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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Uh... why isn't this a browser extension? Asking me to install an entire program onto my computer is extremely sketchy.

TL;DR - we can unblock a lot of things with this approach that browser extensions can't; it also works across all browsers (esp. relevant for Safari users).

Digging in, there are a few reasons actually - first is, Chrome removes extensions with this kind of functionality from the Web Store constantly (only option would be to sideload).

Under the hood, Incoggo is also actually a local proxy (it adds a trusted root cert during the install process - we have some details on this / other potential issues / concerns on our forum). Reason for this being, Chrome extensions can't modify inbound requests in the way that's required to unblock several of the publications we support (NYT, Bloomberg, WaPo being key examples).

Sideloading would frankly make more sense to me. As it is, there are so many "gotchas" that I wouldn't be inclined to daily-drive this, especially since my Macbook sits in my drawer collecting dust. Plus, a lot of these security concerns aren't just minor whoopsies: adding lines to my sudoers file? That's not a practice that should be normalized for something like this. You're shaving an awful lot of yak for something that should have a more streamlined approach in the first place. If Safari causes you issues, I have no idea why you'd kowtow to a single browser with a fraction of the desktop browsing market share, throwing the rest of the options by the wayside. Maybe I'm coming at this from a different point of view, but you're cutting an awful lot of people out just to get an MVP that works for you. Hopefully some day Incog gets a more agnostic, safe implimentation.

Yeah that's totally fair & we try to be pretty upfront about the issues (FAQ + forum). There's definitely a lot of bubblegum and duct-tape on this at the moment - been putting a lot of work in to fix the bigger issues ASAP (been modeling a lot off the AdGuard approach / targeting parity).

Really making the longer-term bet here that with a lot of work, the underlying proxy infrastructure will enable a lot of really interesting possibilities, and the shorter-term bet that with this approach we can create the best / most effective adblocker for paywalls by far.

That kind of makes sense. I guess with Manifest v3 coming / Manifest v2 getting EOL'd, this will probably continue to work in future.

Also, screw building extensions for Safari.

> it adds a trusted root cert during the install process

That's a non-starter for me. I do not want an application to be able to MITM all traffic.

Surely you just need to be able to MITM certain domains (the ones of the paywalled websites you unblock), can't you just create individual self-signed certificates for those and trust them one by one?

That's understandable - if you'd like a work around for now, the app has a 'pause' feature (which, if active, will cease to proxy traffic completely - you can just turn it on briefly as needed, then 'pause' it after loading the article).

The reason for the root cert is that in short order (after cleaning up our infra, etc.) we're actually planning to expand to a full-spectrum adblocker.

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