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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering.

uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

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Around 2010 I started playing with Adblock Plus, and provided a translation for a while. Wladimir Palant was a friendly, responsive, and as I understand it respected developer.

There were not countless adblockers, just Adblock and Adblock Plus. Adblock was abandoned, and Adblock Plus was were the innovation and performance improvements were happening.

Adblock Plus was there in the first controversies around adblocking ethics. It 'took care' of the first lawsuit. It did a lot of good work that the later adblockers benefit from.

Personally I have never been a fan of the acceptable ads feature. But it comes from that time, and offers a middle ground in the adblocking ethics debate, and a way to finance legal troubles.

Now I have not been involved in a very long time (Using uBlock Origin and whatever filters are default), but just condemning Adblock Plus outright is a bit too quick.

I learned the other day that the developer(s ?) of uBlock origin don't even accept donation. That's a really dedicated behavior for someone owning on app installed on probably a million devices, that could make money in an instant if he wanted to.

tbh, that scares me, simply because of the potential that one day, someone will offer enough money that it can't reasonably be expected from anyone to decline that offer.

Is ubo under an open source license? If so, it would instantly fork.

GPLv3: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

It reassures me. Because if gorhill cared about money, he would have a 100% ethical, simple way to immediately open the floodgates and make a five- to six-digit amount per year.

This suggests to me that he doesn't need nor care about having more money, and will be very hard to corrupt by offering money. How do you bribe a person that has free money with no strings attached offered to them and says "no thanks"?

Blackmail

Threaten physical harm

Well those aren't bribes, but I see what you mean.

My memory may be rusty, but iirc he already gave away the uBlock project (sold?) once. The new maintainer immediately started pulling shady moves so gorhill forked uBlock into uBlock Origin and has maintained it to this date (7+ years).

It was not sold. It was transferred to a the contributor of a Safari port. Only the GitHub repository though, not the extension store page. That has always remained with gorhill. So, no one's install was compromised

proof: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/0797d040740de8e9f7552...

Why did origin get made then?

The name origin was used because google took it down for using the name ublock after the GitHub repo transfer

Not to diminish the work on the browser extensions, but the majority of the value is in the filter lists. In the cat and mouse game, these lists need to be constantly updated and pruned, while also ensuring the false positives are minimally annoying to users.

True, but it's worth mentioning that supporting the filter list maintainers is encouraged.

Indeed, and unlike the morally unacceptable Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin continues to work on YouTube ads, although you will have to manually update your filter lists every day or so.

I have uBlock Origin installed in Arc, and ended up getting burned by the YouTube adblocking blocking purge because each time the warning came up, I checked to see if there was a way to whitelist YT and didn't find it. Now I'm watching YT in Safari on my iPad, where the block doesn't apply.

So: anyone know how to whitelist YT in uBlock Origin in Arc?

I had that warning some days ago, too. It's gone now, not sure what changed in the filter lists.

I can't give you Arc specifics, but the /r/uBlockOrigin subreddit are generally on the ball. May be worth a check!

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/

I use arc with uBlock, i simple refresh the page and the warning goes away.

Use invidious. You can import your subscriptions really easily. I self host my own instance on an old laptop (exposed via WireGuard to my server. I connect via local IP when at home)

i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari.

what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?

The first thing that came to mind was "switch to Firefox". Other than that, I have nothing to recommend.

I heard good things about Wipr (paid product) but don't use it myself on OSX.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1320666476?mt=12

Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.

Firefox has poor battery life on macos.

That is a thing of distant past. It runs beautifully natively on M1/M2 chips and has no noticeable difference in power consumption vs Safari.

Not the case anymore, even on pre-M1 Macs.

I currently use 1blocker(paid version) and it seems to be working pretty well compared to Firefox with ublock. I use it both on iOS and macOS.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id13655310...

It works great, but doesn't work against YouTube's anti-adblock yet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37975189

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on the Mac and it works great, but for Safari the best option I've found is AdGuard (https://adguard.com). However, it is nowhere near as effective as uBlock Origin since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.

> since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.

More accurately, Safari removed support for webRequest BlockingResponse in 2019. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

This was unrelated to Manifest V3, and in fact Safari has not deprecated Manifest V2. Manifest V3 does remove support for webRequest BlockingResponse in Chrome, but I believe not in Firefox.

But then again we have to buy apple anyhow

1Blocker already mentioned, but it is is absolutely fantastic.

The iOS version also blocks in-app trackers (in other apps, outside of Safari) and YouTube app ads via its firewall feature.

Little Snitch, a proprietary firewall, subscribed to some ad blocking lists can block surveillance system-wide

There's a webkit based browser called Orion that I've been trying out that supports chrome extensions. That's the closest thing I think.

Orion has issues loading uBlock Origin on new tabs, see: https://orionfeedback.org/d/718-ublock-origin-doesnt-work-so...

Is there a reliable source on being able to buy your way past the requirements? The last time I heard this story (like a decade ago), the author was asking large ad networks to pay to have their ads reviewed (and quite possible rejected), rather than him working for free when they have plenty of cash around. I don't see the problem with that

The acceptable ads program was another bluff-call, where people who had been claiming "I only object to intrusive ads. If there was a way to only allow passive and well-behaved ads I'd allow them!" got their alleged wish and then got angry about it

Also don’t forget that they inserted their own affiliate codes into URLs to Amazon at some point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220817235820/https://www.mobil... (German)

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