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Comment by m-r-a-m | Hacker News Reader

I like Disconnect (I only found it a few days ago), but I'm trying to find out more technical information about what it does without having to look through the code on GitHub. Basically, does it provide additional privacy features on top of ABP+Easylist+EasyPrivacy?

Also, why is it not listed on the Mozilla add-ons site? I barely found out about it. I think I was researching privacy extensions for Chrome and happened to click through to your website.

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Thanks. Disconnect currently has the biggest list of tracking sites of any app (well over 2,000 sites). And our filtering engine is written differently than other apps (no slow regexes). In practice, we benchmarked the 1,000 most popular sites and found they loaded an average of 27% faster with Disconnect than without. I've also done some informal benchmarks of other apps (I should do a more formal study at some point) and can say Disconnect accelerates pages quite a bit more than them.

Mozilla's review process is too sluggish for us right now since we're still making changes to Disconnect 2 quickly. When things are more stable, we'll probably submit to AMO.

Is there any reason why Disconnect doesn't block Disqus and OpenX?

Disqus is in the Content category, which isn't blocked by default (reason: users seem unhappy when we block content-y things like videos, photos, and comments by default). But you can still check the adjacent box to block Disqus (your settings are remembered on a per-site basis).

OpenX, otoh, should be in the Advertising category and be blocked by default as far as I know. Is there a site where this isn't the case?

Ok, thanks. I prefer to block everything by default, so for me per-site basis is not very convenient. In the case of Disqus: on most websites I don't read the comments and I prefer to block all the requests (mostly 100+ if you include the gravatars). With Ghostery I just block everything, but this is also not perfect because, as you mentioned, you sometimes don't see all the content. It would be nice if the add blockers could block content in the way Chrome blocks plugins: everything is disabled, by you have a placeholder which informs you that something was blocked, and when you click on it, it loads the content.

OpenX is indeed blocked (I checked it with the chrome dev tools), but it doesn't show up in the Advertising category, e.g. http://www.openx.com/.

AMO process too sluggish or does Disconnect have something to hide? I personally really enjoy this "open source" code: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/blob/master/firef...

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