Adblock Plus is showing a fake progress bar after updating | Hacker News Reader

Adblock Plus is showing a fake progress bar after updating

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71 pointsanonymousab27 comments

Adblock Plus reportedly has 50 to 60 million users per month, so taking the conservative number, at 8 unnecessary seconds per update they're wasting 12.68 years of aggregate human life with each update animation cycle: 8 seconds *50M years=400M seconds/60/60/24/365=12.68 years. How many updates do they push per year? How many lifetimes do they waste?

Feels criminal to me, intuitively.

But now do the math for not blocking ads.

Two wrongs do not make a right nor justify employing dark patterns

Do you know anyone who is still using Adblock Plus?

It is the second most-installed Firefox extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?sort=users&...

Isn't uBlock origin the much better option for Firefox?

And if so there should be some community effort to remove these scammy and deceptive alternatives.

Yes. I'm not sure what your point is, though.

Just curious if uBlock was still king as i'm using Safari/Orion since some time ago because of battery life.

I switched away from AdBlock Plus when they started not removing ads that paid ABP for that service.

It’s just less good.

Has a great name, though.

>It is the second most-installed Firefox extension

The second most popular extension is "Video DownloadHelper". ABP holds 5th place, it has being experiencing a decline in popularity for quite some time.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

That's interesting, so the numbers on the extension site are wrong?

I'm not sure. That does seem strange.

It could be cumulative users on the addons page, and week-to-week usage statistics for the addons on the data page.

Is pihole the best solution for all this Manifest v3 stuff that Chrome is about to dump on the universe?

No, that'd be Firefox + UBlock Origin. I believe that the DNS based blocking that pihole does would be similar to the blocklist type blocking that Chrome with manifest v3 offers. I belive the advantages of pihole are most for blocking ads on devices without an adblocker installed, like your TV or w/e.

pihole is only doing DNS filtering. Can still be good but not at all similar to the content filtering that can be done by client-side extensions. It's also becoming less effective over time due to increased adoption of domain-fronting and DoT/DoH.

To get there with a hosted appliance you can run on a Raspberry Pi, you'd neet an intercepting and rewriting HTTPS proxy with the TLS certificates trusted by the client. Possible (corporates and ISPs/governments do this) but a lot more effort and security footguns than blackholing DNS lookups.

Sidenote: Most HTTPS packets will still carry the destination domain unencrypted (ECH is still not widely adopted and can be filtered). So even if DoT prevents pihole from being effective, you can still route all your HTTPS traffic through something like sniproxy and drop packages based on SNI extension information. You won't need to set up certicates for this and pretty straightforward on any Linux/BSD router.

I don’t think you have to pick one or the other. Run pihole and then put an adblocker on the client.

That’s how I roll personally. NextDNS + 1Blocker / uBlock

PiHole was good but blocked less compared to uBlock Origin when I tested it a few months ago.

https://canyoublockit.com/

Adguard is better as it does more than DNS level blocking, but on a local VPN level

I do. Should I not be?

Ublock >>

Depends on how much you care about privacy I guess.

Everyone I know switched to uBlock after AdBlock introduced their "acceptable ad" program. It very quickly turned into "pay us to not block your ads".

Now they're intentionally disrupting and nagging users to give them money. What "premium" features can an ad blocker even have?

Why pay AdBlock, who does not care about your security or privacy, when uBlock exists, is free, and is generally better all around?

I find these kinds of practices entirely unacceptable so I don't use them.

Forced to use it as the least objectionable Safari blocker.

What is objectionable about AdGuard?

I haven’t looked at AdGuard. I was happily using uBlock Origin until Apple switched to only allowing downloaded block lists instead of a real programmatic ad block. At that point, ABP seemed the most reasonable choice as there’s no longer much differentiation.

Eyeo is the most objectionable entity in the adblocking space. Adguard, 1Blocker, Wipr, or literally any other Safari adblocker is better than ABP.

Nitter mirror for those who can't see the thread due to loginwall: https://nitter.unixfox.eu/gorhill/status/1735718771908628724

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