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Comment by shock3naw | Hacker News Reader

Huh? What chrome extension are these people using? Adblock Plus (Beta) blocks pretty much everything.

If previous versions of Adblock are still the base code for the new versions, it doesn't block the ad. It merely hides it. The ad is still loaded, you just don't see it. This limitation is/was because Chrome didn't allow extensions to have the access they would need to actually keep an ad from loading.

I haven't used Chrome with AdBlock in maybe a year or two, so this might be out of date. But that's what it used to be like, and that's where the perception is coming from.

Then what is the point of Ghostery, if it can't keep tracking JavaScript from loading?

Sounds like a load of FUD to me. DOM elements are DOM elements, aren't they? How would Chrome's JS interpreter be able to discriminate ad content from anything else?

IIRC, whatever was behind that issue was resolved ages ago. Long enough that I can't recall any technical details, unfortunately.

For what it's worth, the FAQ for AdBlock on Chrome claims that it does "actually prevent ads from downloading", and I assume the same is true for (the unrelated) AdBlock Plus on Chrome. http://code.google.com/p/adblockforchrome/wiki/FrequentlyAsk...?

If you want to investigate how it works, open the extensions tab and enable developer mode. You can open 'background.html' for Adblock and check out what it does.

I wish this meme would die. There's a kernel of truth, that initially Chrome didn't support blocking network requests, but that's because of the tradeoff of extension compatibility vs power that Chrome made. Firefox addons (as originally designed at least, I'm not up on their latest efforts) have always been incredibly powerful, but that power comes from calling internal browser APIs that might change from version to version.

Chrome extension apis have to be explicitly designed and developed, and backcompat is taken care of, so your extensions don't all break every six weeks when Chrome updates.

In any case, yes Chrome supports extensions that block or modify network requests before they occur: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/stable/webRequest.h... (and it's been out of experimental for eight months judging by this bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=60101)

In addition, Adblock for Chrome has been able to prevent requests from loading using a base webkit api for two years now: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/20/chrome_does_resource...

(Disclosure, I work for Google, but not on anything related to Chrome. I'm just huge fans of the project and its ideals.)

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