uBlock Origin 1.53
github.com
github.com
> Firefox will wait for uBO to be ready before sending network requests from already opened tab(s) at browser launch.
> In Chromium-based browsers, this is not the case. Tracker/advertisement payloads may find their way into already opened tabs before uBO is ready, while Firefox will properly filter these.
That’s a hell of a “bug” in Chromium, that blocker initialization has a race condition with restoring the last opened tabs. What a weird little “accident” that Chromium just moves forward and loads all the trackers, “oopsie”. I wonder which kind of promotion the engineer who made that “mistake” has been awarded.
But it has some pretty big downsides, the battery is small, and it is rather bad at this point of life. The audiojack has been oversized by constant use and barely holds now the headphone, stuck in Android 12.
I know I'm in the minority, but I consider both of these behaviors to be a very bad and extremely frustrating idea.
Maybe it's lacking a setting to toggle this (Suspend all network until lists are loaded doesn't control this behavior), but I wouldn't want to load pages full of ads on mobile simply because the app got killed.
The real issue for me is my phone killing applications when it has both battery and memory available.
Edit:
Yeah, disabling prefetch:
> This will ensure no TCP connection is opened at all for blocked requests: It's for your own protection privacy-wise.
uBlock holds itself (ideally) to a higher standard than not executing js or hiding an element, it tries to prevent the network connections from even taking place. This is for browser prefetching that happens on many pages even after the environment and extensions are fully loaded, in many different contexts, to speed up requests by having the binary payload of the response already available in cache before it is needed.
Lately, I've noticed Chrome being really aggressive about this.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...
This "bug" is in Safari/Webkit too, stop it with the conspiracy theory.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...
My workaround is to use Tor. That sails right through.
Excellent job. My tax dollars at work.
I figure it's a good time to kick a bad habit. :D
Used to visit YouTube’s front page as part of my daily routine, effectively using it as a social media site - which it definitely is; it’s just that the posts are all videos, the comment section is like every other but moderated by the video poster, and the front page is completely algorithm driven.
I use this strategy on a lot of sites (which sadly includes stackoverflow lately).
I generally try to limit the total amount of extensions I have on my browser, to a list of tools I feel that I can trust. I apply the same mentality for dependencies in my software. Limits the surface area for supply chain attacks.
As a consequence, my time spent on the site is way down, and the time I do spend is higher quality material.
But I'm with you. There's no way I'm watching an ad on YT. If they figure out how to only stream with unblockable ads, I will never visit the site again.
Patreon to pay the creators.
That's their goal. If you're not earning them money, they don't want you. You don't exist to them and you not watching their ads/videos is no threat at all.
For me, I've found DeArrow (clickbait "blocker") has had exactly the same effect. I find myself no longer mindlessly scrolling through the suggested feed and am more particular about what I choose to watch.
The biggest problem currently are people spreading those types of misinformation see https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17j6ygs/youtu...
> I was able to hide the popup simply by blocking it with uBO's Picker. Why aren't you doing that?
> This only works temporarily. For stages 1-3. You're still reach stage 4 by doing this. And this might cause scrolling issues and not let videos autoplay.
Maybe you should stop using words as "absolutely stupid" because it makes you look like a snob, and when it turns out you were wrong, it makes you look like a fool.
My parents both have been targeted and had to instruct them on how to refresh the quick updates, which has not been easy.
If you are using Firefox you can open it in a container that is not logged into YouTube no ?
I like that they at least offer an alternative for the ad viewing part through Youtube premium. I don't know about the US as streaming services seem to have catalogues orders of magnitude more extensive than over here in Europe, but compared to the likes of Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ and several local offerings, YT Premium is a steal in terms of value proposition.
And like most here I fail to understand how anyone can stand YT with ads.
You wiil seriously start to dislike the podcasts for speaking in video ads though.
How much could they possibly make from ads in a given month off a single user. Best case scenario with a user that watches YouTube like 4 hours a day 6 days a week and clicks through once every week. $4? Probably not even that. And yet somehow YouTube premium needs to be almost $230 a year for apple users?
I bet they’d make way more with a lower premium tier that just removed ads and had no other premium features for like $20/year. Wouldn’t make as much obviously but I bet they’d do way more volume. I wonder if they have some dipshit mba arguing against something like this because it “makes them seem cheap” or “delegitimizes the platform against more traditional streaming networks” or some nonsense to justify charging Hulu prices for YouTube content
I do not like Google's business model, nor their politics either. Thing is they do have a defacto monopoly on viable creator VoD. Yes, other services exist, but they are too fragmented to be viable.
So, do I perpetuate this situation by giving them sub money? Yes. But pragmatically I'm still not going to have my kids be subjected to ad barrages in the meantime, while rooting for true competition to emerge.
I think it's egregious how YouTube treats content creators in general and how expect us to foot the content distribution bills in particular, especially since many of the video themselves are ads (they include product placement, or are straight up teasers for products)
I think there's a case to be made at least for non indies to pay proportionally to the minute viewed of their content, to decrease the pressure on monetizing indies.
I don't care, I still won't watch ads, and if I pay for something, I want to pay for something for that does actively track my watching habits and sell my data, so they are out of luck.
If they were not Google, I'd be ready to pay about 10 euro/m.
Since it's Google, they can rot in hell for all I care. I'll happily freeload them as most as I can.
I'd gladly pay for Youtube sans ads, but not if google also gets to steal my data.
Maybe YouTube isn't the bad habit, but how (metaphorical) you use it?
However, YT premium is only 2-3 USD/mo in India. So, I use that to get ad-free experience on YT and also YT music is great.
For the information that only seems to be available on YouTube I use Invidious.
See https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23940583/youtube-ad-bloc...
Steps: click the U icon, click the gear, click filter list, click Purge, click Update.
Ads are gone again while logged in. You might have to do it again every now and then.
But if it came between choosing between uBlock and anything? I choose uBlock!
What do they gain from the 5-10% of users consuming videos but offering no salable data in return? It's a direct hit to the bottom line from a minority who would rather stop using the service than be converted to impressions. Good riddance
How could a viable competitor to YouTube even begin to pull away YouTube’s inertia without massive vc funding? That VC would want the platform to eventually end up with the same shitty ux issues, intrusive ads, and data collection as YouTube. Guaranteed. Unless someone finds a way to store and serve tons of hi def video for free.
Not to mention even if you get past that step you’re going up against a Goliath. If you’re actually viable and potentially going to make a serious dent do you think google is just going to do nothing? They’ll leverage their gigantic market share and huge amount of resources to take you down. Whether it’s by suing you for some nonsense, replicating your service model in their own platform to recapture customers, straight up buying your platform, etc
I think it depends on what people are trying to do with youtube. I doubt any one new service could replace all of it. Plenty of people want to share videos but aren't looking to get rich from it though. For them, I think a competitor that does video delivery well, but doesn't pay for views could exist.
People who want to make videos for money would have a harder time replacing google, but lots of creators get direct support already so it isn't hopeless. A lot of people are already on multiple platforms now too so it doesn't have to be a hard cut off.
It will be a shittier experience for users, but I think that's the general direction of the web anyway. Just look at other streaming companies. All of their UXs suck (as far as I have tried them on TV) and there is more and more segregation.
Frankly, banning ad-blockers feels like treating the symptoms rather than the cause. There is something wrong with your platform if people hate your ads so much that if they can’t block them they would rather not visit your site at all.
If they stop bundling Music, and possibly lower the cost of YT Premium, it might convert better.
I used to love tech ads. I'd inspect every ad in BYTE, Creative Computing, etc. I'd even buy Computer Shopper, a massive catalog interrupted by some articles, just for the ads.
Ads can be useful, informative, and engaging. I wouldn't mind that.
Some math with conservative estimates:
* power consumption of mobile processor: 5W
* daily ad use: 1 hour (assume it's 100% cpu for the entire time)
* smartphone users: 7.8 billion (world population)
Total yearly electricity consumption given the above: 2.8 TWh
World electricity consumption: 23,921 TWh in 2019
I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
Feel free to put up an estimate then.
>I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.
So, even if advertising was technically neutral (which is clearly not the case), it would still be an ecological cataclysm.
One would even argue that the whole climate emergency is created by our advertise/consume culture.
To give a really simple upper limit: 36.8 billion tonnes per year. Because that's the current total global CO2 emissions per year. And we can be pretty sure that ads are less than that, or at least not more.
I agree with your assessment of the grandparent comment.
Pulling an "estimate" out of your ass isn't exactly any more objective than admitting that attempting to estimate it is futile.
"I know that I know nothing" and all that.
Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?
I can hear the fans on my Windows machine spin up, and I know it's Windows Update time.
Although this study doesn't discuss C02 emissions, it does discuss energy use and the potential impact of internet advertising.
Unfortunately, it only discusses the impact on client-side devices, the energy consumption of hardware used to serve advertisements (networking, servers) is left to a future study.
>Strikingly, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually.
>So, for example, the 1.35 × 1010 kWh saved globally for using uBlock Origin is equivalent to more than 1.0% of the electricity generated per year from coal in the United States, which is responsible for the premature deaths of about 52,000 American every year from air pollution [43,44].
>Globally, the results with the most efficient open source ad blocker tested, uBlock Origin, would be even more substantial: ad blocking would save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year.
All in all I see it as a net positive.
Even SEO spam is dealt with with uBlocklist, so that the main offenders are gone. I forgot about Pinterest and all the Stackoverflow clones.
Then I use my iPad in a pinch and remember that most people are used to a much louder, annoying web. I can't believe that people use Medium without an ad blocker.
I wonder if people notice that this website is much quieter, or just enjoy it more on a subconscious level. I like to think that it's a competitive advantage.
We use Confluence to do document reviews at work, and sitting there attempting to read a document while Confluence is popping up that annoying dialogue box over and over again as people comment on the doc is insanely annoying. With uBlock Origin I was able to (after a few false attempts) sniff the specific element and filter it out.
I get it on my devices when I travel outside Bay Area and my friends everywhere else are getting the treatment that people are complaining about.
But with just uBlock Origin, haven't seen anything pertaining ads on YouTube on Google Fiber in Bay Area.
If I could get the uMatrix "skin" on top of uBlock Origin that would be great.
All I had to do was manually trigger an update for uBlock Origin's filter lists then restart firefox.
The filter lists update automatically, but a new youtube change got around them and the filter had a fix inside an hour (too short a time for my extension to auto-update it's filter lists).
This is different to other ads, which is a crowdsourced list of filters, and isn't on a small or single individual to keep up. There must be a better way to utilize the crowd to make it work.
Don’t underestimate what open source can and will do just to spite things they despise
If UBO stops working, I'll use newpipe, if that stops working I'll use yt-dlp and if that stops working I'll use whatever else people have come up with, and if nobody has anything that gets rid of the ads I'll just stop watching youtube.
I don't see that happening though. As long as we have computers that still work for us, I doubt google will come up with a way to stop ad blocking entirely. Maybe we'll have youtube re-release groups that manually edit out the ads and re-upload videos from popular channels to P2P sites. Maybe we'll get AI that can download videos and edit out the ads for us. We'll figure something out.
Ahh, but that's just it.
Youtube Premium isn't a service, it's a package.
If I could pay for Youtube by itself I would, but I can't, so I shan't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17kw0vc/ubloc... has the usual “it hasn’t completed review yet” guidances as well how to rush ahead of the app stores for those that are impatient.
I know youtube does but I didnt know Chrome does.
News at 11.
It’s customary on HN to downvote comments without much substance. (Fwiw I didn’t downvote it)
Recommended extensions undergo full code review by staff security experts to provide a strong additional security check.
[1] - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/extensions-addo...
uBlock Origin – Wiki : https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki
``` www.linkedin.com##.relative:has-text(/excited to/i)```
between that, blocking images, and user taglines my feed is much more concise and readable.
I probably should see if someone has a linkedin script to remove non-1st connection content.
For instance, I use it to switch HackerNews to dark mode, and restrict the width of comments to about 10-12 words: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...
It's a great alternative to GreaseMonkey or other user style extensions.
I tweaked it a tiny bit since overscroll on FF on osx was showing as white, figured I'd share it back. It's not perfect, but the BG color differences are close enough to not bother me.
! Invert the colours of the site, making a dark mode that I like
! `invert(95%)` does most of the work,
! but you can tweak the hue-rotate value to fine tune the colours
news.ycombinator.com##body:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white)
news.ycombinator.com##html:style(background: black)`We should also not forget to give accolades to the heroic people who tirelessly maintain the filter lists.
No good deed goes unpunished.
In general, I view Reddit as a complete cesspool; I'm not really sure what any sub there really needs to exist. Most OSS projects get along just fine without it (in fact, I've never heard of one that used it).
I mean, it sucks that abusive users are out there, but it is Reddit after all. For communications with users, I think the old-style method of having Bugzilla and requiring an account to file bugs is probably the best.
I have since cut my youtube viewing by about 50-80% and am not using Chrome anymore (except for testing/security). Great success Google and thanks for all the idiotic brainwashing content.
I do get that youtube needs to make money somehow and adds are the way. Unfortunately the experienc is so bad, perormance is suffering etc. that I'd rather have no youtube than youtube with adds.
- Ublock (still works for me, maybe it's a Firefox thing) - News feed eradictor (hides reccomended vids) - Pocket tube (how subscription management should have been) - Sponsorblock (auto skip sponsors which are typically gambling or predatory games)
I couldn't think of how horrible the web browsing experience would be without uBlock Origin
Since Firefox is not owned by Google, uBlock still works.
If the browser just does block ad-blocking on YouTube. If I would be hosting a video platform, can I add my site to the list?
Context - I've used UBO on Google Chrome in the past and now using Brave browser for the last few years. I don't see much difference how web feels with UBO and Brave.
> But if you choose to see Brave Ads, you can earn.
And the Basic Attention Token concept is something I hope takes off since the current state of online advertising is pretty abysmal.
uMatrix has completely changed how I use and experience the web, and going away from it (even to uBO) is such a big downgrade that I don't know what I'll do on the day it stops working D-:
If it's true that YT is actively trying to avoid ad blockers then I guess I may have been pushed down their priority list because I occasionally run a video or two while logged in on my phone via official app where ads actually run.
The same should be applied to that cookie non-sense. Default: no cookies and website should ask for permission to enable them. Or make it an option in the browser setting to reject all cookies.