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Comment by whitepoplar | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?

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> For uBlock Origin users on Chrome, there’s uBlock Origin Lite. However, the Lite version “allows some tracking, its blocklist is a fraction of what the original blocked, and it can't perform the dynamic filtering that made the original effective,”

https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...

I guess that's what the GP and I are both saying we didn't feel. I have no idea what benefit "dynamic filtering" provides. It sounds good on paper but having tried both versions, I can't tell the experiences apart. I don't see ads, pages load fast, and that seems like enough?

Actually, I'll take that back. I used to see far more stuff get blocked (e.g., when clicking links) than with Lite. Which is to say, Lite feels like it has fewer false positives.

When sites attempt to block users who use ad blocking extensions, dynamic filtering allows well written ad blockers to continue to work.

For instance:

> Last year, Google/YouTube ramped up its efforts against ad-blockers, preventing playback for users with the software installed on their devices, coercing them to disable it.

Users continued to exploit loopholes in browsers and third-party extensions, such as Firefox, that allowed them to bypass YouTube's ads while watching videos. However, the tech giant has seemingly doubled down on its efforts against ad-blockers, closing the few remaining loopholes

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/streaming-video...

Are there any URLs where you actually saw any difference?

Same. I'm still not seeing ads.

I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.

They’re not “making up an injustice.” Google is actively trying to stop ad blocking, this is a fact. You can argue whether or not it’s as severe as some people make it sound or whether people should be upset at all (I think we should be), but let’s not act like this was made up whole cloth.

I've seen some teams in YouTube try and stop ad blocking, but I haven't seen Google, or more importantly Chromium try and stop it.

1) YouTube is owned by Google and their entire revenue model is in alignment with how Google does things, which ublock origin interferes with.

2) Manifest v3 is Google’s, not YouTube’s, project.

Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blockers. In fact the chromium team worked together with ad block developers to adjust the design of Manifest v3 to better allow for them to be implemented.

Yeah chromium “helped” AdGuard specifically insofar as they agreed to restrictions. There’s a filter cap. It dilutes the efficacy of adblockers.

+1, Lite is mostly fine. The main difference seems to be that YouTube videos sometimes start a couple seconds late. Not quite annoying enough yet to switch browsers (tbh though, Firefox is totally fine these days, main downside for me is that the WebGPU implementation lags quite a bit behind Chrome and Safari).

it's not nearly as complete: You only get filter list updates when the extension updates, there's no custom element picker, no per-site switches, no strict-site blocking, no dynamic filtering and you can't import block lists. It's better than nothing (which is pretty much unbearable IME) but not as good.

There is a custom element picker.

The filter updates without extension updates is possible in MV3 now too.

Origin Lite _can_ be beat by advertisers rotating the URLs they serve ads from. That doesn't mean advertisers are actively bypassing Lite, but they could

Yes, and this might take some years to catch on.

OTOH it's not out of the question that some open source non-extension Chrome mod emerges that will then block those kinds of ads. Brave is already shipping this anyway.

This can be mitigated by implementing real time updates of filter lists.

it's already implemented... in MV2.

MV3 specifically forbids remotely hosted 'code', which apparently filter lists are.

>which apparently filter lists are.

This is not true and chromium developers have stated that such configuration is not considered code.

Hiding elements on the page should be the last goal. A lot of the traffic uBO-proper blocks, has nothing to do with what you see. "Ad blocker" is a lame name, it's not even the important part.

Yup, unless you're really intense about blocking ads, uBlock Origin Lite is at worst a minor loss in quality most people wouldn't notice.

"Closing the door" on ad blockers is quite an exaggeration.

Just because it's working today doesn't mean it will work as well in the future. It's not about the small technical change with deprecating mv2, it's about the direction they are taking Chrome.

This is HN. The topic has been discussed so many times already. Please read the developer's post about it.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

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