Comment by FoodWThrow
2 years ago
Why is it only trying to detect ads when the user agent is Firefox?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17zdpkl/this_behav...
2 years ago
Why is it only trying to detect ads when the user agent is Firefox?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17zdpkl/this_behav...
Probably because there are other methods for Chrome that don't apply to Firefox.
Like when I noticed that some sites did some URL rewriting trickery on Firefox and others browsers, but not for Chrome. The trick is to show you the proper URL the link points to, but as you click, it is substituted for one that is a redirection, for tracking purposes (ex: "https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http:://actualsite..."). On Chrome, they don't need to use these tricks as the browser supports the "ping" attribute of links, so they can do their tracking without rewriting the URL.
This kind of BS is why I don't ever click on links directly. I copy/paste them instead, so I can examine and trim them. Often, the actual link is through some sort of redirection service and I need to copy/paste the text the browser shows for the link rather than the actual link.
There's so much trickery and nonsense around this stuff that no link is safe to just click on.
Check out the Privacy Badger extension. I believe it removes the tracking stuff from (some) links.
4 replies →
I've also noticed this behavior popping up a lot lately, but I had no idea why. The URL with tracking included was still blocked by uBlock Origin, but having to manually copy-paste the relevant portion was an annoyance.
Thanks for the context!
Check out ClearURLs extension.
Wow, that is pretty disgusting behavior.
The web developer interprets missing features as damage and polyfills around them.
I have no idea because I didn't experience anything like that both in Chrome and in Firefox (both with uBO though). But I'm confident that this particular code is not related to the actual slowdown, if it did happen to some Firefox users, because I received the same code even in Chrome.
Does Firefox allow a wider range of plugins, including adblockers?
Yes, Chrome is severely hobbled in this by comparison.
Yes, there are plenty. You can have a look here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
This is just anecdote, but sometimes (especially when I'm on slower internet) Safari + AdGuard will have glitch [0] on YouTube. Never happened with Firefox + Ublock Origin.
[0] Unable to press play and showing image with Ad instead.
I experience the same glitch and i like it because you can just reload the page (cmd-r) and then the video starts so if you're used to it you can skip ads within less than a second and you dont get annoyed by the ad sound/video, just an image.
I would suspect because Google can do the detection in Chrome itself, but not in Firefox.