I tried this out for a couple of weeks after the "Adblock makes things slower" article came out, and I found it was blocking more stuff - but not necessarily the right stuff. I was finding that sites were breaking, stuff was disappearing and it was because of uBlock. I think I was trying to log into Medium and the Twitter and Facebook had been hidden, literally breaking the functionality of the site. That's not what I want from an adblocker.
Well, as the README says, it's not an "adblocker" but a generic blocker.
Hiding Twitter and Facebook log-in functionality on Medium is a feature not a bug for me. By including those javascripts, both companies can build up a history of the sites I visit.
So I gather this is more of a privacy+ad blocker rather than strictly ad blocker.
Unfortunately, even with EasyPrivacy and "Fanboy's Social Blocking", you will find that blockers (ABP, AdBlock, uBlock, etc) do not prevent 100% connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot.[1]
This is one of the reasons I see dynamic filtering as a key feature: users have the last word, not the filter lists.[2]
For example, I currently block all Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, and any of similarly ubiquitous domains by default using dynamic filtering, so that I have now 100% certainty that no connections to these domains occur on any page, while such certainty is not possible when relying solely on the filter lists.
Oh, it's you! Great. I'm confused. I've been using HTTPSwitchboard now for the last several months and love it. Is µBlock the successor to that, or are they for different things?
edit: Ah, I followed the link to µMatrix and I see now, I think. HTTPSB became µMatrix, and µBlock is the "easy" version of µMatrix. So I guess I should upgrade my HTTPSB to µMatrix, then. Is that right? Thanks for all your work on these tools!
uBlock will do it for you while keeping the point-and-click ability to un-block on a per-site basis. For example, a site which breaks if it can't connect to Facebook.[1]
This is what i like about ghostery. It will pop up a list of blocked sites in the corner each time you navigate, and you can from this list whitelist on a site-site basis.
Here's a good guideline: uBlock is not yet the right blocker for people that don't want to configure anything. It's not clear to me that it is even trying to be that thing, but it's clear enough that it isn't there yet.
Can't find the article now, but it was posted on HN that these social sites' share/like/login plugins track your online activity, so blocking them is a privacy feature, not a bug. Ghosterity blocks these buttons by default too but allows them be enabled in settings.
Great feature, I don't have twitter or facebook and I have to add separate extensions to block those annoying tracking features from every other sites.
To me any website that rely on facebook or twitter to log in is broken and I just don't use them.
I recently had one that required sending my info to xiti to display a js popup to log in with email. Too bad they lost a potential client for their service because their web page sucks and is designed with them in mind instead of the actual user.
