Comment by SpicyLemonZest
1 year ago
I don’t work for Google and genuinely think it’s better for users. It’s always bugged me that ad blockers request arbitrary read write permissions for all websites I visit, and it didn’t seem like that was ever going to change until Chrome forced the issue.
Read/write permissions are necessary to effectively block ads. There's a lot of sites that will throw up a screen saying "please turn off your adblocker" and refuse to let you view the page if they detect ads aren't being loaded. Read/write permissions allows uBlock Origin to inject scripts into the page to fool the anti-adblock scripts into thinking that ads are being served.
It's not ideal, but if that's what it takes to block ads as well as uBlock Origin does, then that's a price I'm willing to pay.
Anyone with a mildly popular extension that has read/write * would be offered lots of money to sell it to, usually, scammers or hackers.
Maybe you're willing to pay the price, but that doesn't mean it was what's best for the ecosystem.
At the platform level, you have to have a security model, and sometimes it will conflict with functionality. I’m sure there’s a lot of potentially interesting browser extensions you could build with the ability to read and write arbitrary files, but Chrome has decided (much less controversially) that the sandbox is key to their security model and extensions can’t ask to escape it.
If manifest V3 ad blockers were nonfunctional to the point of being broken, I’d be more concerned, but in my experience they’re perfectly OK.
uBO Lite exists and I can't see any visible difference in how well it works. So, it's not a price you need to pay at all.
In my testing, UBO Lite is not working as well on YouTube. It blocks the ad, but you still have to skip it. Original UBO didn't require this.
2 replies →
My content blocker on Safari blocks all the same ads as ublock origin in Chrome, with no supposedly no risk of outbound data.
It's my computer. I will run code that I choose and disallow code that I choose. If I choose to run code that blocks your code, that's my prerogative. Whether that's a full blown right is another topic.
You're just pissed because I've chosen to block your code in software you created. Next, you'll tell me I have to watch your programming on a TV I bought with your code on it.
The idea that we have to do anything that evilCorp wants us to do is just insane that people have come to the point of accepting that.
It really isn't. They can spend some of their billions of revenue to review changes when popular extensions are updated, just like Mozilla does. Every uBO update is vetted by Mozilla and is only then pushed out to users. But doing this is not in Google's interest at all.
Mozilla’s guidance on this (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tips-assessing-safety-e...) is that only some extensions are manually reviewed and you shouldn’t trust this as a guarantee of safety if you don’t trust the developer who owns the extension.
If I’m going to be the devil’s advocate, it’s probably better for performance.
When I maintained a hook-based plugin system, I learned that many programmers do not know data structures or algorithms and would slow down the whole software by writing plugins that looked up rules using extremely slow ways extremely often. And if users wanted to complain about the software being slow, they would always blame me first.
But when I replaced it with rule lists, now I was in control and could implement fast data structures.