (Google search results), not disabling 3rd party cookies or whatever else the flavour of the month in abusing-features-for-tracking is.
The people who never look into the settings probably didn't install the ad blocker themselves in the first place...
Not true. Even most people who install an AdBlocker will not change their settings. If you change your settings, you're part of a very small minority. Businesses often use this to increase tips.
Imagine two settings:
1) Enter your own amount (default of $0.00)
2) Four options: 15%, 20%, 25%, Other
If you use #1 you'll receive fewer tips. Many people will leave it to $0.00. If you use #2, most people will tip and of those tips most will be 15-20%.
[0] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-t...
[1] https://www.fastcodesign.com/3022182/how-square-registers-ui...
uBO does select relevant regional list(s), if any, at first install according to the browser locale. I am pretty sure it's the same with ABP.
Thanks for making uBO!
Edit: I haven't actually spent enough time with the opt-out unchecked to come across one of these. I suppose it's the nature of the implementation - unless you have humans reviewing the ads or something of the sort, you'll never be able to filter them with 100% certainty.
The current workaround is to open the log and allow/disallow from there. But you can't get to the log button 99% of the time because of the rendering bug.
Not sure if it only affects the Dev Edition of Firefox or not. It certainly doesn't affect the Linux versions, neither Dev or mainline.
Really wish they would fix it. Here's how it looks on reddit, notice how much of it is unreachable: https://i.imgur.com/UHN7AQD.png
I'd love to help, I just don't have the time right now.
I am pretty sure uMatrix works fine on Firefox/Windows: it's all HTML/CSS/JS code, and thus OS agnostic -- uMatrix does not care about OS.
Firefox is supposed to resize the popup panel according to the size of its content -- the resizing is Firefox's responsibility, it's out of reach of uMatrix.
I believe there are issues in Firefox with regards to using multiple monitors with different DPI. In any case, you should report your issue to buzgilla.mozilla.org.
Firefox limits the size of popups to 800x600 CSS pixels, which in theory should account for high DPI (are you using a high DPI display?).
Not sure what is going on here. What is your display resolution, zoom, and font size?
From [1]. I'm not sure what better fits the definition of selling out.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/google-and-others-reported...
> We receive some donations from our users, but our main source of revenue comes as part of the Acceptable Ads initiative. As detailed below, larger entities pay a licensing fee for the whitelisting services requested and provided to them.
Since I only allow the hosts that I need, I almost never see advertising. And the web is blazingly fast.
I actually just switched from uMatrix back to uBlock Origin, because uBlock makes it easier to block individual JavaScript files, rather than blocking JS wholesale.
The uMatrix rule syntax can do this, and the matrix UI does provide this capability.
EDIT: formatting, typo
Sure you can:
google.com googleusercontent.com image block
The only reason you'd use uMatrix is if you create rules that can't be done with the matrix frequently enough.
Note that with type-based rules, the destination hostname is always *, meaning "from anywhere".> Cliqz is a well-known Adware from Germany[1] and it was a plague
Not sure what data Ghostery is collecting now, or how opt-in vs. opt-out has changed (if at all), but it looks like based on the reputation of the new owners I will no longer be using it.
Edit: the small HN discussion seems to cover this a bit more evenhandedly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126
Just use uBlock Origin.
Has there always been a uBlock extension for Safari? That was my last holdout for using ABP. I've now manually installed the downloadable extension but ABP is prominently displayed in Apple's Safari extension app store.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/11/15/no-boundaries-exfil...
Microsoft said the web was done at Internet Explorer 6.
It looks like it was also rewritten for webextensions from that blog post.
Yeah? And this is like OP asking "Now that Edge exists, what's the point of IE 6?"
And Opera at that time had ads in the INTERFACE of the browser. So blocking those at the router level left big blank spaces in the interfaces that were more satisfying to me than ads.
So I'll give this guy credit because I used his plugin, but not too much credit when you sell out to the people you've basically made a business model out of blocking.
Like many others I've switched to ublock and I'm a control freak so I also use noscript extensively.
For many years now the browser has been the number one threat to the average internet user so I firmly believe in noscript.
You should in fact take it even further and use qubes os.
[1] https://hackademix.net/2017/12/04/noscript-quantum-vs-legacy...
I would have thought he would have savings from Adblock Plus deals.
Anyone got any claims for what XUL should mean now?
2) The list of ad domains, URLs, and elements has to be constantly updated. The plugin has to be kept up to date with changes in browsers. Advertisers occasionally come up with new techniques to bypass or detect adblockers, so those need to be worked around.