Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehsanu1 | Hacker News Reader

No, that's due to Ghostery. Recognized it as soon as I saw your image. Ghostery breaks lots of sites, even those it isn't explicitly blocking.

View on HN

Ghostery doesn't really break many sites, although there are still a couple.

However, in this case, CSS and JS from ChartBeat is being blocked because it's one of the tracking services that Ghostery disallows. You can whitelist, but this is probably the "correct" behaviour if you want to block tracking services.

Ghostery doesn't break "lots of sites". This is one of possibly two or three pages I've noticed in the last year that have been broken by Ghostery. That's hardly an epidemic. (But perhaps this is an issue of sampling.)

Given Ghostery's popularity, I would almost venture to blame the website for this unintended behavior, not the plugin--even if they're keeping to standards and good behavior.

Is this due to JavaScript blocking? I mean, the whole premise of using AngularJS is that the client is executing JS..

It's blocking tracking scripts/pixels/etc. If a site's JS happens to rely on some external tracker having been loaded, it can break the site. I think that's what's usually happening here. Moral of the story: don't rely on external scripts people.

I think the moral is more that if you're not going to let them track you however they want and using whoever they want, they'd rather not have you as a visitor.

I've noticed many sites that have failed load a video or something similar due to Ghostery, but it has been happening much less after the last major update. It's usually not as drastic as stripping all CSS of course, just breakage that seems like a bug on the site, until you realize you should try again after pausing Ghostery.

Ghostery blocks Chartbeat since it's an analytics provider.

No, that's due to web devs tying the functionality of the website to tracking services. I don't remember the last website that didn't have any tracking services, most of them have many. But that alone doesn't break the Javascript when using Ghostery, let alone the CSS. I haven't analyzed this particular website, but it would typically be that they did everything wrong, like loading the CSS via JS, or that kind of weird things web devs like to do these days, that only works fine if you give up on your privacy and security entirely.

Hi, article author here. Our blog doesn't have any functionality tied to tracking services except the tracking functionality. If you're using something that blocks all js and css from *.chartbeat.com and you're trying to read a blog post on blog.chartbeat.com, you might run into an issue though :)

Just for info: ABP Has same result. (EasyPrivacy filter)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com