Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

From the “uBO works best in Firefox” page, I found this gem:

> 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.

View on HN

Ad nauseum solves this. Sure you get tracked but you also send all the wrong signals.

Ad nauseam is "weirdly" banned from the chrome store. Guess it hurts them :)

Can’t you sideload applications like a hacker?

Our computing landscape has deteriorated if installing an application/extension outside of a walled garden makes you a "hacker."

depends how high the walls are I guess. One other way to look at it is, if 99% of users cannot do it, then it's a hack =) aka users have becomed dumbed down by walled garden...

I believe the comment was facetious.

Especially, because it clicks ads without you seeing them

That is a neat idea, going to give it a try.

I'll give a warning with that, the traffic generated by adnausem starts to get cloudflare suspicious and then you end up having 1/2 of the internet made inaccessible because Cloudflare decided at some point you are a bad actor and you're pretty much hosed from that point on.

Good thing I get my internet access from a major internet service provider that stuck me behind a carrier-grade NAT!

The city of Palo Alto's website is "protected" by some cloudflare clone wannabe. It somehow decided that my residential ip address (also in Palo Alto) is a threat and I can't access any city website now. Just get an infinite loop of "are you human?" challenges.

My workaround is to use Tor. That sails right through.

Excellent job. My tax dollars at work.

How does Ad nauseum solve this? It seems you failed to understand this technical issue. Ad nauseam is build on uBlock and suffers from the same issues does it not? I have not looked into it, but it seems it's a technical limitation that lets connections go through b4 an extension is fully loaded and hooked in to be able to block them. So just by my common sense, a fork of UBO would suffer from the same issue.

Anti ad block feature, not a bug I guess.

I would expect nothing less than an immediate promotion to the next title. So cool.

Thanks. Good to know. Solidifies my belief that additionally using Pi-Hole can only improve things.

For now, hopefully DoH/DoT isn't forced upon us

It already has been but the workarounds are known and, for now, I haven’t run into anything that doesn’t fall back to (usually system) udp dns.

It helps, but it also misses a lot, it's really better to use multiple layers

Which is a horrible design on Android. Firefox on my (admittedly relatively old) phone take 20s to load the first page when browser start with uBlock enabled. On desktop this is fine as it only happen once a day. But on the phone it happen a lot since apps getting killed is a normal thing.

My 4 year old S10E does not exhibit this behavior at all (Firefox with uBlock).

S10e was the peak of mobile design.

Preach! I'm holding onto it for dear life, perfect form factor, no BS.

I could've done without the useless Samsung button that doesn't do anything but whine for a Samsung account before you can change the behavior of the button. So I used adb to disable the button entirely, to prevent the whiny Samsung page from accidentally being pressed on the button raised off the left side of the s10e.

Why was it that?

Small form factor, powerful enough to keep working fine today (as long as not gaming), has DeX, has audio jack, physical fingerprint reader sideways, and samsung support (no glitches for important apps)

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 feel the same about my s7 edge I keep as a spare, although currently using the s21 ultra and no complaints

S22, I had to find a way to exclude Firefox from memory management altogether, because the auto-killing behavior was getting ridiculous. Unfortunately, there is still no way to prevent Firefox itself from unloading tabs.

I know I'm in the minority, but I consider both of these behaviors to be a very bad and extremely frustrating idea.

Any phone without an IR Blaster can not be the peak of mobile design. Note 4 master mobile.

And my 7 years old oneplus 3T neither

Do you mind sharing your ubo settings?

Just the default one plus french list in regional settings. To be fair though, I had a tablet from the same time but it was way cheaper than this phone, specifically having way less ram and firefox was not really usable.

Do you mind sharing your ubo settings?

Whatever the defaults are after installation, I didn't adjust the settings at all.

I have the same issue with UBlock Origin since my phone is quite aggressive when killing apps. While it is indeed annoying, I don't think it's a bad design.

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.

I don't get this behaviour on Firefox in Android at all.

Do you mind sharing your ubo settings?

I didn't change anything - just the default settings. Phone is a pixel 6a.

i'm pretty sure there's an setting/option to disable battery optimization for firefox

In fact there are multiple switches you have to turn, however I've made sure to check all of them.

IIRC there's a setting for that in UBo (look for pre-fetching)

I'm already allowing prefetching

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s a different thing altogether.

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.

Chrome desktop since v110 has started killing background tabs and reloading them upon use. [1]

Lately, I've noticed Chrome being really aggressive about this.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...

I'm on the regular stable Chrome build and was explicitly asked on several devices over the last few months if I wanted to enable memory saver or not, it wasn't automatic for me at least.

I have experienced this on firefox as well but it is rare and don't know of a way to reproduce it.

Are you sure you don't have the option to wait turned off in the UBo settings?

It looks like one of the changes improves this:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/4cac9d185b

I thought chromium was open source?

Shooting from the hip, here but part of it is. Other parts are closed source from Google or some other group that doesn't share.

If this "feature" is intentional, then even though it's open source, your patch to fix the behavior may not be accepted.

> 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.

This "bug" is in Safari/Webkit too, stop it with the conspiracy theory.

You realize that Apple is ad company too, right? Just like every other shitty tech company these days. Apple generated $5 billion in ad revenue in 2022.

From the app store ads mainly. Omitting this fact is dishonest at best.

I think they are requiring apps on their store use ads provided by their store as well though.

This is not true.

They are not, as far as I can tell (as someone who is breaking this rule were it to exist)

They are not. For example Unity has their own ad network for Unity made games to use (even on Apple devices).

How much was from outside the app store?

I think $5b is a gross underestimate.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com