Alaknár

ublock has many tools to defuse tracking mechanisms (…)

Fair. What I still don’t understand is the level of impact this has. Considering I’m not being tracked in any noticeable way, or that I’m not seeing any ads, I just don’t get why people in this post are acting like uBO being blocked is a significant downgrade to the user experience.

I’m starting to think that you might be not arguing in good faith.

Sounds like someone not arguing in good faith would say, if anything. How is me trying to understand the impact of the mechanisms used by uBO vs those used by, say, Ghostery, "arguing in bad faith? WTF are you talking about?

you should look up the wast documentation of uBlock Origin and you will get all the answers

I will not. Because I get the technical details, a bunch of people already talked about them here. But nobody was able to tell me what do these features actually do compared to other adblocks.

of course you didn’t. on youtube ads are not served from different domains. have you ever heard about pihole not being able to block youtube ads? that’s why. every ad is literally a video uploaded to youtube, it is even possible to watch them as videos, with their own video page.

So it’s not a privacy issue, it’s an ad issue. Which doesn’t show, it’s blocked.

What does uBO do different here?

or when ads start reappearing. the needs to wait for the next addon update, which may take multiple days.

Just FYI - that only happens to me on YouTube every once in a while. Like, three times this year for a day or two.

OK, that’s a good write-up of what capabilities are missing. What I don’t see there is the end-user impact.

Ads are blocked nicely, so that’s not the issue. I’m assuming that some privacy related stuff falls through the cracks?

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?

this is false. and instead of just claiming so, here is proof: there are built-in (but disabled by default) blocklists specialized for cookie prompts and such

Let me rephrase then: cookie prompt blocking capabilities are not tied to the Manifest version (clearly, as exemplified by things like Ghostery). uBO could easily switch to Mv3 and still do those things.

and as I said, uBO is not just an ad blocker, so saying xy ad blocker can replace it well is false.

But we’re discussing the ad-blocking features, because these are the ones affected by Mv3, no?

All these other features exist and are perfectly fine in other extensions.

except that not really. Because again, the required browser APIs were removed, and even before that, privacy badger was not so effective

Define “not so effective”. What’s “effectiveness” in this case?

everything is effected that:

• needs to block network requests, including loading of certain site scripts
• depends on an up to date list of things to block

OK, but again: what’s the difference for the end-user? Does it impact resources utilisation? Website loading times? Reactivity? I don’t see a difference in how my uBO browser behaves vs how my Ghostery browser behaves, so what am I losing because of the Mv3 switch?

You see it in the edge cases I presume, how fast it reacts to Youtube nonsense and such

Reacting to YT’s attempts to block the ad-blockers faster is a good advantage, but it’s not something inherent in the Manifest version, is it?

It is blocked by Google for a reason I would think.

Well, yes, the reason being: it didn’t switch to Manifest v3. Just like AdNauseam. BTW - both can still be installed, you just need to manually pull the .zip file and import it.

Not true since 2017 (and even before that it was kinda’ disputed). The adblock part of the business went to Cliqz, a German privacy-focused browser, backed by Mozilla.

I have downvoted your comment because it’s repeating a popular myth, nothing against you personally.

What capabilities did it lose? Like: what user-facing consequences are there of that lack of functionality?

Again: I haven’t been using uBlock for a while now, I don’t see any ads on any websites, including those within YouTube videos. So - what am I missing for not using uBO?

Ghostery blocks trackers. So does AdGuard. So does Privacy Badger. All of them work perfectly fine regardless of Manifest version.

So? What’s the issue here, exactly?

I started using Ghostery because it had a cookies auto-reject mechanism. The ad-blocking stuff came in later, which I didn’t even realise, but I installed it first on a new device, did some browsing, noticed there’s no ads, and thought “well, good enough”.

I do miss the custom HTML-element cutting, though.

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?

only ads on big sites or ads by big providers are blocked

This is false.

cookie prompts

Not part of any adblocker. Some, like Ghostery, have a separate mechanism to auto-reject these. I switched from uBO to Ghostery because uBO wasn’t doing anything against those.

data mining and hardware fingerprinting cannot even be thwarted anymore.

That’s not an adblock feature and there are hundreds of other extensions that handle that, like PrivacyBadger. Ghostery says it also handles trackers, but I haven’t verified that.

I would rather see ads (topic based) than give up my privacy, and the complete uBlock Origin is very useful for privacy too.

Look up tools made specifically for it, then. Also: privacy related stuff is not affected by Manifest v3, no?

Well, considering I’m using a different adblock and I just… Do not see any ads on the web, how do you measure the efficiency of uBlock to be better? Resource consumption?

Eye-dropper and HTML cuts are not affected by Manifest v3, no?

Ghostery does the same stuff. Granted, it can’t cut out HTML elements as you see fit, but that’s a feature I haven’t needed in over a decade.

It still blocks ads, what else does it need?

Is it? I don’t know. I know it’s the most recommended one, but I’ve tried uBlock, AdGuard and now I’m using Ghostery, and I honestly don’t see a difference.

Yes, that’s my point. People are crying here over uBlock, like Google killed their family dog, but clearly it’s possible to have the ad-blockers work perfectly fine even on Manifest v3.

have a million prompts all over zillions of sites”.

I’m using Ghostery to automatically reject all of those. They pop-in and almost immediately disappear.

Define “lower efficiency”, please.