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".
"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.
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.
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
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!"
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".
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.
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 you are motivated by the love of free software, why aren't you thinking of the possibility that gcc can have a backdoor written by bribed immoral programmers ?
Or has Richard Stallman convinced you that by mere repetition of the word free, free software is also moral software ?
I have no doubts what so ever that Opera is run by ethical people and it an ethical company.
In any case a security / privacy audit is a much more rigorous test.
The whole free software movement is based on a pathetic assumption that if you can't read 10 million lines of open code you have to suffer from paranoia.
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.
> Even though chromium is open it won't be good for the ecosystem.
You didn't mention how or why. Personally, I hope Mozilla goes away and some other group comes along to fill the void because I don't think Mozilla consists of the right group of people to make anything worth using.
I'm not using any Mozilla browser until they learn how to respect the native operating system UI guidelines. Instead they're trying to build some lame HTML-driven UI experiment. No, I much prefer that Mozilla just go away and die.
Awww, looks like I have an unpopular opinion. You should totally censor it and make it disappear so that your world can be sterile and comfortable once again!
Sure it does. I asked why Chrome, not being open sourced, is "bad" for the ecosystem. Unfortunately, I packaged that with an unpopular opinion. Hence, the censorship doled out by yourself and others. Way to go!
If you don't think there's actually a big difference between actively trying to kill something and hoping that it just goes away and dies, then I guess there's nothing else to talk about.
It's a good thing that people don't need much convincing since Firefox is apparently dying anyway. Good riddance I say :)
> learn how to respect the native operating system UI guidelines
Your comment is almost worthwhile just for the irony in this.
Tabbed browsing basically hijacks window management away from the OS. Tabs are always implemented customly in-app (UI break) - and break the UX of window finding, switching, etc. (doubly annoying in a tiling WM, btw). That's all browsers.
> Personally, I hope Mozilla goes away and some other group comes along to fill the void [...]
> No, I much prefer that Mozilla just go away and die.
Yeah, they're just squatting on that cyberspace and not letting other people through.
Plus, FF is bundled/pre-installed everywhere nowadays; sickening! Your hatred is well placed.</s>
Tabs are fine and I didn't even mention them. MDI (multiple document interface) have been around forever and no...they do not take window management away from the OS because tabs are not windows until you want them to be, at which point the OS takes over.
Mozilla's problem has more to do with the fact that by using non-standard chrome around their HTML engine, they cause many little breakages like improper keyboard acceleration.
> Yeah, they're just squatting on that cyberspace and not letting other people through. Plus, FF is bundled/pre-installed everywhere nowadays...blah.
It's really easy to make a point when you create an really flammable straw-man to represent the other side isn't it?
In any case, it's certainly a better to just make up reasons why you could possibly disagree than trying to understand the actual point of view.
So what's exactly your point? How does Mozilla interfere with your life and worsen it, so that wishing them to "die" would be justified?
Why don't you just ignore them? Why do you want thousands of people to lose their job and why do you want to take away an open source software that's liked by millions of users?
Funny, as an early windows user, I had gotten very used to alt-tab for inter-app switching and ctrl-tab for in-app tab/subscreen switching... which works for browser tabs for me... add in shift to reverse the direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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:
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).
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.
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 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.
I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen different ad areas.
Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year is a bit excessive IMO).
Doomed to fail since Google takes a chunk and it still leaves all the content available to anyone with adblock. It'll get some small use I'm sure but not enough to be notable.
this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering)
Also, last I checked, most phones have 1 to 2 gigs of RAM, and they're not keeping many tabs in memory. If the RAM is there, using it is not really an issue (until you start getting into the whole virtual memory stuff I guess)
Every iDevice other than the iPad Air 2 has only 1GB of ram, and that's an issue for them (source: search every mention of the iPad Air and RAM, especially since the Air 2 came out).
> this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering)
If your webpage has that many images, you need to redesign your webpage. An uncompressed image at my screen resolution is 21MB - your webpage needs ten times that in memory? For maybe 500 words of prose and some meme/cat picture?
Modern web design is just so bad that they can't help themselves from this madness. A modern webpage needs 10+ iframes? Absolutely bullshit.
Well, considering I work at a car classifieds site, and there are usually about 20 photos that may be on any given page, and in the new search boxes will be even bigger, and with retina screens wanting 2x images, I'd say yes.. there are sites that really need that much space for images.
Not that all or most do.. but there are a lot of really nice sites that use a lot of large images for full content display. Other techniques can be used to reserve space and load when a section comes into view, but that's not always prudent.
Images are crucial, and optimizing your rendering is also becoming more crucial.. just the same, not everything on the web is text.. and I'd say people spend more time on the web looking at pictures than text, not to mention video.
Well considering you're an outlier, I probably shouldn't waste my time replying, but because you felt the need, I will reciprocate.
The average web page is what we're talking about here. Even your page which is demonstrably unaverage should not be hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of raw images.
Images are crucial, but running a car classified site, you should know how to properly demand load images and not just have the page load every image unscaled as soon as you hit the page. Thumbnailing was properly figured out in the 1990s, we've only added fanciness to it over the intervening decades. And even at "retina" sizes, thumbnails are a pittance in the memory budget for a webpage - if you went nuts and had 640x480 "retina thumbnails" for 20 cars, that's still only 24.6MB uncompressed. Feel free to rerun the math with your own numbers on your own time.
Since it needs repeating, we're talking about the average webpage coming in at 200MB. Give yourself some logos and a few other UI images and you're still talking nowhere near 50MB of decompressed images on the page. Yet, that's only a quarter of the page's size in memory. Somehow the DOM, Javascript engine, iframes and UI element layout are costing the other 150MB. And that's where I call bullshit. That's how nasty and tangled and batshit insane modern web design has become.
And we're not discussing video here at all, since video is probably one of most insane things about the modern web: either you're forced to use Flash which is basically like running an entire second browser rendering engine inside of your browser, just to download, decode, and play some video, or you're lucky and can use HTML5 at which point the overhead beyond audio/video decompression buffers (which people will be doing in Javascript soon enough, yay!), the setup for the OS's multimedia engine, and a small bit of DOM is inconsequential in comparison to the video stream itself. This makes the amount of space video takes on the client at best unpredictable and at worst, terrible to think about.
From the doc: "µMatrix does not guarantee that sites will work fine: it is for advanced users who can figure how to un-break sites, because essentially µMatrix is a firewall which works in block-all/allow-exceptionally mode out of the box: it is not unexpected that sites will break"
Workaround is to un-block whatever net requests which are causing a site to break. I can't make sense of "no work-around": unblock everything?
Edit: There is a scope-based switch to completely turn off matrix filtering.
Hi, I am well aware of the matrix and a fan (have been a HTTPSB user and now test uMatrix sometimes). I am also a contributor to https://gngr.info which has a Request Manager inspired by the matrix.
I was referring to a few issues I encounter in uMatrix which are not present in HTTPSB. I probably should log them; was not sure if uMatrix is ready for full-time use yet.
> Here’s a lovely bit of irony for you: Adblock Plus... is actually increasing the amount of memory used by your web browser, rather than decreasing it
It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.
This. The ongoing arms race between advertisers and adblockers damage content delivery, which is why I'm hoping for a solution which can replace ads in the near future. Maybe Google Contributor is onto something.
I would recommend trying the Reader view in Safari (I'm sure there's similar functionality in other browsers) to read articles without clutter. Works like a charm.
Reader is especially killer in mobile. A huge percentage of sites are incredible horrible on mobile-- and it isn't even the ads as much as all of the sharing, pull quotes and modals. Why the heck do people have modals for mobile? The insanity of it.
And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers.
Flashblock is not needed on Chrome - go to settings/advanced/content settings/plugins and select "click to play". Now flash will not run automatically. But you can decide to click on something and allow it to play if you want. Works great - no plugin needed.
Firefox differs from Chrome in that it will enable Flash for a whole page, rather than per-element. This means you still need an extension for blocking Flash ads on Flash video sites.
Firefox's model is better, I think. Plenty of sites use hidden flash videos for various utility functionality. How are you supposed to click on these hidden videos so that you can enable them?
What pushed me into using it was when comics.com (now gocomics.com; the official online source of a number of syndicated newspaper comics) had ads that would -minimize my browser-, display a pop up designed to look like a Windows system warning, that advised me to download some malware masquerading as a virus scanner.
Gocomics.com is a particularly good example - I find it surprising that they appear to accept such low quality (one weird old tip) and shady (download now/you have 1 new messages/etc) ads.
It can be tricky to balance between going broke and accidentally showing ads that some users dislike when you're using a large network like AdSense.
As someone with a browsing profile that isn't targeted by those kind of ads, I've found out second-hand that I've been running ads like that a few times. Trying to prune specific ads is an endless game of whack-a-mole that I've never been able to win, and disabling an entire category of ads just to prevent 1% of them from running is very tough on the bottom line.
Is actually very easy to solve. When someone wants to run an ad on your ad network. The vetting process should be more than "how much money you got?" If not for their own sakes anyway.
Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someone in the industry that aggressively hostile ads are ruining their industry rather than being a staple of it.
If they don't... Then I don't mind seeing that industry die.
It's not easy, because there isn't really much of a vetting process on most ad networks; everything possible is automated.
You may not mind seeing that industry die, but until you start paying for visiting websites, you'll have to amend that to say "I don't mind seeing the internet die".
Adsense could also try enforcing their policies once in a while too. I remember complaining about a series of shady "Download Now" ads earlier in the year, including full URL trails, etc, as required by the complaint process. Needless to say, not one damn was given and the ads continued unchecked.
THAT is why people install Adblock. Content owners crying butthurt because "Adblock hurts the sites you love" ignores that the sites you "love" can often just not be trusted not to accept ads that are shady, scummy, or worse. And there is no excuse for that. If your business revolves around spraying dog mess over people's windows, don't be surprised when people put up fences. You reap what you sow.
Honestly, I've only seen the "tricky" Download Now buttons on shady video websites (read: those that have all the episodes of Seinfeld on them).
Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen content (not technically stolen , but still), though...
> the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least
Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.
"they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads"
That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
> When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building.
There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.
I agree about the Times, but what in the story about the student paper constituted an ethical breach? The ads were not influencing copy, just allowing more to be printed.
That's bollocks - it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just advertising working with production to make the product. We're not talking about running advertorial or anything.
The papers I've worked on usually had a little flexibility in terms of extra copy or advertising to populate pages as required.
> it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just advertising working with production to make the product.
Well, that by definition would be considered an ethical violation at a paper like the Times. Not at a student paper, no, but at the New York Times, definitely.
No, it wouldn't. By definition, the advertising department has to talk to production to establish runs and page counts. I guarantee that this happens at the NYT, because a paper could not possibly be produced without this process.
They're not asking for any adjustment to the content, but for extra content, eg a feature piece that isn't tied to a particular date. Bear in mind that a full-page ad only covers one side of the paper so you need something for the reverse side, and newspapers are generally printed on folding sheets (ie 4 pages to a sheet), so that means 3 extra pages to be filled. It's not like the advertising department content is suggesting which content to use. Every newspaper has a variable pile of feature material whose exact publication date depends on the size of the print run, which is highly variable.
I'm curious about what you think the ethical breach here is. Advertising and editorial departments have to coordinate on practical matters like page layout.
No, that's entirely wrong. That's how the layout for a newspaper is established and the news budget (meaning what will fit in the paper) is set — it's mostly based on the size and requirements of the ads that will run in that day's paper. If you have a really important story (or a dearth of advertisers), you might add pages for editorial content without regard to ads and fill the layout holes with house ads, but the actual size of the paper is determined by your advertising. That's literally what's paying for the paper you're printing on.
I recall having bad experience with these things on (or via?) sourceforge. It's probably the main reason why sourceforge dropped to last resort for me.
cnet.com is a particularly egregious offender - I also stopped DLing anything from there because they started bundling things inside a wrapper of crapware.
I'd love an adblocker with a blacklist instead of whitelist so I could keep the ads on for the long tail of my browsing and remove them only on sites that go overboard.
I would be ok with some (not-too-intrusive) ads to make the internet go around. But every single website now links to 30 trackers that try to track and profile your every move on the internet, with no accountability anywhere.
In addition to the NSA, GCHQ, SVR RF, Mossad and other n-letter agencies, there are some 30 corporations that know everything about what and where you browse, keep that data not-very-secure, sell it to the highest bidder - any bidder, actually.
Yeah, the best example is YouTube - sometimes more than 100 elements shows up in AdBlock. There are afaik 3 blocks of ads + possible few trackers. Then what is the other 90?
This is what I've never understood about the people claiming that "they have no choice" or that they feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators. I don't use ABP, but it's really not that much effort to have to see bad ads on each "bad" domain _once_, and then blacklist and not have to deal with that entire domain and their bad ads ever again. I do something quite similar with a JS blacklist (mostly for poorly-coded newspapers where I can't even scroll until they fetch some non-main-content resources over JS).
> "feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators"
I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.
edit:
While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adblockers provide will probably win through.
O pretty much never click on ads, so ppc campaigns are worthless on me... as to ppv ads, most of them are obnoxious.. including on the main site I work for... I tend to whitelist it only because I need to make sure ads work.
That said, thankfully the new design has fewer ads, which should help a lot. It really just depends, it's easy to go down a rabbit whole with ads... but we get 90% if our ad revenue from 40% of our ads. So cutting out a lot changes the layout of income without nearly so much impact on revenue.
> I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.
This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine.
Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost.
Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.
Of course, but that's not relevant in the slightest. Independently of whether or not one is happy with non-ad monetization, the decision under discussion is:
"In the _absence_ of non-ad monetization for a given product, do I decide that the transaction (view ads, get the product) is not for me or do I unilaterally decide to take the product without compensation".
For me it was my first autoplaying video with sound in a pop-under.
Fuck that. You pull that shit, your whole industry can just go and get fucked. If you need to pull that shit to live, you need to fucking die.
This laptop has 8GB because Firefox with ABP is really fat. It's worth every byte. I use FF for personal stuff, Chromium for work; occasionally I load a non-work page in Chromium and am bloody horrified at what the web looks like with ads.
I've been using the web for pretty much as long as it has existed ('94) and I've always held off on using an adblocker mostly just as a test to see if I could. I finally broke down recently and started using abp on chrome. Sometimes pages will take a while to load but overall it's just such a better experience.
I should note that I have no qualms about blocking ads I would never click anyway. I don't harbor ridiculous puritanical notions that I must suffer in exchange for "free" content. Nor do I abide by the notion that anyone else has the right to sell my attention merely because they make content. Monetization should be cooperative, not coercive (and I also support content creators directly quite often).
>"* The main problem, though, is the process by which ABP actually blocks ads. Basically, ABP inserts a massive CSS stylesheet — occupying around 4MB of RAM — into every single webpage that you visit, stripping out the ads.*"
Isn't then the actual problem the way that Adblock+ removes the ads? Why not simply allow an API for a plugin to easily strip content from a site. If there is one already, then ABP should switch to it to reduce memory usage. If not, well then we should look at the actual culprits of this problem which is the browsers.
This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population. Looking at prices on tigerdirect you're dropping about $10 per gig (I'm sure apple charges $200 per gig for laptops, but they're price insensitive so don't matter). Anyway that provides a data point that ad blocking is worth at least $5 to the average user.
Also from a scaling perspective I wonder if its linear with tabs. There are various tribes of tab users and if its linear, a "normal user" who uses about 3 or so would scale down to approximately nil.
Three hundred tabs! Perhaps you might enjoy a cool feature called bookmarking. How do you keep track of them all? I get to 10 tabs before my Sheldon Cooper kicks in.
I use bookmarks too. The way it works is that while I read I open up links and make notes as I work my way through a page, by the time I'm done there is a few lines added to the notebook and maybe a few new tabs open. Little by little I exhaust the subject and at some point all the links on the subject are already visited. A bit like a human crawler. But the peaks in the middle are easily in the 100's of tabs. This is the most efficient way that I've found, bookmarking works but then you will still need to open those bookmarks later, much easier to just open the tab right away.
It's very much a paper analogy, highlight the interesting bits, add new stuff to the 'to read' stack, and when the 'to read' stack is empty you're done and the notes file contains the extracted information.
The note taking extension I use is called scrapbook and I couldn't live without it. I also use vertical tabs which makes it much easier to work with large numbers of tabs.
If you use both tree style tabs (which, apart from stacking tabs vertically, lets you collapse tab trees if you desire, and the trees are naturally topic-oriented) and tab groups (a built-in feature, good for splitting tabs by topic), you can easily have hundreds of tabs on the go.
Tabs are sort of a halfway house to bookmarks for me. They persist across browser restarts, but the fact that they are still open increases the chances that I'll consume the information in them.
bookmarks have been broken for quite a number of years now. UX is terrible and irrelevant to my workflow. I use two browsers with 100-150 tabs each and session management is lacking in web browsers.
I use the sidebar and tab grouping to keep track.
My solution was to add a 8GB stick of RAM with the usual disabling of javascript by default, no iframes allowed and no flash installed with adblock and fanboy's lists.
"This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population"
That's a reasonable conclusion only if people are aware that they're making the trade, which I suspect most users are not (otherwise this article would be rather boring)
I would suspect that most people don't come close to using all the ram in their computer in normal use. Whether they use adblock or not will not have any noticeable affect on the computer performance apart from the blocking of ads.
Not sure I agree with this. I tend to use way too many tabs, and therefore use up my memory. I was visiting my parents recently, and on their Mac they were leaving a lot of programs running (having closed the window but not exiting the program).
I think low-memory situations are the most likely explanation for slowdowns experienced by typical home or office users.
I guess the problem here is there is no way to cache this css injection. Maybe FF devs should do something about it instead of just whining about how an add-on is unable to handle the browser's shortcomings.
We could say the same about jQuery or bootstrap. You could have pages with many iFrames to other pages using the same js or css files. Right now these pages waste memory on the browsers too...
It's possible to make this case better in various ways. Pretty much all of those ways involve tradeoffs that increase memory usage or the amount of CPU time needed for CSS processing on normal pages without ABP involved.
It's not clear that we want to make those tradeoffs.
We _should_ of course make the changes that don't involve such a tradeoff. They're not trivial, and have significant opportunity costs, so haven't been the top priority for Gecko, unfortunately. You can tell how long https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77999 has been around, for example.
Just to be clear, what we're talking about here is a stylesheet which has about 13000 rules. The data structures used inside Gecko to optimize dynamic changes to documents without having to recompute all style for the document are about 200 bytes per style rule. So you get about 3MB per document, which can add up once you have a large number of documents. Ignoring ABP, having that many rules is not that common, and having that many rules in random dummy iframes sprinkled in your page is something that basically never happens.
The idea that you have to choose between a blocker or resources has become common unfortunately.
It's unfortunate because this idea being held as a premise by so many users kind of give a free pass to developers to not work harder to improve their code.
That's not why I started using Adblock. I started because the web became unusable on an older machine (5 years). The content wasn't any more sophisticated but it soaked up all the resources (CPU, RAM etc.) available. Imagine if you had a PDF reader that ran at 100% CPU and swapped all the time!
Indeed, the post you replied to is not based in actual reality. The entire foundation of the adblock industry was an aggressive attention-war plied by the ad business, where soon webpages were an armed conflict of aggressive ads each imposing even more of a tax.
No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.
I have an atom dual core small PC connected to my TV (it runs windows 7, yeah I know) and it's 'ok-ish' with performance, but starting a browser is a tad slow (chrome) and adblock makes it even slower as it's a plugin which is particularly slow to start. So I don't think blocking ads for performance reasons on slow machines is still cutting it if you take into account the performance penalty of abp.
All things considered however, it's IMHO a small price to pay for having the freedom to decide which content is fetched during page rendering and thus which services won't know whether you're visiting a certain webpage.
Resource conservation is one of the primary justifications that people cite for why they block ads: many ads have high level of animation, auto-play videos, and so on, that it lags down the experience, especially when a single page has a number of them competing for your attention.
I would be surprised if many would agree with accepting a performance hit for what ostensibly is your browser doing much less.
Sure using a blocker there's some expectation of resources used but in the case of Adblock it's ridiculously high and has really bad response to the number of iframes on a page.
I so agree! I have been annoyed at Firefox's resource hunger for a couple of years, now, and I have been aware of ABP being a major factor in that, too, but all in all, I think it is still worth it.
It is a sad reflection on the state of advertisement, but lacking any viable alternatives, using an adblocker (and NoScript) is pretty much non-negotiable to me. I am always apalled when I have to use a browser without an ad blocker installed.
It is not that I mind the ads in general, but too often, they are seriously distracting, and advertisers seem happy to go totally overboard. Imagine walking down the street and looking at blinking, flashing billboards. Imagine turning on your car and being greeted by an ad before the engine actually gets going. If ads outside the Internet were as annoying as they are online, we probably would have riots. (And that is ignoring the malware.)
Firefox is actually much less resource-hungry than Chrome, though that's largely because it doesn't (yet) use different processes for different tabs....
You get one process that crashes about as often as Chrome, though it consumes fewer resources and is much faster to restart (by not loading tabs unless you go to them).
The increasing crashiness of Chrome was one of the reasons I stopped using it.
This is just not true (your first claim that is, I would say people use it for multiple reasons). Adblock can certainly conserve resources in some cases. I know one webpage that loads 2-3 very resource-intensive banner ads every 30 seconds or so. I've seen websites that do a lot worse too.
I would just like to say I have never been a major user of Adblock. There are two reasons I have always been okay without it:
1. I feel somewhat bad about using a free service and preventing them from getting ad revenue
2. I'm really good at ignoring advertising of all kinds. People might say it still works subliminally or it has an effect on me and I just don't notice it, but I seriously don't believe this is true. With TV I used to mute it, change the channel, or do something else on my computer (I don't watch TV anymore, but I do admit I pay attention to ads if I join somebody else that watches it). With video ads on the internet I mute the audio and do something else on my computer. I basically have never intentionally clicked a banner ad, besides maybe some Facebook ads only because they seem to have access to my Amazon search history and show me items I'm already shopping for. Facebook is certainly a different beast in terms of advertising because it involves showing businesses that friends have liked, but I wouldn't say this has a very positive effect on my opinion about that business.
That said, I used Adblock many years ago around when it first came out to block YouTube ads but switched over to my muting/ignoring method because it did affect my conscience negatively, not so much because of YouTube/Google but because of other content I browsed on the web.
My setup recently has been to have Adblock installed on Firefox (I have always primarily used Chrome) for the instances where ads on a website are causing performance/experience issues. I have had Adblock installed (disabled) on Chrome because I have a Chromebook and have occasionally enabled it in order to visit the problem website on it (it is pretty much unusable on this Atom processor without Adblock). In the past several months I have noticed some very weird bad performance issues if I leave it enabled and use YouTube (maybe some other websites), not sure if this is due to changes in Adblock or if YouTube is intentionally breaking itself when it detects Adblock usage.
P.S. I'm not sure if any of this has anything to do with my previous post being downvoted, but I felt compelled to explain my reasons for using Adblock.
P.P.S. The website I am primarily talking about that has become nearly unusable and quite unstable due to ads is tinychat.com... My reasons for being okay with blocking them for this website are complicated and I'd rather not go into detail.
I'm using adblock type stuff to conserve resources. After finding out about the memory use my safari process size went from 6g to about 3.5g (i'm a heavy user of tabs). So yeah it comes in handy for resource conservation.
I can completely agree with this. I have a shitty machine with 2GB RAM and it's more often than not that it freezes almost completely when I compile bigg(ish) projects because it hits swap. I keep my Firefox open all the time (who doesn't?) and since I disabled AdBlock Plus this wasn't an issue anymore, and from 1.2GB Firefox's resident set size has plummeted to 500MB for me.
I prefer the hosts file way of redirecting ad/tracking domains to localhost. There are some nice hosts lists already compiled, which you can download to make your own. The resources problem simply went away when I started doing it this way.
I often send URL to printfriendly, most of the time it's light, readable and ads-free. Works with Firefox keyword tags (added manually) and with Chrom* urlbar (added automatically after a few visits).
what about forking chromium and integrating adblock directly in the browser? +removing all the google nonsense (like disabled cross domain security for some google domains)
What kind of fucked up site has 10+ iframes per page, let alone hundreds? And the example site he uses takes 530megs to load even without addons. I'm sensing the issue is somewhere other than Adblock Plus.
The "fucked up" case highlights the fact that ABP injects 14,000+ CSS rules (with only EasyList) in every page and iframes on a page.
You could as well ask "What kind of fucked up add-on unconditionally injects minimum of 14K+ CSS rules per page? (assuming no iframe)".
The original point is that the approach is detrimental to Firefox the browser regardless of that stress test, and I can understand very well Firefox developers wanting to raise the issue [1], as the browser ends up taking the blame when resources are abused.
No, they may render in iframes; iframes are certainly not a requirement for any of those features, and some (the original commenter included, I suspect) might consider them a heavy-handed approach to the problem.
iframes are the only unit of isolation on the web. Unless you want the like button you're hosting to have complete unrestricted access to your application's private data, then yeah, the like button needs to be in an iframe.
The Facebook like button tells you when you've already liked a page. It can also show you how many likes a page has, which a simple link cannot do.
The like button is just one of many of Facebook's components which can be embedded into pages; another being the comment box which shows your name and display picture but cannot allow the hosting page to get at that information unauthorized.
Well there are ways of presenting a personalised link, and a link containing a total number, without resorting to iframes, or even client-side code. I'm not seriously suggesting they be used, merely pointing out that the multiple-iframes functionality is not a default requirement of every page on the web, as the article suggests. Some studies have shown that articles with facebook like buttons receive fewer likes than those without.
FWIW, on a site I work for, we use a plain facebook like link without any personalisation because that's all we require, and we recognise that it respects our visitors' privacy more than the full-on iframe variant.
I use AdBlock on one machine and uBlock on the other, both in Opera. I've not noticed any real difference in unattended use, except uBlock seems to use less resources.
Well, ABP has "acceptable ads" turned on by default , but Adblock is pretty much just worse in every way.. Here's a few items from the changelog before they moved to a closed development mode
AdBlock 2.6.11 (2013-10-25): The AdBlock feature which sends a unique user ID to the AdBlock server every day has been extended. The server can now decide that the user should see a survey — this one is being opened in a new tab, immediately, no matter what the user is doing right now.
AdBlock 2.6.14 (2013-11-09): AdBlock won’t just send a unique user ID to its server now, it will also transmit user’s setting determining whether Google Search ads are allowed.
AdBlock 2.6.29 (2014-04-28): The “AdBlock custom filters” (AdBlock-specific filter list that is installed by default and listed as recommended) add a set of filters to whitelist Mixpanel tracking on the AdBlock website.
AdBlock 2.7 (2014-06-06): Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while
Ghostery is proprietary software, and it's reporting your usage back to trackers if you enable Ghostrank. You would be better protected running Privacy Badger by the EFF. It's Free Software, and it doesn't track you.
Privacy Badger isn't a recommendation to reduce CPU and memory usage. It's a recommendation to use in place of Ghostery. Because it is based on ABP, it may certainly have some of the bloat issues uBlock is trying to address.
Curious, I checked out the Task Manager for my Chromium install. Privacy Badger, although based on ABP code, is using substantially less memory than uBlock. Less than 1/2, actually.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
I suggest removing the icon and just putting a plain old checkbox with a label that says "Whitelist Site".
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! :)
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'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 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.
Sadly, the US-International keyboard on Windows does not implement a shortcut for the "micro" character (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560).
yup. Has been around since NT or maybe even longer..
It is having to open it every time you want to type the name of µSomething
Or has Richard Stallman convinced you that by mere repetition of the word free, free software is also moral software ?
I have no doubts what so ever that Opera is run by ethical people and it an ethical company.
In any case a security / privacy audit is a much more rigorous test.
The whole free software movement is based on a pathetic assumption that if you can't read 10 million lines of open code you have to suffer from paranoia.
http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/
At least for me, option-m is the µ key.
You didn't mention how or why. Personally, I hope Mozilla goes away and some other group comes along to fill the void because I don't think Mozilla consists of the right group of people to make anything worth using.
I'm not using any Mozilla browser until they learn how to respect the native operating system UI guidelines. Instead they're trying to build some lame HTML-driven UI experiment. No, I much prefer that Mozilla just go away and die.
If you're going to try to split hairs over "kill them" versus "go away and die", you're going to have trouble convincing people.
It's a good thing that people don't need much convincing since Firefox is apparently dying anyway. Good riddance I say :)
Your comment is almost worthwhile just for the irony in this.
Tabbed browsing basically hijacks window management away from the OS. Tabs are always implemented customly in-app (UI break) - and break the UX of window finding, switching, etc. (doubly annoying in a tiling WM, btw). That's all browsers.
> Personally, I hope Mozilla goes away and some other group comes along to fill the void [...]
> No, I much prefer that Mozilla just go away and die.
Yeah, they're just squatting on that cyberspace and not letting other people through.
Plus, FF is bundled/pre-installed everywhere nowadays; sickening! Your hatred is well placed.</s>
Mozilla's problem has more to do with the fact that by using non-standard chrome around their HTML engine, they cause many little breakages like improper keyboard acceleration.
> Yeah, they're just squatting on that cyberspace and not letting other people through. Plus, FF is bundled/pre-installed everywhere nowadays...blah.
It's really easy to make a point when you create an really flammable straw-man to represent the other side isn't it?
In any case, it's certainly a better to just make up reasons why you could possibly disagree than trying to understand the actual point of view.
Why don't you just ignore them? Why do you want thousands of people to lose their job and why do you want to take away an open source software that's liked by millions of users?
Makes sense.
[1] https://github.com/Deathamns/uBlock/tree/ports/xpi
I've used it every day since starting a new job seven months ago and I've not noticed any issues with it.
Google helped to close the gap by making Chrome more bloated and much more unstable.
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.
Thank you :)
----- EDIT
I reinstalled the plugin and the problems went away. So far looks good.
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:
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'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.
EDIT: ( Chrome 39.0.2171.95 (64-bit), linux )
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.
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
n.b. Firefox results from experimental patch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802509
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).
Note: No automatic updates with this unofficial build.
I usually wouldn't notice a broken website with ABP, but with ublock I see something wrong at least once a week.
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.
this would explain why i've never considered chrome to be a memory hog.. (although, all my machines have a lot of memory, too)
I'm using https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock to replace Adblock plus since last week.
Do all designers work on their iExpensiveMachine and don't care about other peoples lower-end machines/phones/tables/whatever?
Also, last I checked, most phones have 1 to 2 gigs of RAM, and they're not keeping many tabs in memory. If the RAM is there, using it is not really an issue (until you start getting into the whole virtual memory stuff I guess)
If your webpage has that many images, you need to redesign your webpage. An uncompressed image at my screen resolution is 21MB - your webpage needs ten times that in memory? For maybe 500 words of prose and some meme/cat picture?
Modern web design is just so bad that they can't help themselves from this madness. A modern webpage needs 10+ iframes? Absolutely bullshit.
Not that all or most do.. but there are a lot of really nice sites that use a lot of large images for full content display. Other techniques can be used to reserve space and load when a section comes into view, but that's not always prudent.
Images are crucial, and optimizing your rendering is also becoming more crucial.. just the same, not everything on the web is text.. and I'd say people spend more time on the web looking at pictures than text, not to mention video.
The average web page is what we're talking about here. Even your page which is demonstrably unaverage should not be hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of raw images.
Images are crucial, but running a car classified site, you should know how to properly demand load images and not just have the page load every image unscaled as soon as you hit the page. Thumbnailing was properly figured out in the 1990s, we've only added fanciness to it over the intervening decades. And even at "retina" sizes, thumbnails are a pittance in the memory budget for a webpage - if you went nuts and had 640x480 "retina thumbnails" for 20 cars, that's still only 24.6MB uncompressed. Feel free to rerun the math with your own numbers on your own time.
Since it needs repeating, we're talking about the average webpage coming in at 200MB. Give yourself some logos and a few other UI images and you're still talking nowhere near 50MB of decompressed images on the page. Yet, that's only a quarter of the page's size in memory. Somehow the DOM, Javascript engine, iframes and UI element layout are costing the other 150MB. And that's where I call bullshit. That's how nasty and tangled and batshit insane modern web design has become.
And we're not discussing video here at all, since video is probably one of most insane things about the modern web: either you're forced to use Flash which is basically like running an entire second browser rendering engine inside of your browser, just to download, decode, and play some video, or you're lucky and can use HTML5 at which point the overhead beyond audio/video decompression buffers (which people will be doing in Javascript soon enough, yay!), the setup for the OS's multimedia engine, and a small bit of DOM is inconsequential in comparison to the video stream itself. This makes the amount of space video takes on the client at best unpredictable and at worst, terrible to think about.
Edit: To clarify, the above is in comparison to HTTPSB.
Workaround is to un-block whatever net requests which are causing a site to break. I can't make sense of "no work-around": unblock everything?
Edit: There is a scope-based switch to completely turn off matrix filtering.
I was referring to a few issues I encounter in uMatrix which are not present in HTTPSB. I probably should log them; was not sure if uMatrix is ready for full-time use yet.
It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.
I would recommend trying the Reader view in Safari (I'm sure there's similar functionality in other browsers) to read articles without clutter. Works like a charm.
But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.
http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...
http://unchecky.com/
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-p...
Though I just never bothered installing Flash. If I need Flash for a site, I use Chrome (which comes with Flash embedded, I believe).
As someone with a browsing profile that isn't targeted by those kind of ads, I've found out second-hand that I've been running ads like that a few times. Trying to prune specific ads is an endless game of whack-a-mole that I've never been able to win, and disabling an entire category of ads just to prevent 1% of them from running is very tough on the bottom line.
There should be an easier way of black/white listing certain types of ads when setting up adsense.
Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someone in the industry that aggressively hostile ads are ruining their industry rather than being a staple of it.
If they don't... Then I don't mind seeing that industry die.
You may not mind seeing that industry die, but until you start paying for visiting websites, you'll have to amend that to say "I don't mind seeing the internet die".
I think you'll find in the absence of one solution, another presents itself.
As an example, github is not an ad based service, nor is it some sorta bait and switch. It's terms are reasonable and is generally useful to everyone.
That is ridiculously dramatic to say "The internet will die"
It's just the shitty part that will die.
THAT is why people install Adblock. Content owners crying butthurt because "Adblock hurts the sites you love" ignores that the sites you "love" can often just not be trusted not to accept ads that are shady, scummy, or worse. And there is no excuse for that. If your business revolves around spraying dog mess over people's windows, don't be surprised when people put up fences. You reap what you sow.
Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen content (not technically stolen , but still), though...
http://marc.durdin.net/2012/08/rant-of-the-day-the-big-green...
Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.
That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building.
There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.
The papers I've worked on usually had a little flexibility in terms of extra copy or advertising to populate pages as required.
Well, that by definition would be considered an ethical violation at a paper like the Times. Not at a student paper, no, but at the New York Times, definitely.
What possible ethical issue is there?
I'm curious about what you think the ethical breach here is. Advertising and editorial departments have to coordinate on practical matters like page layout.
Not on a computer right now to try it out for myself, but it sounds like an interesting approach.
In addition to the NSA, GCHQ, SVR RF, Mossad and other n-letter agencies, there are some 30 corporations that know everything about what and where you browse, keep that data not-very-secure, sell it to the highest bidder - any bidder, actually.
Do you like that? I don't.
You could blacklist them, rather than universally denying revenue.
I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.
edit: While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adblockers provide will probably win through.
That said, thankfully the new design has fewer ads, which should help a lot. It really just depends, it's easy to go down a rabbit whole with ads... but we get 90% if our ad revenue from 40% of our ads. So cutting out a lot changes the layout of income without nearly so much impact on revenue.
This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine.
Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost.
Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.
"In the _absence_ of non-ad monetization for a given product, do I decide that the transaction (view ads, get the product) is not for me or do I unilaterally decide to take the product without compensation".
I don't want to download a trojan from a malicious ad-server. Not even once.
Fuck that. You pull that shit, your whole industry can just go and get fucked. If you need to pull that shit to live, you need to fucking die.
This laptop has 8GB because Firefox with ABP is really fat. It's worth every byte. I use FF for personal stuff, Chromium for work; occasionally I load a non-work page in Chromium and am bloody horrified at what the web looks like with ads.
I should note that I have no qualms about blocking ads I would never click anyway. I don't harbor ridiculous puritanical notions that I must suffer in exchange for "free" content. Nor do I abide by the notion that anyone else has the right to sell my attention merely because they make content. Monetization should be cooperative, not coercive (and I also support content creators directly quite often).
>"* The main problem, though, is the process by which ABP actually blocks ads. Basically, ABP inserts a massive CSS stylesheet — occupying around 4MB of RAM — into every single webpage that you visit, stripping out the ads.*"
Isn't then the actual problem the way that Adblock+ removes the ads? Why not simply allow an API for a plugin to easily strip content from a site. If there is one already, then ABP should switch to it to reduce memory usage. If not, well then we should look at the actual culprits of this problem which is the browsers.
With ABP:
Without: Both after a complete stop and start of the browser, restoring every tab by activating it.Also from a scaling perspective I wonder if its linear with tabs. There are various tribes of tab users and if its linear, a "normal user" who uses about 3 or so would scale down to approximately nil.
It's very much a paper analogy, highlight the interesting bits, add new stuff to the 'to read' stack, and when the 'to read' stack is empty you're done and the notes file contains the extracted information.
The note taking extension I use is called scrapbook and I couldn't live without it. I also use vertical tabs which makes it much easier to work with large numbers of tabs.
https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Main_Page
Edit:
also https://github.com/343max/TabHibernation great to save resources when processing too many tabs. also, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac... for snapshots in case you do crash
otherwise, Readability
Tabs are sort of a halfway house to bookmarks for me. They persist across browser restarts, but the fact that they are still open increases the chances that I'll consume the information in them.
My solution was to add a 8GB stick of RAM with the usual disabling of javascript by default, no iframes allowed and no flash installed with adblock and fanboy's lists.
That's a reasonable conclusion only if people are aware that they're making the trade, which I suspect most users are not (otherwise this article would be rather boring)
I think low-memory situations are the most likely explanation for slowdowns experienced by typical home or office users.
We could say the same about jQuery or bootstrap. You could have pages with many iFrames to other pages using the same js or css files. Right now these pages waste memory on the browsers too...
It's not clear that we want to make those tradeoffs.
We _should_ of course make the changes that don't involve such a tradeoff. They're not trivial, and have significant opportunity costs, so haven't been the top priority for Gecko, unfortunately. You can tell how long https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77999 has been around, for example.
Just to be clear, what we're talking about here is a stylesheet which has about 13000 rules. The data structures used inside Gecko to optimize dynamic changes to documents without having to recompute all style for the document are about 200 bytes per style rule. So you get about 3MB per document, which can add up once you have a large number of documents. Ignoring ABP, having that many rules is not that common, and having that many rules in random dummy iframes sprinkled in your page is something that basically never happens.
Disclaimer: I'm a style system module peer for Gecko, and I've looked in quite some detail at the ABP sitation here; see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c20 and following.
It's unfortunate because this idea being held as a premise by so many users kind of give a free pass to developers to not work harder to improve their code.
No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.
All things considered however, it's IMHO a small price to pay for having the freedom to decide which content is fetched during page rendering and thus which services won't know whether you're visiting a certain webpage.
So...Acrobat Reader?
I would be surprised if many would agree with accepting a performance hit for what ostensibly is your browser doing much less.
It is a sad reflection on the state of advertisement, but lacking any viable alternatives, using an adblocker (and NoScript) is pretty much non-negotiable to me. I am always apalled when I have to use a browser without an ad blocker installed.
It is not that I mind the ads in general, but too often, they are seriously distracting, and advertisers seem happy to go totally overboard. Imagine walking down the street and looking at blinking, flashing billboards. Imagine turning on your car and being greeted by an ad before the engine actually gets going. If ads outside the Internet were as annoying as they are online, we probably would have riots. (And that is ignoring the malware.)
And I wouldn't say that's the 'point'. Chrome groups tabs into fewer processes most of the time.
Personally I'm much more excited about the possibility of a compacting GC.
The increasing crashiness of Chrome was one of the reasons I stopped using it.
Also it still takes a nontrivial amount of time to not-load a lot of tabs.
1. I feel somewhat bad about using a free service and preventing them from getting ad revenue
2. I'm really good at ignoring advertising of all kinds. People might say it still works subliminally or it has an effect on me and I just don't notice it, but I seriously don't believe this is true. With TV I used to mute it, change the channel, or do something else on my computer (I don't watch TV anymore, but I do admit I pay attention to ads if I join somebody else that watches it). With video ads on the internet I mute the audio and do something else on my computer. I basically have never intentionally clicked a banner ad, besides maybe some Facebook ads only because they seem to have access to my Amazon search history and show me items I'm already shopping for. Facebook is certainly a different beast in terms of advertising because it involves showing businesses that friends have liked, but I wouldn't say this has a very positive effect on my opinion about that business.
That said, I used Adblock many years ago around when it first came out to block YouTube ads but switched over to my muting/ignoring method because it did affect my conscience negatively, not so much because of YouTube/Google but because of other content I browsed on the web.
My setup recently has been to have Adblock installed on Firefox (I have always primarily used Chrome) for the instances where ads on a website are causing performance/experience issues. I have had Adblock installed (disabled) on Chrome because I have a Chromebook and have occasionally enabled it in order to visit the problem website on it (it is pretty much unusable on this Atom processor without Adblock). In the past several months I have noticed some very weird bad performance issues if I leave it enabled and use YouTube (maybe some other websites), not sure if this is due to changes in Adblock or if YouTube is intentionally breaking itself when it detects Adblock usage.
P.S. I'm not sure if any of this has anything to do with my previous post being downvoted, but I felt compelled to explain my reasons for using Adblock.
P.P.S. The website I am primarily talking about that has become nearly unusable and quite unstable due to ads is tinychat.com... My reasons for being okay with blocking them for this website are complicated and I'd rather not go into detail.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bluhell-firew...
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
You could as well ask "What kind of fucked up add-on unconditionally injects minimum of 14K+ CSS rules per page? (assuming no iframe)".
The original point is that the approach is detrimental to Firefox the browser regardless of that stress test, and I can understand very well Firefox developers wanting to raise the issue [1], as the browser ends up taking the blame when resources are abused.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266
The like button is just one of many of Facebook's components which can be embedded into pages; another being the comment box which shows your name and display picture but cannot allow the hosting page to get at that information unauthorized.
FWIW, on a site I work for, we use a plain facebook like link without any personalisation because that's all we require, and we recognise that it respects our visitors' privacy more than the full-on iframe variant.
Remember: ABP = Shit. AB = Good.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
I use AdBlock on one machine and uBlock on the other, both in Opera. I've not noticed any real difference in unattended use, except uBlock seems to use less resources.
AdBlock 2.6.11 (2013-10-25): The AdBlock feature which sends a unique user ID to the AdBlock server every day has been extended. The server can now decide that the user should see a survey — this one is being opened in a new tab, immediately, no matter what the user is doing right now.
AdBlock 2.6.14 (2013-11-09): AdBlock won’t just send a unique user ID to its server now, it will also transmit user’s setting determining whether Google Search ads are allowed.
AdBlock 2.6.29 (2014-04-28): The “AdBlock custom filters” (AdBlock-specific filter list that is installed by default and listed as recommended) add a set of filters to whitelist Mixpanel tracking on the AdBlock website.
AdBlock 2.7 (2014-06-06): Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
Privacy Badger most likely has the same issue that this article is talking about.
https://imgur.com/ScBfmjS