Comment by crazygringo

1 year ago

Fortunately, at least so far, uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine on Chrome.

I know people have made a lot of arguments as to why it might not be as good in theory, or why things might change in the future. But so far, ever since I was forced to switch, I have seen exactly zero difference. Lists are updated often enough that I haven't seen anything get through. Adblocking works on YouTube. If anything, pages seem to load even a little faster. I've had no complaints.

41 comments

crazygringo

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culi  1 year ago

If you have fast internet you will probably not really notice the difference

The difference between v2 and v3 is that v3 will no longer allow uBlock to modify network calls. Previously one of the big savings of a adblocker is they can stop the calls from being made AT ALL. That means less tracking AND less of your internet bandwidth being used

Both v2 and v3 can block the actual elements from your screen so you will probably still not see most of the ads. But you will still be able to be tracked and your data will still be used in the background

  • crazygringo  1 year ago

    That's wrong.

    V3 doesn't allow network calls to be modified, for privacy reasons. It still allows them to be blocked, which is how the adblocking works in the first place.

    Contrary to what you say, v3 does block the tracking in the ad request as well as the bandwidth.

    https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

    • makeitdouble  1 year ago

      I'm not well versed into adblocking, but shouldn't the extension also get access to the content of the request as well, to be able to either improve it's blocking accuracy (e.g. detect if the whitelisted content matches blocked content patterns) or decide to hide a resource after it was fetched ?

  • wraptile  1 year ago

    it's easy to see how people might say v3 is an adtech conspiracy. Ads are always served to the user now, expect a noticeable revenue increase by almost every adtech company.

    • QuiDortDine  1 year ago

      "Conspiracy"? There's only one dominant player, you don't need a conspiracy for that. Just Google abusing its massive power.

naet  1 year ago

I saw significant difference using the Lite version, enough that I switched to Firefox with Origin instead. I expected it to be good enough and was surprised to see the difference.

  • duffyjp  1 year ago

    Same. I use the element picker tool all the time to rid the web of crap I don't care about. Example:

       whatever_class:has-text(/YouTube Shorts/)

    On Android you can even do this on your phone in Firefox. The UI is a bit tricky on such a small device, but it's so worth it. I went so far as to uninstall Chrome (well, disable it) on my Android.

creato  1 year ago

It's also great to not give basically unlimited permissions to an extension.

  • pmdr  1 year ago

    I think people should be able to do whatever they want on their own machine. If the setting is there, then let me use it for whatever extension I see fit. Sure, make it harder to do so, but don't treat users like children. I can't even screenshot banking apps on my own damn Android phone now.

  • makeitdouble  1 year ago

    This is becoming more and more complex I think.

    To put it in the flatest way, it's not a given that users trust the platform owner more than some extension providers.

    In theory that shouldn't be the case, and not trusting a platform that runs natively and has potential acccess to everything we do sounds crazy. But in practice there's only so many platforms, and depending on one's work or environement, not using Chrome isn't even an option.

    In that context, extensions are the most direct tools the users have to get back some control.

  • culi  1 year ago

    You can choose the permissions on v2 as well.

    The change in v3 is that uBlock cannot even ask for more permissions any more

MattSayar  1 year ago

My YouTube ad-blocking experience with uOL looks like a black/muted screen for 30s until the real video starts playing. No "Skip" button appears. I disabled the extension for YouTube so I can at least skip the video after 5s. Is it better for everyone else?

  • crazygringo  1 year ago

    Are you using the "complete" filtering mode?

    For certain sites, you need to click the extension and change it from "basic" to "complete". This seems to be a performance thing, so it's not doing slower more complete adblocking on sites that don't need it. I've only had to do it on a couple of sites.

redox99  1 year ago

It's just a matter of time. Now that anti adblocks are way more effective, they'll become common.