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shpx

People are using µBlock now for precisely this reason.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

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Together with umatrix (https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/) are the best chrome extensions

Since I went back to firefox those are the only extensions I really miss, there is policeman (https://github.com/futpib/policeman/) but it's not as good as them yet

To whoever develop extensions, please don't focus only on chrome, firefox during the last months has become must better that it was before, if developers only consider chrome, people will eventually migrate to it and firefox will die. Even though chromium is open it won't be good for the ecosystem

I use NoScript and RequestPolicy for full white listing functionality in Firefox.

As my paranoia ramps up year on year, I now use Opera with µBlock. For me, it has the polish of Chrome with some nice extras, but without the increasingly creepy Googality. It works fine, although I've not tried µMatrix. (I have my defaults changed to DuckDuckGo. Usually connecting via a VPN.)

I've whitelisted a few sites I like to support (a couple of webcomics, HaD etc).

I have a lot of filters: "62,501 network filters ＋ 40,728 cosmetic filters".

Opera's task manager says the extension is taking up a mere 32MB. Probably not accurate, but a lot better AdBlock (my previous favourite).

Off-topic but I wish people would stop using Mu for project names. Where is the Mu key on the keyboard? I have to copy and paste or alt-code it. Call the project microBlock or something! They use "u" instead of "µ" on Github, so why not just use something else entirely?

µTorrent was the one that really irritated me because I couldn't type "utorr" to search for it on my start menu.

I'd say something to gorhill (albeit far more politely), but it seems childish and ungrateful. He's clearly poured so much time and effort into making such useful software. "Great software but the name is fucking annoying, mate!"

I myself most often write "uBlock" and pronounce "you-block", as in "users decide".

I originally used the mu character in place of the u to emphasize smaller resource footprint relative to similar solutions out there.

I've never been good with picking name etc., unfortunately now we are stuck with it.

Don't sweat it. It's actually quite a good name. It works both as "you block" and "micro block" depending on reading the first character as "u" or "mu".

http://www.howtotype.net/symbol/Micro/

Sadly, the US-International keyboard on Windows does not implement a shortcut for the "micro" character (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560).

There's always character map which has this and like all others you can ever think of. A bit cumbersome, but at least one doesn't have to remember character codes and can search for characters by name.

"Let me google that" pulls out character map pretty poor UX if you ask me. Almost as bad for search ability as calling your product "go" or "cloud" or "driver" or any other one-word generic, hard to find even with contextual terms around it.

pretty poor UX if you ask me

yup. Has been around since NT or maybe even longer..

the poor UX is not the Character Map

It is having to open it every time you want to type the name of µSomething

The poor UX is the keyboard layout throwing away altgr.

In addition, I pretty sure many European keywords can type µ by alt-gr+m, at least in Windows on my Danish keyword. Only know that because once I had a keyword were they actually had printed it on the key, just like they always do with € on E.

If this is motivated by your paranoia, why are you switching to a closed-source browser?

There is a μ on the German QWERTZ keyboards.

On Apple keyboards Alt+m prints µ.

Use a compose key system, native on Unix (Linux, Mac, etc) and available on Windows. It's very intuitive and will open up your character vocabulary considerably. I use the caps-lock key for compose.

http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/

> Where is the Mu key on the keyboard?

At least for me, option-m is the µ key.

DDG lies about not tracking you. Startpage appears not to.

How does uMatrix compare to something like Ghostery? Would it be redundant to have both?

Isn't ghostery owned by an ad company?

Yes, however the GhostRank feature that people don't like is opt-in not opt-out.

I went back to Firefox in the last couple of months and I wholeheartedly agree. I used to use HTTPSwitchboard in Chromium (which divided into uMatrix and uBlock) and I miss it in Firefox.

I do want uMatrix ported to Firefox. The developer who ported uBlock[1] has now made it more easy for me to work on a port of uMatrix, as I have now a model on how to proceed + a lot of code which can readily be shared with uMatrix. Once it is ported, in all likelihood I will myself go back to use Firefox as my main browser.

[1] https://github.com/Deathamns/uBlock/tree/ports/xpi

Is there anything we can do to help? I'm not sure I personally can help - I've never looked into extensions, but there may be others who can?

What was wrong with Firefox?

I've used it every day since starting a new job seven months ago and I've not noticed any issues with it.

Firefox has improved a lot and it has been good for more than I year (I switched back in the middle of last year). Before that it was slower than Chrome, and it crashed when trying to read very large pages (eg a tumblr page of gifs).

Google helped to close the gap by making Chrome more bloated and much more unstable.

N00b here - why would someone use both?

I've tried a couple of times to work with uBlock and uMatrix. I ended up going back to ABP each time. The 'block an ad on this page' feature is one of its best and most useful. That, and it doesn't go too far in blocking useful item on-page.

As I said in a similar thread on Reddit a few weeks ago, uBlock has some way to go before it can be considered user-friendly (at least, for the user who isn't familiar with the intricacies of how browsers work). I would love to be able to use it, though. ABP is an enormous resource hog on my system, but more to the point, pages render so slowly when it's switched on.

One thing I would like to point out, is that there is a bug currently in Chromium 39 which causes a new memory leak each time the popup UI of an extension is opened:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441500

This affects all extensions.

Just so people are informed memory figures won't be too reliable as soon as you opened even only once the popup UI of an extension. (In all my benchmarks I of course avoided to do this).

does this happen only when you click the ublock and it opens a popup window or with any extension popup UI?

Any extension popup UI, which appears when you click an extension icon. The more complicated the HTML document in the popup, the larger the leak.

what about extensions without a popup UI?

In some tests, uBlock results in the browser using less memory than with no plugins: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-version:-benc...

n.b. Firefox results from experimental patch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802509

That was my experience. My usage for four pages was about 80M with uBlock, 120M with AdBlock Pro and 200M with nothing. Pages also took like 1s to load with the blockers and 12s without because of all the ad junk loading. (with Chrome)

I tried µBlock but it seems to be extremely trigger happy. For example Youtube front page doesn't show any videos and Facebook doesn't load at all (basically it blocks everything other than its side bar). I can obviously white list those sites but my concern is that next time I visit some site for the first time I will not know if its broken or just µBlock acting up.

----- EDIT

I reinstalled the plugin and the problems went away. So far looks good.

> Youtube front page doesn't show any videos

I see videos all fine on Youtube front-page, using out-of-the-box filter lists. That kind of issue was never reported for uBlock. I would need to know exactly what filter lists you were using, including custom filters.

uBlock relies on 3rd-party filter lists to do the job, specifically, out of the box:

    - EasyList
    - EasyPrivacy
    - Fanboy's Social Blocking List
    - Peter Lowe's Ad Servers
    - Malware domains

So if you think it blocks too much, un-select the filter lists you do not want.

Bottom line, whatever filter lists you use in uBlock, you will get the same results with the same lists with ABP.

I haven't tried ublock yet, is it obvious how to work back from a broken page to figure out which blacklists need adjusting?

I'd also recommend that the defaults should have YouTube and Facebook (at least) working out of the box. Otherwise I think people will just uninstall the plugin, rather than trying to figure out how to fix it, which would be a shame.

Having just tried uBlock, the defaults do allow both Youtube and Facebook to work out of the box (and exactly the same as with adblock, as far as I can tell). I think the poster must've had some other problem. (or maybe some of the filter lists changed in between his problem and my trying it, which is equally possible)

EDIT: ( Chrome 39.0.2171.95 (64-bit), linux )

It works exactly like AdBlockPlus in terms of user experience. There's no way that you could have been using ABP and suddenly are flummoxed by uBlock.

If you have things being blocked you don't want, either whitelist the element or find the block rule in your rule list.

YouTube and Facebook definitely both work 'out of the box' with the recommended lists.

Yes, it seems to work well for YouTube and Facebook now that I've had a chance to try it.

Still, I don't think everyone out there who has ABP installed necessarily understands how to use it, or how it works. I have installed it for my wife, and for friends, (the kind of people who spend 90% of their time on a handful of popular sites) and if Facebook or YouTube was broken they wouldn't know why or what to do about it.

EDIT: Spelling

That's odd. I actually unselected some lists and white-listed some sites and the problem persisted. I disabled the extension and all sites started working as usual again. I am running Chrome 39 on Windows. I'll give it another try now - will uninstall / reinstall to make sure the default lists are being used.

Seems to be working well on my second attempt. I am still not sure what was wrong before.

I'm also finding it doesn't work on sites where Adblock worked. For example Aeroplan.com. I've reinstalled it and it still doesn't work.

Too bad its's not for Firefox

Someone is working on it there https://github.com/Deathamns/uBlock. There is also experimental xpi https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/27.

Fantastic!

Thank you :)

I use Bluhell Firewall, it isn't as good as ABP but it is definitely better than nothing and so light

For those using Safari, there is a preliminary version of µBlock here: http://chrisly.me/0B0s2Y2Y3b0R

Note: No automatic updates with this unofficial build.

Impressive, it's already much much faster than AdBlock.

Thanks for the recommendation! Long time ago I've uninstalled AdBlock due to the noticeable performance issue and have been suffering the ads on the news websites, will now try uBlock.

Thanks, haven't heard of uBlock until now. Giving it a try.

I find ublock breaks many more websites than ABP.

I usually wouldn't notice a broken website with ABP, but with ublock I see something wrong at least once a week.

iirc, ublock also blocks api.google.com (i guess it's the analytics javascript files?), which incidentally, also breaks a lot of sites that uses the google common javascript library CDN (which servers stuff like jquery etc). I whitelisted it and it seems to unbreak some stuff.

> ublock also blocks api.google.com

There is no filter which matches "api.google.com", so this can't be blocked, unless you have a custom filter which does that.

> also breaks a lot of sites that uses the google common javascript library CDN

uBlock uses third-party filter lists such as EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's, etc. It won't block more than what is spelled out in these lists. Un-select whatever filter lists which you think should not be selected.

As I have said countless times now, uBlock will block as much as ABP blocks when using same filter lists.

As always, if you think something is blocked which should not be (for example if ABP with the same lists has a different behavior), I need a URL, a test case in order to be able to infirm/confirm that the problem is with uBlock and not with the filter lists. On that ground, uBlock has been quite stable for a while now, I don't remember the last time something was blocked which should not have been blocked (or vice versa) as per filter lists.

Thanks! This is my first time to hear about µBlock. I have uninstalled ABP to use µBlock to see if there are any difference.

I desperately need ublock for mobile.

it probably needs a better way to whitelist sites/pages

I frankly don't know how to improve on clicking the big fat green button in the popup to whitelist a site (Ctrl-click for a specific page).

sorry, i never hovered on it. thanks

It's not at all obvious what that button does. The icon is typically associated with "power on/off." While I can see how this is supposed to suggest whitelisting in an abstract and metaphoric sense, making that connection is a bit of a stretch, particularly for casual users.

I suggest removing the icon and just putting a plain old checkbox with a label that says "Whitelist Site".

If you hover over it, it tells you exactly what it does.

"hover over it to find out what it does" does not constitute good UX unless you're talking about a toolbar with a multitude of icons which cannot all (by sheer numbers) be "intuitive".

I'm not claiming it's the best UX, and I have no particular affinity to this program, but it's really not hard to tell what it does, especially for the demographic here.

Nor do I have any particular affiliation or affinity. It just sounds like poor UX/UI.

I guess the whole "hover over it if you're confused" thing is pretty established by now, so I'd say your original assessment is probably the correct one. I just want us (the industry) to get better at this stuff! :)

Fair enough; that's totally reasonable, and I agree with you. I guess I just had an objection to the post I originally replied to which (seemingly) had the attitude of it being impossible to tell what the button did. The UX could certainly be better, but it's not bad.

Yes, but it is not intuitively obvious for the ordinary user who would account for the majority of page views and potential advertising revenue.

Addendum: The apparent scope of the icon is browser-wide, not limited to the current page. Since the "power on/off" icon is unqualified, it seems like clicking it will turn the entire plugin on and off, not merely whitelist the current site.

thanks for pointing out :)

Thank you so much for these!

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