You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2.
I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?
It’s inferior AFAICT because the API is more limited, and it looks an awful lot like the world’s biggest ad company (Google) has arranged that specifically to be less effective for ad and tracker blocking.
It's also inferior because the filter lists for requests must be hardcoded and can only be changed through extension updates, which Google (or whoever owns the browser's extension store) can delay or block at their discretion.
This also means users can't install their own filters, which was widely used when YouTube began aggressively bypassing adblockers.
>It's also inferior because the filter lists for requests must be hardcoded and can only be changed through extension updates, which Google (or whoever owns the browser's extension store) can delay or block at their discretion.
This thread is about safari, and its declarative ad blocking API doesn't have this issue.
Ublock origin is more than an adblocker. You can target entire site elements you don’t like loading. Screw it, delete the entire youtube recommendations sidebar and live in bliss. Is it possible to learn this power? Not from a Jedi.
You can roll your own filter regex to catch future similar elements as well in ublock origin. Way more powerful. I’d figure HN users would want the actual reigns.
I use 1Blocker with Safari, and I create custom regex/css blocking rules all the time, and as a bonus, they auto sync between desktop and mobile. Also, the rules update independent of the extension. I'm not aware of experiencing the purported downsides some folks dogmatically cite in this thread. I'm happy to learn the error of my ways, but only if it's real.
They adopted declarativeWebRequest as the exclusive option for "content blocking" years ago, which requires an actual extension update to change blocked URLs. It allows for some optimizations that look nice on benchmarks, but in reality uBO makes the web faster by getting rid of a lot of tracking requests and javascript. Nobody in the ad industry cared, because Safari's share is so small and plastering Safari users that use this basic adblocking in ads probably would've made them move elsewhere.
Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
You may have reasons to require separate profiles. However, keep in mind that firefox multi-account containers [1] address many of the use cases for separate profiles in chrome with an IMHO better UX.
Pi holes don't swallow everything, in stream ads like on Youtube and Twitch and served by the ___domain all make it through the Pi hole approach. It also doesn't allow you to turn it off for a particular page or site either, if you want to allow ads on Phronix you can't do it without enabling that advertiser everywhere since it lacks the context of the DNS calls.
The advantage is it works with every browser on every device, its network wide and it blocks a tonne of other calls that aren't made by the browser such as telemetry.
Also plugging Firefox mobile here if you do any web browsing from mobile. You can add uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile, which you can't do on Chrome mobile.
From a quick web search, while it supports installing firefox plugins they may not all work as expected due to limitations/differences in the browser APIs, and ublock origin fails to work properly as a result.
So IMHO mozilla are probably choosing "Let's not" rather than "Let's deliver a broken experience"
As one user on reddit said - "Orion supports Firefox and Chrome extensions. Yes. And you can install them. Yes. Do they work, though? No, most of them don't. Orion is lying about their extension support. "
Safari is limited in the same way as Chrome manifest v3, allowing basically only a URL blacklist. They're crippled compared to uBlock Origin's various other blocking capabilities.
I’m also going to add for now you can still manually install ublock on the latest chrome by downloading it from GitHub and installing it under manage extensions. For now.
Use a third-party browser with integrated ad blocker - then all this Manifest v3 stuff doesn't matter even if the browser is Blink-based. One example is Vivaldi.
Pi-Hole (or better yet AdGuard) is still desirable because it will block ads for other apps and devices. Defense in depth.
I have found a really amazing way to block ads on websites. It's by not visiting them in the first place. Imagine how well this could work. It's sort of like abstinence and chastity rather than contraception. "Oh you know I love you, let me just have a little for free, and not worry so much about consequences, baby!"
Also I found this amazing hack for YouTube and YT Music. I am nearly hesitant to write it down here, lest everyone try it out. I figured out that if I pay them like $20/mo, all the ads disappear from both apps! Can you believe what suckers they are! I fear that this loophole may be closed soon, but for now I'm living high on the hog!
Nothing wrong with paying for a commercial service. I rather pay with money than indirectly by losing time and being annoyed in the best case and manipulated in the worst case.
With the sites that I choose to not visit (Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram) this is not possible, as the attempted manipulation of users is an integral part of the business model.
Also, your attempt of being funny is not working, neither is your metaphor.
No, my friend, what is reprehensible to me is freeloaders who believe that they can just play cat-and-mouse wars by installing software and then scrape whatever web content they want, without giving the company their due expected revenue.
This is cheating of the cheapest cheapskate order. It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like". Perhaps you feel a little guilty, and needed to take a dig at my comment tone in turn?
I can understand needing to protect/defend yourself against malice and undue surprises. The web is wild and wooly. I can understand how intrusive and troublesome ads can become. But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone -- raising prices, jacking up the cost to deliver and maintain sites, and in fact, you're to blame for ads becoming more intrusive and more ubiquitous, because how else are they going to get past your damn blockers???
But if you're going to visit a site, and you want to see/read their stuff, then I feel it would be ethical to engage with them on a level playing field. Because how badly do you want their stuff? If the ads turn you off so much, then don't go to the site. I simply find 98% of the Web is not worth my time after this calculus. News sites don't really report news anyway; why should I waste my time.
All this Hacker News ethic of cheating with ad blockers and yt-dlp and posting archive.is links to "help you bypass this evil paywall" is just ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime. It is not working and it is most definitely not funny!
> "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like".
That's the deal. Publishing something on the public internet does not entitle anyone to decide if/how I choose to consume that content. There's no reason to complain about people who choose to not download a bunch of ads, or those who replace fonts, or those who use custom CSS or userscripts, or those who use a screen reader, etc. If you publish something to the internet be grateful that anyone consumes any part of it. That's all you'd be due. "expected revenue" is not a right. It's not ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime, because it isn't a crime at all.
> But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone
Ads are "ruining it for everyone". If ads were all respectful, honest, safe, and non-obtrusive, ad blockers wouldn't have so many fans. The ads shot first. Blaming people now for making ads "worse" has strong "look at what you made me do!" vibes.
Me personally, I think it's hilarious. It's only unfortunate that it doesn't translate to any significant economic harm to those companies, but every little bit helps, so do your part and help your neighbor block ads, as well.
“Won’t somebody pleeease think of the billionaires!!” - you.
As a side note, your disdainful tone is incredibly grating and will likely convince others to ignore your points out of principle, which should go against your goal if your goal is to actually change people’s minds.
But I suspect your goal is to feel smug and fake morally superior, as you’re not acting in good faith. So congratulations, I’d suggest some personal introspection is in order.
||It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like"||
It's MY metered bandwidth that I'm paying for - that a site loads 50MB of trash javascript when I merely clicked on a link for a 300kB PNG is an absolutely outrageous strain on my resources, not to mention a total waste for that site whose devs obviously know nothing about optimization.
Well that's awfully self-centered of you. It's their resources too, isn't it? It's them keeping the lights on; redundant reliable Internet connection; carrying insurance, rent; paying devs to write JS; data center storing that PNG you wanna get at so desperately. That PNG that belongs to them and they are choosing to give to you with whatever other collateral data belongs in the transaction?
If you feel that they're exploiting your resources then you have a right to decline to use theirs, right? You don't need to offer your resources to them. It was a voluntary click, a freewill request? Or just hack the shit out of them, and fuck your social contract?
If you disdain this provider so much that you criticize their developers and wish to connect to it on your own terms, then perhaps you're better off not doing it at all. In fact, anyone using adblockers or other "defensive ware" should carefully pore over all Terms of Service, EULAs and AUPs, because you could eventually be found in breach, and then perhaps they'll just nip you in the bud, at the Cloudflare level, and you won't have to worry much about ads at all!
You all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles.
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section