Firefox says it will keep supporting uBlock Origin even as Microsoft Edge and other Chromium browsers phase it out under Manifest V3.

Firefox says it will keep supporting uBlock Origin even as Microsoft Edge and other Chromium browsers phase it out under Manifest V3.

  • Alaknár@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    OK, sure, but what are the actual, real-life consequences of that?

    I don’t see any ads online. So ad-blocking still works. What doesn’t work?

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      OK, sure, but what are the actual, real-life consequences of that?

      uBlock Origin and any other effective content blocker had that as its most important weapon, without exaggeration. it has many other techniques for specific circumstances, but preventing to load the ad scripts, and preventing network requests that send back data to the advertising company, are universally a powerful tool.

      I don’t see any ads online. So ad-blocking still works. What doesn’t work?

      you don’t see them because addons can still insert unlimited cosmetic tweaks. CSS snippets that make specific elements hidden. but the ads are still loaded, consuming network and CPU resources, and the ad framework still collects usage, interaction and device data.

      also, the addons now can’t regularly update the lists even for what cosmetic tweaks to apply. google has decided it does not allow addons in their addon store that fetch filterlists from the network. this means these addons need to embed the lists in themselves. list updates are released much less frequently, and can have several days delay while google decides whether the updated version contains something malicious or otherwise unacceptable to their policies. compared to that, uBlock Origin on Firefox updates the lists every day by default, with no delay, as it fetches the lists directly from their websites.

      • Alaknár@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        23 hours ago

        uBlock Origin and any other effective content blocker had that as its most important weapon, without exaggeration. it has many other techniques for specific circumstances, but preventing to load the ad scripts, and preventing network requests that send back data to the advertising company, are universally a powerful tool.

        You’re just repeating what you already said.

        My question is: since there are (and always have been) other privacy-oriented extensions (e.g. Privacy Badger, Ghostery) and they still work just as they always have, what is the advantage of specifically using uBO with Mv2?

        you don’t see them because addons can still insert unlimited cosmetic tweaks. CSS snippets that make specific elements hidden. but the ads are still loaded, consuming network and CPU resources, and the ad framework still collects usage, interaction and device data.

        I just loaded up YouTube and didn’t see a single call to a known ad server, so this seems to be false.

        Also: the CPU usage of loading even a couple MB-worth of ads is negligible compared to the overall resource hungriness of Chromium.

        (…) list updates are released much less frequently (…)

        I did notice that every now and again YouTube would block me from using it due to detecting the adblocker, but is that an inherent disadvantage of Mv3? And why wouldn’t the extension developers then embed the updated filter lists and just release them as extension updates? Does Google limit the frequency of those?