uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox | Hacker News Reader

uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox

addons.mozilla.org

858 pointsnixcraft398 comments

I instantly install this extension whenever I work on a new machine as I could not imagine browsing the web without it.

For that reason I just went looking for a donate button to help fund the project and it turns out they don't even accept donations

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-...

"Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. This can't be emphasized enough."

So you can fund the project -- by donating to the lists it relies on.

While I agree on supporting the things you use. I don't think "the lists are everything". Quite the opposite, Its the blocking features. For me I like uBlocks disabling Javascript with an easy click and the other granularity (popups, multimedia) it allows on a site by site basis.

I'm thinking of it this way. A guy builds a flamethrower to burn away the creeping slime that threatens to overtake your house. Someone else then supplies the fuel. You want to donate, but the builder says no. "The fuel is everything."

That's pretty much correct from one perspective. The flamethrower is built, just needs a bit of maintenance now and then. But its everyday slime-burning power comes from the fuel.

The lists are more like an automatic targeting system for your world-saving flame thrower. Both are vital since the slime killed everyone who knew how to use it, so now you have to enlist average people who only use them to clear weeds and snow.

When your flamethrower needs to shoot hundreds of thousands of little slime balls all at once using tiny little blasts of flame I think that targeting system becomes pretty damn vital!

As a general life rule, not just for uBlock: help in the way you are asked to help.

Please explain how you are able to disable Javascript.

To disable javascript for specific site in uBlock Origin, click the extension icon, then click the "more" button in the menu several times until all options are displayed (you only have to do this step once total, not per site).

Once the 5 top menu icons are visible, click the one to the right that looks like </> to disable javascript for the site you're on.

Thanks, I did search through uBlock before asking.

how do you block popups?

I prefer DNS filtering over extensions as they generally want all permissions to essentially impersonate you at the browser level. Am I wrong?

Most ad services now swap their ad JS domains frequently, aggregate snippets (ads and functional) over a Tag Manager, or simply even proxy the ad scripts through the main domain, which a DNS filter cannot block reliably.

Wrong, no. It's a compromise. Addons have the ability to filter advertisements that cannot be identified by their domain name or ip. They also can take actions to compensate for website failure when ads are blocked.

You’re not necessarily wrong, however there are whole categories of ads and tracking that cannot be prevented by DNS blocking.

You're not wrong. We're all placing immense amounts of trust in uBlock Origin. I often say that the blockers should be fully integrated into the browsers themselves in order to solve the trust problem. It's sad that it can't happen due to conflicts of interest.

> the blockers should be fully integrated into the browsers themselves in order to solve the trust problem

s/solve/transfer

The browser owns the connection anyway and can do whatever it wants with the content. Of course trusting one party is better than having to trust two parties so we are back to do we trust the adblocker?

> Of course trusting one party is better than having to trust two

I wouldn't trust Google to block its own ads, it is much harder for them to intentionally fuck up a generic API that can be used by others without raising suspicion. Hence why everyone calls them out on the manifest v3 changes.

I also wouldn't trust Mozilla to invest the manpower to keep the plugin running and with them already including ads in the browser itself I would see another acceptable aids policy on the horizon.

For a job like this in specific I would rather trust someone whose goal is to provide a great internet experience over making money, I couldn't name a single browser vendor who would qualify.

I assume browsers are trustworthy user agents. If this is false, we've already lost.

If you use Chrome, you've already lost. I mean seriously what do you expect if you use a browser from the #1 targeted advertising provider in the world?

If you use Firefox, perhaps... They are becoming like the others in their quest to become a corporation. Driven by marketeers and telemetry, selling ads to get by, paying their C-suite millions of dollars...

So in effect, yes. Most people have already lost. The rest of us are on the way there.

Given that it's open source, we have the freedom to audit the code to make sure it's trustworthy.

Also, Mozilla has a vetting process it puts a popular subset of extensions through.

>Due to the curated nature of Recommended extensions, each extension undergoes a thorough technical security review to ensure it adheres to Mozilla’s add-on policies.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...

You can bet with every release of ublock origin that security people are all over looking at the code diffs for security issues. I don't have an issue with it. At some point you have to trust somebody. Otherwise just take wire cutters, walk outside your house, and cut the cable.

DNS is better, but I find that you need to have a dns server rather than modify/update the host files on router because it'd kill it.

Pihole is great, but you have to maintain a pi. It's not hard, but the other issue is also training and education when users/family is not on it.

In the end, subscription purchases for youtube, help because the ads are really horrible on mobile platform and not blockable easily on iphone.

I went all over the place with this comment, but I agree DNS level is better then browser level. The IP is still enumerated on a browser adblock level, but not on a DNS level.

> impersonate you at the browser level

This is a new framing for me...I don't think of ublock as impersonating me, but rather representing me, like an agent in a transaction. While it's true that agents that represent you need to be trusted, there is also a huge upside: ublock origin can do things that DNS blocking cannot. Given ublock's (gorhill's) track record, I think this is an excellent deal.

Gorhill's track record is the critical bit. He transferred maintenance responsibilities for ublock to someone who immediately exploited it to make money, which is why we now have ublock origin. In a world of 7.9 billion people, it is amazing that a decent internet experience depends so much on a single person being competent and honorable. He (and the block list folks) are the heroes that run into the virtual dumpster fire and pull us out.

Right; there's a reason we literally call the browser the "user agent", and uBlock is just a part of that. It's not impersonating me, it's a vital part of the browser being a useful tool for me.

The concept of a user agent is hilariously and sadly quaint on the modern web.

Can you imagine what a user agent to interact with Facebook would look like? Or Instagram? Or TikTok?

It shows how far we slid backwards for large, popular areas of user functionality, post-90s.

On the contrary; the browser is still generally the user's agent (although Chrome can be iffy) - we don't need to imagine, because we can compare the Facebook app to browsing Facebook in a browser, and see that the browser is still far more friendly to the user's interests than what FB ships.

It is, although both Chrome and Safari obviously have their own, non-user interests.

But browsers in 2022 are second class citizens, for business models that can generate positive ROI from developer time. They are at best dissuaded (e.g. Reddit, TikTok), and at worse actively crippled or prohibited.

The majority of users are on apps, and more users are moving to devices (e.g. Chromebooks, Portal). All of which are explicitly not user agents.

> I prefer DNS filtering over extensions

DNS filtering is weak and there are numerous bypasses [0], including ones you can never fix at the DNS layer [1]

[0] Ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30412070

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30411049

I have extensions turned off in private browsing and then use this mode for banking etc.

DNS filtering sucks and can't filter ads served from the same domain as content, if all you can block is a FQDN, there's an absolute shit ton of trackers and ads that are getting past you.

This is why piholes are awful. I don't know why they get such high praise - it's just a crappy DNS filter that blocks like what 40% of the ads you see?

Pihole is contributes to a defense in depth strategy. Lots of android games are unplayable when I'm connected to the internet unless I'm on a network protected by pihole. Yes, I can run a firewall on my phone, but maintaining firewalls on every device that my family uses?

Solution: don’t play games or use any app where the business model isn’t “I give you money and you give me goods and services”.

I have one ad supported app on my phone - the Overcast podcast player. That’s only because the author created his own non scummy ad network and I find ads on the podcast player that advertise other podcasts useful.

If I didn’t, I would pay him too to get rid of ads.

That only works when they're willing to take your money and willing to then not show you ads or track you. Lots of places won't take your money and only do ads, and an upsetting number are happy to take your money and then track you and/or show you ads anyways. (My "favorite" so far is Hulu, who has the audacity to call their paid plan "no ads" and then include ads.)

Then don’t use those services or buy those products?

When I did buy Windows PCs, I either bought from the business division of Dell or the Microsoft store specifically because they weren’t bundled with adware.

That's great. I'm glad you have balanced out your morality and online browsing. We will all sleep easier tonight.

It’s not about morality, its about my preferring not to be bombarded with ads.

Defense in depth.

On my Android I have Netguard[0] configured with a hosts file, Firefox with uBlock Origin and NextDNS with comprehensive blocklists.

uBlock Origin protects only one app — the browser.

[0]: https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/releases/

PiHole is not awful. It greatly enhances the blocking provided by browser plugins. Most valuably, it blocks an enormous amount of ads in non-browser apps. If I'm using e.g. the BBC app on my phone, PiHole blocks most of the ads (or at least it used to; I haven't checked recently). It also blocks ads in smart TVs and other places where you can't install uBlock.

it doesn't enhance anything a browser plugin does -it's a redundancy.

yes, it can block SOME ads in apps. it's also really good at breaking access to said apps too, then you must spend a great deal troublehsooting apps one at a time.

IMHO - ublock on the browser, pay for apps that have adfree versions, don't use apps that don't, and pirate the rest.

I thought part of the point is that 40% or whatever never gets sent to your device in the first place - speeding up requests, reducing usage. Those seem like good things.

And, it's 40% that don't show up even on devices and browsers where you can't install uBlock.

pi hole is great and is just another layer.

pi hole is as great as those blocklist filters people used to add into Torrent clients or using tools like PeerBlock.

It's just so faulty and pointless.

Pero ¿por qué no los dos?

Its better to do both - layered approach. And if you wanna be extra see my other comment on this thread :-)

The advantage of DNS is of course that it will generally also work on things other than your browser which is a pretty huge win.

I can definitely understand his point. Some guy donates a dollar to your project and suddenly they act like you owe them the 80 hours required to implement their stupid enhancement request.

Just block them then ;)

It's hard to forget to install it. The first time you open a browser on a new machine and for a moment, for probably the first time in a while, see how the internet really looks, that's the best ad for uBlock Origin.

The internet with no adblock is a little like driving through Breezewood, Pennsylvania

https://imgur.com/a/qmAxHfk

A little. On the internet, the ads actively jump in front of our faces while we're trying to read something. Imagine driving under such conditions.

Be more like this virtual barrier in Sydney:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325904/Water-stop-...

That's actually a pretty famous photo. You can right-click and see a much larger one. Must get that full-sized advertising goodness.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/postwar...

Famous and deceptive. It is a narrow angle shot, taken straight down the axis of very specific strip. Take an off axis, wide angle shot, and billboards disappear. I don't remember the details but photographic tricks like that played a large role in a trial opposing advertisers to people who considered billboard an eyesore. The former used wide angle shots while the latter used telephoto.

We saw a lot of tricks like that related to covid and social distancing. Heavily zoomed pictures of "crowded" beaches, streets, etc... where in reality, it is far less dense than the photo makes it look like.

Hilariously that won't even load for me on firefox w/ublock origin.

that picture only captures, like 5-10% of what you see as you pass through there.

I think it's always ridiculously represented as "hurr this is what America is!"

It has every chain business there because it's the intersection of major highways where there's no other meaningfully-sized rest stops around for hours.

Indeed, people outside the US (especially Europeans) don't really grasp the scale of the US interstate highway system. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "The United States is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

It's so big, that if you're driving long distances over the middle of the country you have to make sure you stop for fuel and food and a biology break whenever you get the chance, because there's no guarantee you're going to be able to find a place in flyover country.

Given that ads are a major vector of malware, it's more like raw dogging a prostitute.

What makes Breezewood unique is that you are forced off of a freeway to drive through that strip. Otherwise it looks like many other American roads.

I think the internet without Adblock is more like these heinous digital video billboards in Los Angeles that appear above the road, directly in the line of vision of drivers. Why these are legal is incomprehensible to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7ZeROERRrg

Why advertisements are legal at all is incomprehensible.

the day is coming - between changing how 3rd party cookies work, how ads are served from the same domain as content itself, to the intended feature-creep of Trusted Computer.. that ublock origin, pihole (which is already a piss poor solution), and other tools are going to be rendered useless.

It's a great tool. But it's days are numbered. A couple more years and mark my words, things like ublock, will be defeated.

If you think that's going to happen, you definitely have never worked with an advertiser or agency.

Most would rather die than trust the content provider with reporting their own statistics.

Good luck with that. ISPs, DMCA people, etc have been saying that for 30 years.

We're two. It's so useful. I use it on those website who display the "accept all cookies", specially on those ones because I'm tired of denying cookie usage.

I still don't understand why Firefox, champion of privacy, doesn't make a uBlock native.

Blame government for not understanding unintended consequences when they pass laws regarding tech (GDPR)

The law says that agreeing or disagreeing should be equally easy. Companies are breaking that law.

Personally, I rarely come across a site that makes it harder to agree than disagree. I find both paths equally annoying.

We must not use the same internet. Agree is always one click for me, and there is generally no disagree button, but a "manage your privacy settings" button, that opens the biggest popups ever, slow as hell, when then even work,with thousand of button to click.

Examples are plentiful.

https://twitter.com/cookieshame

One interesting thing is that loads of sites use OneTrust to implement illegal banners. However OneTrust has a compliant banner on their own site.

So they can do it, but most sites deliberately configure it illegally.

It’s hard to know what a law says that requires you to read 11 chapters with 99 sections just to create a website.

https://gdpr-info.eu/

completely false, it's trivially possible to create a website without needing to involve GDPR at all.

Don't collect any information you don't actually have to, and if you do hold personal information, treat it basically like you'd want your own information treated, and you're basically good. It's really that simple.

The only people who think it's particularly hard or onerous are the people referenced by "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I don’t deal with the clusterf%%% of modern front end development. I’m just tired of seeing cookie banners everywhere.

Did the law in anyway make my life better?

Obnoxious banners are not required under GDPR. In fact, unless denying consent is as easy as granting it, they're illegal.

It's not the law's fault that companies would rather implement such detrimental UX than either give up the teat of personal data or give people their rights.

It is, however, the fault of regulators for not stamping down on such behaviour when it is against both the letter and spirit of the law.

And, honestly, I consider the fact that so many websites are forced to admit that they are trying to take and sell my data to be positive.

Why do I care whose “fault” it is? Did government intervention make my life better or worse?

As Reagan said the most dangerous words in the English language “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

The great "mistake" of GDPR is that it has consent provisions at all.

After previous cookie banners, they really should've known better. (Or, let's be real, absolutely did know, but left it in for corporate interests anyway.)

How do you know what is needed for that without reading the GDPR?

if you don't collect personal data or analytics, you aren't covered by GDPR at all.

in the abstract sense of course everyone has to know all the laws of society - the law in its majestic equality forbids unsafe construction practices from builders and greengrocers alike - but that's not a particularly interesting or insightful observation.

I don't want to agree or disagree at all. I want my internet back pre-banners where I just get the content. The new internet is awful.

Personally I like the banners because they are an active reminder that that website is explicitly harvesting personal information.

Or, blame companies for throwing passive-aggressive shitfits that aim to mislead people. GDPR doesn't mean you have to have an intrusive confusing mess of a cookie banner, for example.

In fact, a confusing banner that makes you play a minigame to get the respect for your personal information that you have a legal right to (in the EU) is explicitly disallowed.

And if you don't want any banners, then don't collect any information you don't have to. If it's actually technically needed, you don't need consent. For example, Wikipedia has lots of cookies for things like UI elements and they don't need a banner.

That’s not really comforting to me as an end user forced to deal with punch the monkey cookie banners everywhere.

Indeed, having it repeatedly demonstrated that companies are willing to unapologetically break laws to attempt to trick me into permitting them to scrape up my personal data is not very comforting.

So maybe the government shouldn’t pass a law that it can’t or won’t enforce? See also “The War on $x” or “because terrorism”, “think of the children”.

CNIL, the French regulator, did just (last month) fine Google and Facebook 150 and 60 million euros, so there is some level of enforcement, but I agree it's not enough.

There are some big ones here: https://www.tessian.com/blog/biggest-gdpr-fines-2020. Ironically, that site also has a cookie banner that attempts to trick you into thinking that the highlighted button will save the default preferences shown (it won't, it'll turn them all in, then save that). This is illegal too.

> In fact, a confusing banner that makes you play a minigame to get the respect for your personal information that you have a legal right to (in the EU) is explicitly disallowed.

It is. So are the ones defaulting to "yes". And the ones where there is just a popup telling the user to install some blocker in their browser without giving them a choice (like https://npr.org ). Or telling them to take a subscription if they don't want to be tracked.

All these things are illegal but unfortunately they are not enforced.

The problem is that GDPR didn't go far enough.

They should have added a provision that if the user has Do Not Track turned on, the site may not present a cookie barrier and may not serve any cookies except essential ones. I know many browsers have removed DNT but they sure would bring it back in a heartbeat if it actually did anything.

This is what you get when corporate lobbying gets as big as it is in Brussels :(

Enforcing the rules for handful of "normal" websites that have illegal cookie banners would cause all the others to magically discover that it's actually not very hard to have to buttons next to each other with the same colour.

Brussels might have a corporate lobby problem, but they did create the regulations in the first place, so they're already ahead of a lot of national governments (which run the regulators).

So now you want the government making laws about how to design your website?

> I still don't understand why Firefox, champion of privacy, doesn't make a uBlock native.

That's the best technological solution but there are inherent conflicts of interest since Firefox depends on Google for money.

Not just that but due to their search for independence from Google they are increasingly relying on their own ads as well, like on the New Tabs screen :(

> I still don't understand why Firefox, champion of privacy, doesn't make a uBlock native.

Mozilla's "commitment" to privacy is all talk and no action.

Enabling Google as the default search engine, or the proprietary Pocket plugin, arguably isn’t innocent inaction. It’s actively anti-privacy action.

I don't think it is a good idea. Usually when things like that happen the project will become less and less effective, also once it is so ingrained it will be harder to switch to a new kid in town that is better.

Firefox has its own built in privacy mechanism that is enabled by default and don't prevent me to use uBlock together with it. I prefer that approach.

Just to make people aware who may not be, you can block a lot of cookie banners and other annoyances that are not blocked in uBlock Origin by default by enabling more specific filter lists in the extension options.

In the "filter lists" tab, I would recommended enabling the "Fanboy's Annoyance" list. It's a huge list that focuses on removing various annoying, recurring website components, and it's created by the maintainer of Easylist (uBlock Origin's primary filter list).

The downside, of course, is that this may in theory break some additional % of websites, but this has not been an issue in my experience.

I do that, especially those from onetrust

If a website fails to work if you don't click though the cookie banner, it's probably illegal in the EU. They cannot collect the covered data until you consent, but they also can't stop the website working if you don't. And if you didn't actively click the button, you can't have consented, and you definitely didn't consent if you deliberately hid the button.

- ublock origin

- vim c

- user agent switcher

are the big three for me.

> I don't want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for funding. I want to be free to move onto something else if ever I get tired working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).

This resonates with me. I'm thinking about spinning up a new open source project, and I really want it to be default-alive. I know that I don't have infinite time and attention for it... I want it to be able to live without constant feeding.

I do think that donations will be part of the picture though. Similar to uBlock, the project will have some dependencies on upstream data providers. I would love to generate revenue and pass it to those upstream providers to support the broader ecosystem.

uBlock Origin, with CNAME uncloaking is the most powerful ad/tracker blocking tool. Browsing Internet without it is often time a scary experience.

It does block our [Wide Angle Analytics](https://wideangle.co/documentation/track-with-custom-domain) tracker about which we are open about.

And ... we are not against. Every user should have a right to self determination and control when browsing the Internet. Our tracker is not invasive. It does not spy on users across site. We do not facilitate user profiling and personalized Ads. So maybe we should be against? But we are not.

It is your browser. It is your device.

I'd upvote more than once if I could! If every tracking / ad provider would like that the internet would be a better place!

My experience with uBlock or in fact any Ad Blocker have been suboptimal. It sometimes uses a lot of CPU resources in places I dot understand and couldn't be bothered to figure out why.

In the end I just switch to NextDNS.

NextDNS and uBO are complimentary.

Agreed

This went from props to a sales pitch fast

I'm tired of the tech hustle culture.

Tired of the tech hustle culture? Then check out nomohustle.co a paid newsletter I run on substack.

Tired of nomohustle.co ? Checkout no-nomohustle.io !

Yeah, I hate it when people believe in the work they’re doing and are eager to talk about it.

Just the worst.

You genuinely believe that this guy is passionate about his tracking software and is just eager to share?

Yes, absolutely.

Is money a factor? Yes. Do you need passion to make money when building a startup? Yes.

Part of me thinks this would be a better place if everyone was prohibited from talking about themselves and their projects. Let the braggarts chest-thump on Product Hunt, that place is already a wasteland

It's like everything tech has to be a dog and pony show nowadays.

Eh, I hear it, but I think it’s rare enough and so strongly filtered (/new is lousy with the corpses of the self submitted articles), it seems to be fine for now.

Is AdBlockPro needed with uBlock or does uBlock do everything ABP does and more?

>Is AdBlockPro needed with uBlock

Nope

>does uBlock do everything ABP does and more?

Yep

Ditch adblock pro and use ublock Origin (origin!), you will only be getting more wins and not losing anything. I suggest reading up on the various lists to enable outside of the default ones that are enabled. Don't turn them all on though, that is a LOT of "stuff" to block, even on modern machines and will noticeably slow down your page load.

AdBlockPro has built in allowlists for some advertisers (might be paid on the advertisers side?) and Ublock does not. And from I remember the developer of Ublock might have originally also been involved in AdblockPro and then left? I could be wrong

Just FYI, the problem with analytics providers like yourself is that even if you don't explicitly intend to spy, you're still collecting a lot of information in a single spot that could allow someone to track the user across websites if it were to leak or be compelled (by law or force - enemy invasion like in Ukraine) to share it.

The most popular extension, and the 2nd most popular, just like the 6th, 7th, 9th and 10th most popular, are ad-blockers.

I guess it's only marketers that love targeted ads...

I sometimes wonder if adtech devs also use adblockers.

I’m a web developer, but I use noscript, despite the sites I work on relying on JavaScript and the business not allowing us to make them work without scripting enabled.

It is a well-known fact they do.

This is why adtech has gotten craftier about ads, and adblockers have had to respond accordingly.

That case is to thwart adblockers abilities to block ads. I think the OP's question was more rhetorical, as in they don't eat their own dog food type of thing.

I have worked in the ad industry for 10+ years. Firefox, strict mode but no ad blocker for web. What I would not do though, is using an android or ios phone (or anykind of smartphone where I don't know what the system nor the application do). I am not sure that people realize how many power and data are used on these phones, for things totally unrelated to their personal usage

So you don’t use a smartphone at all? Or am I misunderstanding?

Yes, until recently where I have a Pinephone, but at the end of the day, I do mostly a "phone" usage rather than data/camera/social usages

Why not just use an Android phone with Firefox and the same exact settings that you use on desktop?

I guess it is doable as long as you are doing only that with your phone. If it is linked to a google account for example, the OS and "embedded" google application will still report tons of data that will be then use for advertising

When I worked in adtech I absolutely did. I think it was fairly common at the company.

Right but what are they really competing with for those top spots? Most other functionality comes built into the browser these days.

Only marketers love ads in general. To the rest of us, it's just annoying noise, to be filtered.

From an older submission to Hacker News: "Appreciate marketing. It seems like bullshit, but it’s bullshit I don’t want to have to do. I’m glad someone else is doing it, I’m sincerely grateful for their efforts." [0]

Software development is important, but marketing is also important, and it actually works. Most companies can't survive without effective marketing.

[0] https://devjac.dev/posts/2021-05-29-my-personal-creed-of-emp...

I don't think most marketers are evil, but as an industry marketing includes a lot of bad actors and boundary pushers that actively make the internet worse for financial gain. As a result I think it's fair for an individual to have an adversarial stance with "marketing" even if your employer's marketing department is pretty benign and helpful.

> Appreciate marketing. It seems like bullshit, but it’s bullshit I don’t want to have to do.

Bullshit? To me it seems more like mind rape when a bunch of corporate ideas and brands are suddenly and forcibly injected into my mind. I didn't ask for it, I didn't consent to it. We don't tolerate it when people violate our bodies, so why is it okay to violate our minds? They "need" it to make money, so it's okay?

If I want to see products, I'll ask for it. I'll open the store app. Until that time, they better keep their marketing to themselves or I'll do everything in my power to defend myself. That's what software like uBlock Origin is: self-defense against hostile megacorporations who want to exploit you in every way possible.

I agree 100%. If your company can't survive without exploiting human psychology and contributing to a surveillance infrastructure and monetization scheme, good. Companies survived for centuries without internet ads, tracking, targeting, etc. Just because you can take advantage of technological methods and mental vulnerabilities to pimp your product without the consent of the target, doesn't mean you should.

> “Companies survived for centuries without internet ads, tracking, targeting, etc.”

As far back as ancient Rome, vendors still used advertising and marketing. This included word-of-mouth advertisements and billboards (such as in Pompeii before the volcanic eruption). [0]

In the 1900s, newspaper advertising was a major source of advertising. Now that fewer people read print newspapers, advertising has shifted to internet ads and email newsletter ads.

Technology evolves, and marketing evolves to keep up. Even non-profits have significant marketing investments today. I encourage you to actually try to run an organization, for-profit or non-profit, and try to sustainably achieve the mission while rigidly adhering to the ideal that companies shouldn’t use marketing.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4387300.pdf

> This included word-of-mouth advertisements

This is not really advertising. It's more like a conversation. It's real people talking about their experiences. Advertising is when some phony who's on the corporation's payroll comes to you unsolicited and starts overstating the positives and downplaying the negatives.

There is two things going on here that are getting lumped under the same umbrella. 1) Modern marketing that uses a deep understanding of psychology to treat people as a series of levers to be pressed in order to get a certain reaction. 2) Service discovery. This can be really valuable. Just imagine you made something you were truly proud of and thought would bring value to others lives, or of something you already think is incredible. Finding out about it brought you value.

These two things both get called advertising but we have (quite reasonably) different feelings about them.

> Service discovery

I don't consider this advertising either. If there is a list of services somewhere and people consult it voluntarily, then it's not really advertising, it's information. People are informing themselves about what's available.

For example, I don't consider an online store to be advertising. The whole reason I went there is to see products, so it's totally fine when products are shown. It becomes unethical when they start shoving products in my face everywhere I go.

I was having this argument a couple of weeks ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30418664 ) cut-n-pasting from there:

Organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. E.g., there are the various "black" markets. There was no appreciable change in availability, quality, or price before and after pot legalization, for example. The high end of most services and products doesn't need to market, they're "saturated" by word-of-mouth alone.

- - - -

Going further, you can trace the historical rise of modern marketing directly from military propaganda techniques. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#World_War_I )

Aren't you consenting to it when you are browsing the web? If it bothers me so much ("mind rape") and I know a website has ads, why would I go there?

> Aren't you consenting to it when you are browsing the web?

No.

> If it bothers me so much ("mind rape") and I know a website has ads, why would I go there?

Websites don't have "99% advertising 1% content" warnings to help me decide before I click a link.

Also, there is no reason to avoid going anywhere these days because uBlock Origin exists.

It's the other way around: when advertisers and website owners decide to leverage the internet, the largest distribution channel in the world at no expense to them, agree to the "public square" terms. If they dont like the terms, they can always build their own distribution channel and set whatever rules they like. Advertisers are the real freeloaders here.

I don't think distribution channel can be ad-free as such, let alone claiming every page on the internet needs to agree to this. Would be great if I can get access to superb resources without paying for them but that is not going to happen, hence ads. If you don't like ads (or block them), how come you are not a freeloader?

> If you don't like ads (or block them), how come you are not a freeloader?

They sent us the web page for free. It's their choice, they don't get to shame us for it.

They did that because they assumed we'd look at the ads. The chance that this assumption would turn out to be false was always there. There's just no way they didn't know about this risk.

What's happening is we don't want to look at this noise. We're not gonna do it. They need to accept that and move on instead of shaming us for invalidating the silly assumptions their business model is based on. Where does it say we're obligated to "give back" in exchange for their "free" content? That's just an idea they made up. They got it into their minds that we are "supposed" to pay them back by viewing ads when we are under exactly zero obligation to do so. They are not entitled to our attention.

The problem is that in order for you to hear about a product probably a lot of other people need to first. Not a huge fan of advertising myself but to call it 'mind rape' seems a bit over the top.....

Making a science out of convincing people to buy things they don’t need is not only not important, it’s fundamentally dishonest. No amount of apologies or hand waving will change that fact. Marketing is a pox on the human mind that we’d all be better off without.

>”Marketing is a pox on the human mind that we’d all be better off without.”

If you work, marketing pays part of your salary. A company can’t survive without it.

Marketing includes the “Who’s hiring?” threads on the front page; word of mouth recommendations; and job postings on LinkedIn. If you’ve found a job that pays your bills, marketing played a role.

You pay your bookie a vig too?

The fact that marketing exists isn’t something I’m debating. The fact it has wormed its way into all aspects of life is a sign that we lead sick lives, to me.

Your point, as written, was: "Marketing is a pox on the human mind that we’d all be better off without.” A reasonable response is that marketing has likely directly benefited your life.

Agreed, it surely has benefited my life. That benefit doesn’t seem to outweigh, in my mind, the dishonesty pervasive in marketing, however.

A thing can benefit me and still be a net drag on humanity. I’ll continue to maintain that “the human mind would be better off without” marketing.

There is a spectrum here. Benign forms of marketing that are closer to outreach or education campaigns all the way to the darkest, borderline fraudulent techniques.

Then there is the question of what's being marketed. Could be 'concentration' pills bankrolling someone's four hour work week, or trying to help teens understand the risks of smoking, and everything else in between.

I don't think it is marketing as a concept that is the problem - it is that we are forced to have it everywhere. There is no choice.

I think a much healthier relationship would be a system where you can choose to dedicate some of your time and preferences to marketing. Instead of companies trying to trick you into clicking their advertisement they would need to create compelling and entertaining advertisements for stuff you might actually want. What I am envisioning is basically something like an app or channel you might willing give some type of inputs (say, for example, you are looking for a new car - you could input some data about your preferences) and then advertisers would have to compete to show off the best product. You could choose to dedicate 0 of your time or X amount of minutes.

Some of the products I actually use and like the best also have the best (in terms of entertainment) marketing - if someone can make me laugh with a 10 second video AND show off a well designed product at the same time then I generally take that as a positive. But the advertisement needs to be providing entertainment value on its own.

I like targeted ads (if I ignore the general threats to privacy and democracy they pose). There are certainly ads I've enjoyed seeing, mostly ads for specialized software, tools or machinery that I wouldn't have known about if not for targeted ads.

I still hate ads. Youtube has maybe five interesting, relevant ads a month it can show me, and I'm willing to see each one maybe twice. That's ten ads a month. But Youtube has hundreds of ad slots to fill every month if they want to show me two pre-roll ads before each video and a couple within the video. Those slots have to be filled with something, and the few relevant ads mostly get drowned by the garbage. Other platforms have the same problem.

Ads on the internet have fallen to the tragedy of the commons. If there was just a couple of them they would be more relevant and less distracting, but every advertiser and platform is incentivized to increase the number of ads without end, leading to where we are now.

If I listen to a software engineering podcast, isn’t “targeting” by the fact that I might be a software engineer good enough? The same is true for websites I visit. If I go to Mens Health, that’s a huge signal to what I’m interested in.

>I guess it's only marketers that love targeted ads...

That maybe, but it might be hypocritical if you're working at a private business that generates sales via ads, which in effect pay your salary. I'm not against ads, so I wouldn't use an ad-blocker on principle, I would just avoid visiting sites that show excessive ads.

You know, I don't mind advertisements that are really targeted and would enrich my life in some way. I use Ublock Origin (and others) everywhere I can and it's great. However, there are some things that I want to be told about or update on. The latest superhero movie? Yes, please. A new keyboard or update for my car? Yes, please. A valentines idea for my wife? Yes, please!

The problem is that I (almost) never get these ads. Most of the things shoved into my face are something that I would NEVER purchase or recommend to others. The same truck commercial 100 times? Nope. Alcohol commercial? Nope. Cable sports package? Never.

I was really hopeful that Google, with all of their knowledge about me (and they have a TON of it!) would be able to target advertisements that I might like. Yet, YouTube is chock full of Truck, Beer, and Football commercials; I guess just because I'm a middle aged man and that's what "we" like.

So, I'm forced into blocking everything I can, whenever and wherever I can. The Ad companies are really doing this to themselves. If they were better at their job I wouldn't even know they existed. As it stands, I get bombarded with so much unwanted things that I actively hate the things they spew at me. I will NEVER buy the products that they are advertising; even if it did fit my personality or needs.

Or maybe it’s just the lack of targeted-ad-injection plugins. ;)

I really, truly, sincerely wish more developers put compatibility with adblockers at the top of their priority list. I have so many customer support issues to deal with because some of the SaaS platforms we use are not compatible with ad blocking software.

Usually, the first thing I tell people is to turn off their adblocker. This almost always fixed the issue. Yes, I absolutely hate asking our customers to do this.

If you want adblocking software to thrive -- then please make sure you test your software with adblocking software enabled. (Please!)

Incopabiltiy can happen incredibly fast.

One of our backends had a route called /statistics for showing application statistics to the user.

Some Adblockers with some lists block routes named like that which caused a confused bug hunt.

> I have so many customer support issues to deal with because some of the SaaS platforms we use are not compatible with ad blocking software.

That's amazing. I hope this keeps happening until businesses are forced to fix their sites to make it work with uBlock Origin.

"I hope this keeps happening until businesses are forced to fix their sites to make it work with uBlock Origin."

I very much this is going to happen on a large scale unless there's legislation demanding it.

Businesses want to serve up ads and track their users both because:

1 - it's profitable

2 - it gives them insight in to what their users want, so they can improve their products and come up with new ones

Supporting ad blocking goes directly against these two motives, so for most business it won't be done voluntarily.

> for most business it won't be done voluntarily

I'm okay with that.

First thing I show people that I show ad blockers is how to turn them off. I tell them that is the first thing to try if a page gives them hell. Don't call me until you've tried that or you will get (mildly) yelled at, Aunt Janie.

What kills me is even paid subscription sites like WSJ, Bloomberg, Seeking Alpha, show you ads even when you're a paying member.

Why is it a war on our attention?

This!! For real. Paid subscription for Bloomberg and boom, there is huge banner on top. Takes ~10% of screen.

Why?!

They also include ads in print versions of newspapers and magazines that you subscribe to, and always have. Advertising has always been a component of making them viable businesses: the problem isn't the existence of ads in things you pay for as much as the obnoxious way they are implemented on the web.

The fact that you're able and willing to pay is exactly what marks you as a desired target. You can't spend your way out of people wanting your money; they'll always want more.

I find this ironic too. I get NYT via my institution, and on the actual app there are ads, but when I browse on the website, logged in with uBO, there is nothing.

Funnily enough, the only way to not get ads on those news apps is by using moded apks (unless you use root or dns adblock, but that usually messes with the layout) . There's no amount of money you could pay to remove them even if you wanted to, so the only way is to download apks that not only remove ads but also make all the articles free without paying anything.

It's crazy because Bloomberg already charges quite a lot (40$/month?) if you don't get a discounted price, how much are they getting with those very generic banner ads? It can't possibly be more than a few cents, maybe a dollar or two per month for casual readers. It's so counterproductive if it makes them lose even just a few % of their subscribers.

A DNS-based ad blocking solution helps with this problem on mobile.

Isn't it that those people that can easily afford the payment and thus buy it are those that are most attractive for any advertiser (for that very reason). At least that's what I heard, before Youtube Red became a thing which kind of disproves it.

This annoys me too, because I dislike ads, but to be fair, newspapers and magazines have always had ads as their primary revenue source, and also almost always charged for the print copy as well. About 30 years ago, when physical newspapers were still more popular than virtual newspapers, you'd pay about 50 cents for the daily edition and $1.50 for the Sunday edition. That adds up to more than the current monthly fees for the online versions. In fact, way back in 1990, the New York Times cost $5/week for home delivery[1]. It's $17/mo now for the digital-only version[2]. Granted, if you want both digital and daily home delivery now, it's $40/mo. If you look at old free print papers (like the Village Voice), the volume of ads is enormous compared to something like the Times.

In any event, paying for a product with ads has always been part of the print media/news business. I'm far more annoyed by paying for cable TV (or streaming services) and still getting ads.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/21/business/the-times-raises...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription

That adds up to the current monthly fees only if it assumes you buy every single edition. In print, you have the choice not to - with the subscription you pay full price regardless of whether you actually read every day's edition.

It's almost like delivering a physical newspaper costs more than a digital one. Who would have thought?

Why would they not show you adds? I mean, they already got your money, now they will get a bit more.

> Why is it a war on our attention?

Entitlement. They literally think they have a right to our attention. The audacity of these people never fails to impress. Paying any amount of money will only make them bolder.

My guess is it's more that advertisers want paying customers the most, so they pay extra or otherwise pressure services to include ads into paid services.

I appreciate the option to pay more to go ad free. Though I also understand offering with ads to widen the audience at a free or lower price.

> I appreciate the option to pay more to go ad free.

You shouldn't. In practice that option is nothing but free market research for advertisers. They get to see not only who has disposable income but who's willing to spend it. They will offer even more money for your attention and eventually some executives will realize they're leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of it.

I prefer Ad Nauseum (https://adnauseam.io/) because I don't want to just block the ads I want to ruin the profile ad companies have on me by having all the ads clicked as well.

I really like the concept but I would be concerned about having my Google account banned the instant it becomes popular

Time to diversify your supply chain then.

I mean, I say Google but I can't imagine any website will allow a logged in user who is committing rampant ad fraud.

Don't give leverage to ad-supported websites?

No site I use/rely day to day has any ads so those won't have a reason to ban me. For the rest, not only do they have very little to ban me on (no account, etc - best they can do is IP address?) but an IP ban would actually be beneficial as there's a chance it'll also propagate to their trackers and essentially mark my network as invisible or untrusted, not collecting/processing any data from it as it's considered fraudulent.

This is one of the reasons I now use my own domain name

That's the same concern I had. But after years of draging my feet, I've finally degoogled enough to not care if they banned my account. Time to install AdNauseam now.

Do you think they can't tell when a click is automated?

Google banned it from the Chrome store while leaving other ad blockers up, so maybe they can't?

This is the strongest sign that it actually hurt their bottom line

This gets brought up every time Ad Nauseam is mentioned but I have yet to see a proof of concept.

I bet it could probably be done by doing statistical analysis or some AI technique to analyze one's browsing data, and maybe combining it with other information about you that they get from other sources (purchase history, social media participation, etc...).

The problem for them is that even if it works this adds extra processing time, effort, and development time.. which can add up when aggregated over the many millions/billions of users they have.

Much easier to just oppose effective ad blockers.

A proof of concept that a site can tell whether you clicked something automatically? reCAPTCHA.

Hah it'd be even funnier if it was able to use their "report" functions to report the ads as the spam they are.

I have always assumed our future fascist overlords will use the curated ad profiles to bootstrap a social credit system. So instead of clicking on any ad I need one that only clicks on regime supporting, pro-social, good citizen ads.

They probably don't have the data. Unless they started monitoring people for jaywalking, driving through crosswalks, smoking on trains, not cleaning up after dogs, buying junk food at 711, etc.

An efficient government could figure it out from proxy data, I’m sure I could do it. A corrupt and inefficient government wouldn’t care so much about getting it wrong.

I suspect it’ll be the inefficient one. I can’t convince Google ads that I’m not 60 and not single and absolutely not into mature age dating. My non-ad blocked internet browsing experience is marred by pictures of leering grandmas. I expect my future in the fascist dictatorship will be an unpleasant one.

If you enable ad personalization then they have an ad settings panel where they let you know what they think you're interested in. For instance, Google Ads thinks I'm a married disk jockey living in Orange County who listens to pop and hip hop and loves bread making, aviation, and environmentalism. They let us turn some of it off, but there's no option to tell them what we like.

You realize all that is coming, right? Health insurance companies would love to adjust your premium on the fly when they see you buy a 6 pack at the store.

Or perhaps the opposite where more cities and suburbs become like San Francisco and everyone is so afraid to go outside they retreat into darth vader pods with internet connections or escape to Fiji like Larry.

UBlock Origin is not just an adblocker though, in their own words it is a "wide-spectrum content blocker" capable of blocking things like malware, cookie consent popups, social media buttons, and outsider intrusion into LAN.

If adnauseam did those things I would use it (I don't want to run both at the same time).

edit: i'm wrong, it is a ublock origin fork, apologies

Ad Nauseum is a wrapper over Ublock Origin. It says so in the second sentence explaining what it is.

I see, I originally saw AdNauseum years ago and misremembered how it worked, I should have read about it again. Sorry!

Automated clicks on ads don't change anything. Even if everybody did this, over time the prices for ads would adjust and find a new equilibrium. Everything else would stay the same. If an advertiser pays $100 for 100 clicks today then he will pay $100 for 1000000 clicks in an ad click inflated world. Maybe slightly more for the additional energy burned to power all this madness.

Actually, this happens in close to real-time: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2459326?hl=en

My main concern would be that that means loading enough for it to click on, right? Part of why I use uBo is to avoid loading any bytes over the network that I don't need, and avoid executing any JS that isn't useful.

In my experience, it happens in two ways. One is where ads are not displayed but AdNauseum tells me so and so ads are clicked. Second is where they are loaded (and hence additional bytes) and clicked as well.

Sometimes, no ads and nothing in Adnauseum as well.

How does it work in the front? Does it block ads and those blocked ads get clicked? Many times, it shows me no ads but it also displays 0 ads so nothing is clicked.

Do we have to allow it to display all ads on the page to let it click?

Sorry but it's somewhat confusing for me.

For the past five years it seems like any time I saw an adblocker mentioned you'd see someone replying that uBlock was better, and then another reply clarifying that uBlock Origin is the one you want.

It's crazy that despite that it still took this long.

Really great on firefox for android too, along with YouTube background player.

I use Firefox on Android as a background YouTube player. Just open Youtube on Firefox, select the video you want to watch, lock the screen. The video will stop, but if you press 'play' in the dialog you get in the lock screen, it'll start playing again.

The issue is that the YouTube webpage video player itself tries to detect when it is backgrounded - seemingly via both APIs and usage patterns - and will stop playback when it detects that. This is true on desktops as well.

There were extensions to disable this behaviour that thankfully work with Firefox for Android.

NewPipe allows both picture-in-picture and background audio, no extension wrangling required :)

There is an addon available for Firefox on Android that stops the video from stopping, too, which makes this even easier.

I wonder how the post manifest v3 world will look like and how much it'll affect uBlock Origin on Chromium based browsers. Even now, several features, such as CNAME uncloaking, happen only on Firefox.

Some Chromium based browsers plan to just continue supporting v2 extensions regardless what Chrome does e.g. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/20059

My biggest issue with web advertising is placing video ads on a text website.

Your eye is constantly flicking over to the flashing lights making the ability to focus impossible. Ad blockers are the only thing that makes most ad supported sites usable.

The most irritating thing about that for me is that my device thinks I want to hear the audio so it will stop my music to play the ad audio.

What do people use to block garbage domains from their Google results? Google results, especially for developer stuff, is so awful -- cluttered with junk sites ripping off content from blogs and Stack Overflow, etc.

I've been trying to figure out some rules for uBlock Origin, but haven't gotten there, yet.

Edit: Multiple fantastic options in the replies, below. Thanks, people!

⠀

There was kagi.com here on HN a few weeks ago, I've been mighty pleased

I've started using https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/ which is a programmable, custom search engine that Google provides. I only include sites that I want to. For news, I have a separate search engine; for programming, I include Gitlab, Github, and others. It's quite nice, and you can share your search engines with others via a public URL.

Another example is creating a "social media" only search engine- I have over 50 social media websites in one of my custom searches, it makes it relatively easy to find another person this way.

> I have over 50 social media websites

What are the others besides the usual 2-3?

https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock

My list is based on this project. It has over 200 items, many of which I was unaware existed.

I use uBlacklist, and I get a "block this site" option on every Google result. Worth a try, I hope it's legit.

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter is a pretty well maintained list specifically to block copycat developer sites.

Not only did I not know this was a list, I also didn't know it was super easy to add new list to uBlock Origin, thanks!

Give ublacklist a try. Very effective to content farm.

ublacklist is what I've been using, works well.

I've noticed this getting worse recently. We went through a sort of "golden era" where most results would be stack overflow, mailing lists, or blogs and now we're almost back to the "expertsexchange.com" days of spammy results for programming queries.

uBlacklist

There are other search engines out there you might want to try. I've been using Kagi and am happy with it. Even though Google is one of their sources (probably the main one), they do things like omit sites that scrape Stack Overflow. They also re-order results assuming their user is tech savvy.

The internet without an adblock is just a scary, misleading place that's trying to trick you into scams, echochambers, bad deals, bad advice, botnets and cryptolockers.

I haven't run without an adblocker for like 10 years plus. The odd occasion I have it disabled, I can't actually believe what a trash heap some websites I browse are... popular ones!

The internet has become so user hostile, I don't want 10 popups or alerts for cookies, ads, newsletter subscriptions to read a 10 second article.

>echochambers

>bad advice

I doubt ublock does anything about that

The biggest echochambers (like ultranationalist parties) and worst advisors (financial, political, social) try to recruit new members via targeted advertising.

In 16 years on the internet with as blocking limited to manually blocked annoyances only I have never had any of those issues.

I’m almost certain it’s just an argument to justify adblocking. I wish people had the ability to avoid all the motivated reasoning and just honestly admit the selfishness of their behavior.

Ad tech went too far and has driven everyone to blocking. If the extent of ads was a couple of Google style sponsored text based results a lot of people would probably be fine seeing those.

The motivated reasoning is in line with the corresponding selfishness. I want a clean internet. I don't want to be exploited by advertisers. I am proud to admit that this is purely selfish indeed. The only way for an advertiser to reach me is to align with my selfish wishes.

It doesn't JUST block ads, it also blocks malware and other garbage. IMO Its not safe to browse the modern web without it

The bottom line is that the web is completely unusable without some sort of ad blocker. That's a pathological condition which speaks ill of the long term viability of the internet. When ublock breaks as it inevitably will, so does the internet (in terms of usability, not in terms of sending packets around).

Great news! Adblock Plus has been compromised for quite some time. This means the pressure will definitely increase on uBlock Origin but I hope they stay strong.

Librewolf

I’m surprised LibreWolf doesn’t get more attention. [0]

It’s stock Firefox, with uBlock Origin preinstalled and a bunch of Firefox configs adjusted to more privacy oriented settings.

It ranks as the most private browser experience, even better than Brave. [1]

https://librewolf.net/

https://privacytests.org/

They used a slightly tricked out version of librewolf on Garuda Linux as the default.

Entropy increase is bad for privacy, so using more obscure browsers would make you stand out more often right?

Depends on the user agent. Maybe they appear as Chrome.

I have a dream that some day all browsers come with builtin uBlock.

I wish I could install it for everybody. Browsing the Web and watching Youtube is such a different experience with adblock.

I think YouTube has an okay monetization policy, it's nowhere near as malicious as a random recipe blog with 19 ads and auto playing videos

Why is it that after 11PM YouTube will randomly show me ads that are entire movies long, like 90 minutes long? Do they think I am asleep and want to charge their ad client full price for the view?

There's an inherent conflict of interest here - much of our computing tools today is built for "growth and engagement" which is why no mainstream browser has it - the only holdouts so far are Apple and Linux distributions.

How do ya'll feel about the idea that adblock can be morally equivalent to theft[1]? I see this argument pop up from time to time in relation to people who use alternative clients to services such as YouTube. But if you're using uBlock Origin, you are probably browsing many, many sites that rely at least partially on ad revenue, so it's a similar case.

[1] https://twitter.com/LeaVerou/status/518154828166725632

it is no more theft than smelling the cooking of a restaurant.

Obligatory: http://www.marilynkinsella.org/Fabulous%20Folktales/theft_of...

Nice website/stories.

I don't think it's theft but I also don't think it's really equivalent to that either. After all 1,000,000 people can smell what the restaurant is cooking for another customer and it doesn't cost the restaurant any more than if 0 people did because the restaurant is letting the scent go out either way. On the other hand if 1,000,000 people watch a 100 MB video and block ads it certainly costs the content provider a lot more than if nobody did.

Not really. Imagine a restaurant which says, hey, here's this sample, it's free if you watch an ad while you eat. And then you eat, and specifically don't watch the ad. That's not just smelling the cooking, just like how reading an article is incurs traffic on a website, which the provider has to pay for somehow. Not to mention the procurement of the article.

No one on the internet is entitled to ad revenue, especially when it robs me of my right to decide what does and what doesn't get run on my own personal machine.

Theft requires taking something someone already has, not just going out of my way to avoid giving it to them. Anyway, my user-agent, my rules. That should really be the end of the argument.

If piracy isn't morally equivalent to theft, then I'm not sure how adblocking would be.

Personally I think there is a stronger argument that dirtying up the Internet with advertising is more immoral than piracy.

Don't forget the invasion of privacy. These ads include tracking.

If the site owner views it that way, they can detect my adblocker and put up a paywall.

And if they're afraid that a paywall will cause people to bounce, then deep down they know what I already know: their content isn't worth paying for.

This is probably the best take. If someone says that ads are part of the deal, fair enough. I can go somewhere else, or I can honor the deal. Otherwise, seems unethical to me.

What "deal"? They are providing publicly accessible information, I'm choosing to only download a portion of it. If this is affecting their bottom-line, maybe they should rethink their business model. Not my problem.

I block ads to save myself from buying things I don't need, to save myself from being tracked over the internet, and because they are often annoying and sometimes contain malware. I see nothing wrong with this.

I'm not the one that is abusing some sort of "deal", in my opinion.

I am not responsible for the mistaken assumptions underlying other people's hopes for their business models.

“Hey, viewing this ad is the price of getting this product I’m offering” “No thanks, I’ll just take it”.

I don’t think it’s an incorrect argument. We’re free to seek out ad-free content, or paid content, or whatever, but unilaterally rejecting the implicit terms of an interaction is ethically grey at best imo.

Edit: this would mainly apply to sites that detect and block ad-blocking. Other sites are a little less clear imo.

If you argue that from the site's side then you can bring up that ads are taking up data, bandwidth(thus time) and battery (insane JS "game" ads) on the client side no?

I'd have more sympathy for this argument if ad-tech didn't consistently run roughshod over my preference not to be tracked. If ad-blockers are theft, trackers are stalking.

I'm personally annoyed by ads so I block them.

But I see the point in the sentiment. People pay for advertisements to be seen. On the other hand, a good businessman calculates this into the cost - like if someone prints 1000 flyers, they are sure not every single one of them is read. Like it's part of the flyer business that many go into the bin without being looked at.

It's as morally equivalent as muting the tv/changing the channel/averting your eyes or attention when a commercial comes on.

It only gets fuzzy when you start to argue about how surveillance capitalism let's them deny payment when ads are avoided on a Web browser but not when they are avoided with television. But "I don't get paid because they spy on you and the process more effectively than in other mediums" is already far more morally dubious.

And at the end of the day, brand or product awareness is only one part of the reason for an advertisement to exist - and the reason to pay for someone to run your ad. Another big part is an expectation that users will click on the ad, that they may buy the thing. So I take even more moral umbrage with content creators who show ads and argue that users should have to view them and are bad for not doing so even if they knowingly will not click or buy them; the content creator tacitly acknowledges that they are fine with only delivering part value to the advertiser while receiving payment in full. At that point it becomes "I am mad at my readers/viewers for being parasitical with me instead of helping me be parasitical with the advertiser" and any arguments about morals have become bunk.

So... unless they also demand that every user should fully read each ad and at least click on them in good faith with an open mind to open the wallet, I see it as a bit hypocritical to question the morality of Adblock users.

People find all sorts of arguments that are both logically and morally unsound to justify their behaviour, and it isn’t going to change.

For a while I thought they might notice that they are hurting themselves just as much as they are hurting the publishers, since ad blocking is part of the reason the time of freely reading thousands of high-quality sources is coming to an end. But there is really zero appreciation for the work of journalists. Local papers are already gone in rural areas and it took maybe five years until nobody remembers what they’ve lost.

I would take this argument more seriously if paid subscriptions didn't also include ads.

Ad blocking is analogous to paying someone to cut advertisements out of a magazine you ordered before you read it.

You request something which is when sent to your house. Sure it is via http, but that is irrelevant. It could have just as well been via snail mail.

You are absolutely allowed to remove the ads from your copy of a magazine, whether you do it yourself, another household member, a visitor, or even someone you pay.

Even if someone does it without your consent, the dispute is with the copy owner not the magazine publisher.

This would be an issue if an unauthorized party took it from your mailbox, but that still has nothing to do with the publisher or content.

Precisely my point.

Thanks, that was not clear with the commentary about "paying someone" and "before you read it" that make it sound like something normal people wouldn't do and should be wary of.

I don't have to instruct my computer to display everything you decide to send to it. Period. That's the end of the moral argument.

I'll consider this if publishers and adtech vendors consider the fact that stealing my personal data, bandwidth and processing power (= battery life on mobile) could also be unethical.

Publishers and adtech might not like the fact that I am in control of what happens on my device and do things they dislike, but then they seem to do exactly the same when it comes to controlling how many ads are displayed and what personal data they collect.

Maybe if the industry can come to an agreement for a reasonable amount of ads, respecting privacy and taking responsibility for the ads they serve (aka compensate the user in case of scam or malware) then people might be more inclined to consider it.

I mean, do you consider it theft if you don't look at a billboard? Fuck these assholes for trying to spin it as if we are stealing from them.

I have a website bringing a lot of money using ads. I don't attempt to detect adblockers, or deter users from using them, and use them myself.

ublock origin is wonderful. If one day, everybody is using it and I can't make money from ads anymore, I'd say it would be a sad day for my wallet, but a great day for humanity.

Good. Blocking ads is essential for...

security reasons: to prevent malware from being installed via rogue ads;

for privacy reasons: to reduce being tracked by corporations;

and for mental health reasons: to reduce being bombarded with injunctions to buy things.

It would be nice if browser makers started bundling ad block by default.

Those that aren’t financially supported by the blocked advertising often do.

Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and I'm sure others have built in ad blockers and even have it enabled by default. Firefox and Safari do not (they stop at built in privacy tracking).

Of course every single built in blocker is vastly inferior, either intentionally (like Chrome) or just because uBlock Origin is that much better (like Vivaldi).

Where is this built in ad blocker in Chrome? I have never seen this feature.

It's on by default since 2018 and not very configurable, you can toggle it on a per site basis in the site settings of a site via the "ads" permission for that site. It of course exists to bolster the number of their ads that are viewed not actually block all ads https://blog.google/technology/ads/building-better-web-every...

I need to give uBlock another try. I use and love uMatrix, and was hoping someone would step up to maintain a fork of it, but six months later it is apparent that will not be the case (and is far outside my expertise).

For some reason uBlock never clicked with me. The various global blocking settings I tried either broke too many sites or let too many annoyances through, and I found the process for allowing/blocking third-party resources on a per-site basis was clunkier than other blockers like uMatrix or Privacy Badger.

I really respect what gorhill has done, and keep hearing great things about new privacy preserving techniques being adding to uBlock that go beyond what other blockers do, so I really want to like it. Given how so many people love it and don't have these complaints, I'm probably approaching it with the wrong mindset / usage model, that is causing me to fight against it rather than work with it, so I need to step back and try again with a blank mind.

I don't know how long ago you used it, but it's install and forget and works great. Maybe once every few months I'll use it to hide a frame on a random site.

>I found the process for allowing/blocking third-party resources on a per-site basis was clunkier than other blockers like uMatrix or Privacy Badger.

It's clunkier yes (requires editing the static filters list by hand), but you might get used to it. My own list is huge (~700 lines across 75 web properties) and took some time to create, but now I only have to touch it once a month on average.

uBlock Origin + NextDNS has been a pretty amazing combo for me.

If you want to really take it even further you can setup pfsense or any other edge router that supports IP blocking and then (at least on your home network) block the IP's of common DNS providers other than the one you want your devices to use. This stops apps and devices that have hardcoded IP's trying to do encrypted DNS (DoH or DoT) to bypass your preferred DNS choices. Its a bit of a game of whack-a-mole but I find they do not change all that often. Unfortunately of course this does not do anything for when you may be walking around using mobile data on a phone (at this point now only NextDNS would be in play - still better than nothing) but I suppose you could run a VPN back to your home network if you wanted to.

Disclaimer: Former ABP developer.

Mozilla worked surprisingly hard to make uBO number one - for years they've actively promoted it, marked it as recommended and similar things, added weird warnings for the unwashed masses of "unrecommended" extensions, made them harder or even impossible to install on some platforms. Generally incredibly shady practices I was shocked to see from Mozilla, who I thought had above average integrity - not in the last five years or so I guess. Not even Google pulls stuff like that from what I can tell.

That said, uBO is cool and I'm happy it's still growing.

Whoa whoa talk about AdBlock Plus and integrity!

AdBlock Plus seems to whitelist your ads if you pay them millions [1][2]. The euphemism ABP (and their parent company Eyeo) uses is 'acceptable ads'. Acceptable to Eyeo I guess. It's opt-out at the users end.

OP knows all about this [3][4].

I'm not a fan of some of Mozilla's policies but I'm thankful if it's true that Ublock Origin is shown preference over the shady, user-disrespecting ABP.

[1] Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140

[2] gorhill, UbO developer on Eyeo https://nitter.net/gorhill/search?f=tweets&q=%22eyeo%22

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818307

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946892

[5] Eyeo on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28746231

I can't say much about recent years, given how I've left quite a while ago. But I do want to point out that ABP was always surprisingly upfront about Acceptable Ads (only users who cannot read could possibly miss it, it's prominent on every step of the funnel). And even though that may be hard to believe, they do take the criteria very seriously last time I checked, even doing a ton of user research, which surprisingly (to me) yielded back then that a lot of users feel bad about blocking all ads unconditionally and mostly care about not having stuff jump at them.

The only possibly shady thing you point out is that it's opt out, I get that. Especially people who want to block everything unconditionally might feel cheated because it's not called Adblock Minus.

What Mozilla did here, OTOH, I find shady because they're pretending to run an impartial addon store, when in practice some guy who wants to promote a specific extension (maybe that person feels like you, maybe he's a friend of gorhill - I have no way of knowing) can pull these kind of tricks.

But I suppose it's a case for Hanlon's Razor: They probably just don't have their stuff together about running any type of store the way the big guys do.

I'm still a proud Mozillian, I can find one thing they do shady without finding all of Mozilla shady, I realise it didn't sound like that above.

If there was a whitelist toggle in the funnel clearly labeled "No, I installed an adblocker to block ads, not to be shown the ads your protection racket is paid to deliver" then it would be all cool.

The thinking is that when something says it's an adblocker, it has one job - blocking ads. ABP doesn't do that, hiding behind the euphemism 'acceptable ads'. It would be ok if they promote it as a 'selective blocker' instead of 'adblocker'. It would also be ok if they say adblocker and the acc. ads thingy is opt-in. If Mozilla did something to highlight something that had one job to do and did it, I'm thankful.

P.S: Ublock Origin is not just an adblocker. It can block various types of content.

To be fair you should mention uBlock, fake uBlock Origin with paid allowlist by default. There is hard evidence that this unmaintained extension, which is intended only to mislead users into installing it as uBlock Origin, is owned by eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.

Let's make it a native Firefox feature.

Librewolf (fork of firefox with privacy tweaks) comes pre-installed with UBO.

Nothing says "our entire industry[0] is a blight upon human society" like a thriving ecosystem of popular software existing for the sole purpose of shutting you the hell up.

[0] advertising and marketing industry

I think I know why you are being downvoted, but I just wanted to chime in and say that I get exactly where you are coming from. On certain days, I cannot shake a similar thought from my mind as well.

Today though, I'd recommend skimming through uBlock Origin's Github readme: https://github.com/gorhill. Note the "Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought." in the About section. Our industry reflects our collective condition: some good, some bad, and some in between. The oft used Mr. Rogers quote about "look for the helpers" seems particularly appropriate for uBlock Origin and its creator (and maintainers :)).

P.S. In case this comes across as a lecture, I assure you that this was just as much for myself as a reminder, as it was for the community here :).

Oh, I think I see the issue. If your post is anything to go by then people think I'm talking about tech or even just the web. That's understandable since both are frequently the target of my ire, however in this instance I am specifically talking about the advertising and marketing industry.

I think it's fair, considering the sky-high salaries at the top end of our industry are almost solely due to ad revenue. We'd all see significant downward pressure on wages without that—we're basically accountants by social status already, but losing ad revenue would put us in the same area pay-wise, too.

Ah sorry, I misunderstood as well. Makes sense!

Dear Mozilla.org please add it as default in the browser if you care about privacy and the web in general, This is the first add-on that I install on all computers , mine or for friends

That they've put off doing the obvious for so long ("obvious" because one of the key selling points of the browser at initial release was, de facto, a form of ad blocking—namely, popup blocking) makes me think we're more likely to see integrated ad-blocking in Safari than in Firefox. But probably neither is very likely.

If major browsers were 100% user-centric they would've built ad-blocking into the browser. Maybe make it opt-in, but it should be there as a built-in feature.

All of the major browsers (except perhaps Safari?) are built to increase the control of the browser vendor (through profiles and tracking) and web developers (through increasingly intrusive hooks into the OS). All of this at the expense of the user. Users are _not_ given fine-grained control over what websites can do with their computer, and what control still remains is being slowly eroded by changes to APIs and intentional hiding/removal of important privacy settings under the guise of "not overwhelming users with too much choice."

Extensions _should_ be able to help here, but browsers keep slowly marching forward with changes that take away extensions' ability to perform meaningful actions on behalf of the user. Extensions these days are pretty much only useful for turning the browser into an application delivery platform, like the Apple App Store or Google Play. Firefox switched to "web extensions" some years ago, neutering many useful extensions. Google is now switching to Manifest V3 (which Firefox has stated they will adopt), which means the days of effective ad blocking will soon be over.

Firefox are not blocking the limitations of declarativeNetRequest. They are picking and choosing the good parts of V3 and implementing those.

How do people reach technical audiences on Google search when the said technical audience has Adblock installed? Do any founders or tech startups use Google Ads? I don't know any tech person that doesn't use uBlock Origin.

I've seen people recommending StackOverflow ads to reach exact people that might be interested in your product, but I've never ever seen ads on StackOverflow - thanks to uBlock Origin.

If you want to get the attention of technical audiences, create great technical content. Blogs, YouTube videos, conference talks, etc. If it's good, your audience will spread it among themselves using their existing social connections.

If you don't have good content, then you don't get access to technical users who do everything in their power to avoid useless noise on the internet.

Youtube thing is being eroded. I just searched "Django tutorials" on YouTube and being spammed by boot-campish videos that show horrible coding practices.

Blogs, especially the ones that upvoted here on HN, are very very good. Thanks for the info.

I saw a comment more or less like "Please add more ads and make the x button to close them smaller" today on a website. I was seeing no ads and I never did see one there. I was about to reply to use an adblocker, then wondered if that could make me banned and the reply deleted (they have a moderator approve every single comment).

Is there any reason not to enable all the blocklists and filters in uBlock Origin that aren't enabled by default?

And why aren't they enabled by default?

Finally, are there any other quick/easy things that can be done by users to improve uBlock's blocking... like maybe installing some other blocklists that aren't in uBlock Origin at all?

I usually add this list to uBlockOrigin to remove the cookies consent popup. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

The primary reason for not enabling every list is that some additional % of sites will "break" (although frequently, this will only be cosmetic).

An example of this is that the lists can block very general class or id attribute such as #cookie-banner. While it's likely that you'll want this blocked in general, some small number of sites may have an element (unfortunately) named this that is functional and that you actually want to see.

Because some of the lists have tens of thousands of entries, these edge cases can add up to break more sites than is actually desired. So there is a give/take there.

Another point is that some of the lists are redundant but have different maintainers. So it may make sense to choose one of these, but you it would just be additional overhead to check them all.

In my experience, running the default lists along with the "Fanboy's Annoyance" list and a few custom entries in "My filters" provides a good experience for me.

Recently, the uBlock Origin icon in my toolbar has just disappeared and doesn't appear in the overflow menu.

Anyone else see this?

"The overflow" has been moved to the puzzle piece menu, I had to open that and manually pin the extension.

Windows 10

Was on 97.0.2 and did not have that issue.

Just now updated to 98.0 and still do not have that issue.

It's simply the best there is. I had used various of the adblock** plugins until I came across uBlock Origin.

Whatever it is you want to block, Javascript, fonts, ads, etc, it's just works, with global defaults and per-page exceptions.

I've just removed adblock and installed ublock origin.

Having tested a few sites on my favourites bar the difference is night and day.

Where has this been all my life....

Are there any add blockers for iOS? I want to get a tablet for reading on the couch but I assume I would need an Android or Surface tablet in order to install Firefox with uNlock Origin.

Not as good as uBlock Origin due to API limitations, but AdGuard is probably the best you can go for because it supports (and internally converts) uBlock-style filters as opposed to using its own, usually outdated filter list like other blockers do.

Lockdown Privacy is also a good one to filter out malicious traffic across apps - this neuters the Facebook SDK malware present in many apps for example.

Try Firefox Focus.

I still use a hosts file instead of pihole. The tool is called hblock. I'd use pihole if I can find a deal on a rapsberry pi.

just installed it today on my father's partner's laptop.

in my opinion ublock origin is by now an integral part of the internet infrastructure.

it's also the only piece of software which I consistently install on every platform I use (Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS).

Raymond deserves some sort of Nobel prize or something for this. The internet is not usable for me without it.

How do you install uBlock Origin on iOS?

Try AdGuard - not as good as uBlock but it's the best you can do on iOS given API limitations.

damn, you're right. I repressed that. I would, though!

That makes perfect sense -- browsing the web on desktop without uBlock has become a nightmare.

Surprisingly the adtech is by far the profitable industry including costs to operate comparing to any other industry. Ads are the biggest pillar on which most of the faang stands. Sadly most people don't even want to make a few clicks to download a browser extension.

Why doesn't firefox build ublock origin directly into firefox

As it should be

uMatrix seems even better, but no uMatrix for mobile. Reasons.

I am frequently annoyed by FF but then I use Chrome. What capitalism has done to the internet... Long live Mozilla.

I think it's only a matter of time until adblock is legally banned.

The current situation, where the vast majority of the internet relies solely on ads and an increasing number of people use adblock year over year is unsustainable.

The system can support a certain number of free riders (people who consume the product but don't contribute back in ad eyeballs), but at a certain point the math will no longer work.

Eventually we as a society will reach a point with only two options:

1. Stop using ads to fund most of the internet

2. Ban adblock so our current ad funded internet can work.

I keep wondering if / when we as users want to pay for more things…

I would pay for I the things I currently block. The problem is they usually want >5$/mo for things that would make maybe 10c/mo from ads otherwise which I don't find fair

Option 3, let the ad funded internet die and keep the remaining good parts.

The problem is that the most popular alternative, microtransactions, doesn't work. Turns out there is a big psychological barrier between free and literally any payment at all, even a few pennies. People are sensitive to the danger of being nickled and dimed to death.

And that's before you get into the problem of how to set up a clearinghouse where you can handle microtransactions without being eaten alive by fees.

I thought the porous paywall + subscription model is the most popular alternative?

If ad-based business models truly become unviable, they will find a new one. Ad-based businesses suck all the air out of the room, preventing other models from even forming. It'll take effort to find better models, but they'll come. But TBH, I don't see the ad-based model dying any time soon.

There are plenty of reasons to post good content that are not related to ads, and very weird incentives to write good content otherwise. Content for ads is riddled with SEO, hyped headlines, short shallow and unoriginal articles.

Good content is posted by people and companies for indirect benefits: a researcher makes videos about papers to motivate and held himself accountable to the public, a company publishes documentation and tutorials that are related to their business, a hobbyist does the same for pure fun. A teacher posts lesson plans to collaborate with other teachers. We'll be fine without content-for-ads.

I think taxes are the biggest hurdle for microtransactions. You are legally required to report taxes in _every_ country where you have customers. This means that the customer will need to fill in address information for each website they want to use which is also a high barrier. And if you run an online business it won't take long before you have to report taxes in 200 countries. It's a job on its own to administrate that!

With advertisements you receive payments from a single party, and because it's a business-to-business transaction it's tax free.

> People are sensitive to the danger of being nickled and dimed to death.

And yet, people will sign up for multiple subscription services (Netflix, Disney plus, HBO max, Amazon prime, etc), which I consider to be the same as being nickeled and dimed.

Consider a Netflix like service where you paid $0.50 per show you watched. It happened seamlessly and you just saw a bill at the end of the month. Would you have the same video viewing habits?

Services like this exist, but total revenue is so small they don't even register on most charts. People don't like it.

Well, I watch maybe 1 movie a month. So, .50 sounds pretty good.

Ad funding would never stop because people wanting to make money off content would never stop - it just becomes more subtle. Think sponsored posts, product placement, added bias.

Imagine a plain text blog run by an individual, good quality technical content, and a company comes and offers $10k to write a blog post about their product after trying it. If the author decides not to disclose the financial motivation, you now have a subtle biased funded advert that no adblocker will save you from.

We already have mountains of shilled astroturf on the internet. I'm fine with it since shill content tends to be low quality and not too difficult to distinguish (except in google SERPS, which is another problem).

Legitimate content creators won't just blindly hop on the shill bandwagon because building a following is hard and takes time, and getting caught shilling can destroy your credibility and cause you to bleed followers VERY quickly. Adding a sponsor call-outs will probably be the ultimate go-to for legitimate content creators, but even that must be done carefully as pushing low quality sponsors will also hurt subscriber numbers.

If AdBlockers become illegal it will lead to a slew of adblock devices like PiHole-preloaded RaspberryPis and will just shift the blocking at the DNS level

Ads are for people who don't know how to avoid them.

How do you draw the line? What is adblock? Is it addon which allows to control your browser? Is it list of rules for some websites? Web is too flexible and built with flexible user agent.

There’s definitely an option #3 here: ad-blockers eventually lose the arms race. We’re already partially there.

I think this is most likely sadly.

There has been no working adblocker for twitch.tv for over a year now. As far as I know, they are splicing the ad directly into the main video stream while it’s playing, so there’s no way to differentiate it from the content at all.

Surely it’s only a matter of time before youtube starts doing this too.

> Surely it’s only a matter of time before youtube starts doing this too.

I recently learned about the SponsorBlock extension[1] for YouTube. It's a crowdsourced collection of the location and duration of in-band sponsorships in YouTube videos. The extension queries the database for each video, then skips over the sponsorship portion of the video. I don't use it myself, since I don't mind skipping sponsorships manually, but it's kind of fascinating that it exists and (apparently) works.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/about

Oh yeah SponsorBlock is great! It reminds me of Wikipedia - it is surprisingly reliable given that it's crowdsourced.

It does rely on the sponsor being at the same location in the video every time though, so it's not a solution to twitch-style adverts.

The ad model is unsustainable for many other reasons too and it will likely fail anyway.

See Facebook's struggle when Apple limited their ability to track you.

If any ad-evasion technology was ever going to be banned legally, it would have been TiVo. The internet is far less reliant on straight ad revenue than TV shows were.

Did TiVo actually affect ad revenue? My understanding is that the revenue figures were calculated based on Nielson family scores, and TiVo ad skipping wouldn't show up in there.

>Did TiVo actually affect ad revenue? My understanding is that the revenue figures were calculated based on Nielson family scores, and TiVo ad skipping wouldn't show up in there.

Given that TiVo has been running "pre-roll" (i.e., when you start playing a recording) ads for a couple years now (they are skippable), they're certainly trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet ad revenue for themselves.

I have no idea whether that cuts into the existing pie or is additional ad spend.

That said, TiVo isn't as intrusive (in that you can skip their "pre-roll" ads) as YouTube, Amazon Prime, etc.

Really, the best thing about TiVo is their video Fast-forward/rewind. It actually scrolls the content as it does so. No other platform seems to support that, which really kills UX for me.

As for ad skipping, that's only supported for some shows, and even those don't generally allow it until at least a few hours after air time.

Of course, you can still fast-forward through the ads (made much easier by the TiVo video scrolling) which works quite nicely.

Legally banning adblock will open up a large can of worms that I don't think anyone really wants to probe into. Third party "ads" can run shady, if not outright malicious JavaScript. If "adblocking" becomes illegal, does it logically follow then that a visitor to a website is legally compelled to allow the site's shady-ass code to run on their computer?

That would likely fail in the courts, and it might cause inverse blow-back that fully bans such things from running at all. The ad vendors don't want that, because they're probably content to let a minority of users block their ads if it means that the majority still let their ads and all associated tracking/JS run unabated.

What happens when the people who grew up without the internet die and all that's left is the people that have been watching youtube since they were 3. Won't the vast majority of people be using adblockers?

Anecdotally, I feel like half the people in my immediate circle of friends/family still don't use adblockers unless I help them set it up. And then that only holds until the next time they get a new device and I'm not there to help them do it again.

How old is your immediate circle? The truly internet first generation is only like 15-20 at this point.

Are we sure this "truly internet first generation" is primarily using laptops? If they grew up with an iPhone/iPad, there's no guarantee that they even have adblocking as an option.

That's a good point. I do think the push to get users on mobile has a good deal to do with the difficulty of blocking ads on mobile. Maybe that's where we're headed. Instead of making adblockers illegal users will be herded into locked down platforms that don't allow adblockers.

There's good precedent for adblock remaining legal through a few lawsuits[0]. Granted that is in Germany but I'm hopeful legal action in the US would have a similar outcome.

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/adblocking-does-not-constitute-copy...

So far, adblockers have won in court every time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32903235

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43838308

https://torrentfreak.com/adblocking-does-not-constitute-copy...

Yes, they would have to create new laws to ban adblockers. With the justification that those laws are necessary to save most of the internet.

That would set quite a precedent.

Anyone is free to point a domain at a server and serve HTTP, in the sense that they are allowed to buy a server, domain and maybe software- in order to have a website.

A fair comparison could be done for a pamphlet or a book- you are free to pay a publisher/ printing press/ editor- in order to have a pamphlet or book.

Banning adblockers would not simply affirm this. It would go further and set a precedent that you, the publisher, can run arbitrary code or display arbitrary things on a user's screen; potentially against the user's wishes.

There was an internet before everything was funded by ads. It was different, but also nice.

The problem with ads is that they are intrusive and not respecting the privacy of the users. I don't mind static, well placed and well curated ads on any page. The pages then should fund ourselves using crowdfunding and good ads. It's already a working model. They can't ban it anyway, once the data reaches my device I do whatever I want with it.

I too fear AdBlock will eventually fail, not because it will be legally banned (on what basis??) but because Chrome will kill it and other browsers will die.

You seem to welcome it; I think it would be a great catastrophe.

This can be a new selling point for Firefox: "the browser that allow you to block ads"

It's more likely governments will make it illegal to not use an adblocker. For example the security community is now having adblock installed on normie browsers as a matter of policy. If everyone starts doing that and the companies whose survival depends on ads react in a way that ends the free ride for the technical class, things will really hit the fan. Imagine all the smartest programmers in the world wake up one morning and are forced to use the unfiltered internet. We'd all switch to SerenityOS within the fortnight and the old regime would skulk along like a brainless beast for a few decades while Andreas Kling becomes emperor of the world.

If ads were reasonable, I would not block them. I define reasonable as simple static image ads with no tracking that link to the advertised product/service.

But ads today bloat pages with so much tracking & other nonsense that it has ruined the experience. I cant stand to browse the web without an ad-blocker, it's horrific.

> certain number of free riders

This implies that ads means paying/sutaining for the service, and no ads means not paying/sustaining.

This hasn't been the case for a long long time. Even paying customers get ads piled on them. Sure for many sites ads is the whole business. But there are also many business that

1. Never had a business plan to begin with, even the ads won't sustain them. The goal is just to be bought by a bigger company or become a loss leader and then "figure it out later".

2. The goal is to maximize profits by any means necessary even with paying customers upon which a sustainable business could be built. But instead we get dark patterns, abuse of user data and ads.

> Even paying customers get ads piled on them.

Often times more… they have demonstrated that their wallet is open.

If you want an example of this in the US, make a small political donation.

The amount of money that will be spent coming after more of your money is mind-bending.

It's exponential growth that's unsustainable. Just five years ago, ad revenues on the internet were half of today. How did we "sustain" it then?

I had a good laugh when I saw my grandma using her iPad calculator app to do her finances. The app was displaying an an ad, she didn't want to see it and stuck a sticker over that part of the screen. :-)

Is my grandma's sticker going to be illegal in this forced advertising future? If not, where in the stack between the webpage and your eyes will it start to be legal to block? What about blocking in the graphics stack in the OS? The display? A sticker in front of the display? A smart film in front of the display? Smart glasses? Will it be illegal to avert your eyes from advertisements, à la Black Mirror?

If it's unsustainable, it's their own fault. They chose to send people content for free. They did so hoping they'd look at the noise they call advertising. Well, it's not happening and they need to deal with it. We don't owe them a thing, they need to accept it and move on.

The fact is people don't want to be subjected to ads. Advertisers aren't entitled to people's attention and they're not gonna get it. So either they start charging people for access or they just turn off the servers, either is fine. If they send us ads, we're gonna block them.

Too bad modern Firefox doesn't actually have the support to run full featured uBlock Origin since they moved to the Chrome extensions model and threw away the entire Firefox add-on ecosystem. Actual Firefox forks like Sea Monkey and Palemoon still support the fully featured uBlock Origin.

I had no idea SeaMonkey was still going, I remember using that +15 years ago!

How? Mozilla has kept the old webRequest API: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

Back in the day, Firefox plugins were able to execute shell commands, and had complete access to the OS of the user. Some people apparently miss this, but it was a key reason why I moved to Chromium based browsers in the first place.

I'm not talking about Google's Manifest v3 or anything recent. I'm talking about Firefox 57 (~2018) and onward when they abandoned XUL and all the extensions/add-ons had to be re-written as chrome-style web extensions. Unfortunately many of the most complex extensions could not and lost features at best.

If FF didn't do that, it would still be a security nightmare. XULs are available in some FF forks, which are security nightmares.

It's amazing that Sea Monkey, Palemoon, and all the other forks which support XUL have managed to do so securely with incomparibly smaller teams. Multiple proofs of the falsehood of your claims already exist.

Mozilla got rid of XUL because it wouldn't work with the multi-process model of Chrome they were copying in order to speed up the browser for running complex javascript applications. The security justifications were nonsense. The real security problems are in supporting all the new attack surfaces that modern browsers do in the form of exposing bare metal (or just above) functionality for acting as an OS (webgl, websockets, etc) instead of a browser.

You are confusing Chrome and Firefox. Firefox has no plans to remove the old api.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com