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Comment by ethana | Hacker News Reader

What people doesn't know is that uBlock makes use of EasyList as one of its default block lists. EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company. That list itself has built-in whitelist that could not be turn off without revamping the list itself. That list contains upward of 60k of rules and no one has time to evaluate that for free.

uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day, uBlock is still relying on ABP for its blocking rules--which is no guarantee at all.

edit: lol why are people downvoting me for pointing out that uBlock is relying on ABP? uBlock never acctually claimed to not having acceptable ads. By using ABP's EasyList, they could already be running an "acceptable ads" whitelist.

edit 2: Here's the link to easylist for anyone that care to check out the included whitelist: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

Warning, the list is over 1mb.

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> EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company

EasyList/EasyPrivacy are community-driven filter lists.[1] Whatever whitelisting in EasyList/EasyPrivacy is to address site breakage. Not addressing site breakage would lead to less people using these lists, and thus less people benefiting from the protection they offer (see graph at link below).

The "acceptable ads" fitlers are in a separate list, which is not part of uBlock Origin.[2]

Here are the benefits of using EasyList/EasyPrivacy (the "Easy mode" bar): https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode#. If you know filter lists which can accomplish the same protection with the same reliability at not breaking sites, I will be happy to use them in uBlock. Filter lists which lead to site breakage won't be used by a majority of users because the majority of users just want an install and forget approach. So the net result would be less people protected, the complete opposite of the goal I set for uBlock.

> uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day, uBlock is still relying on ABP for its blocking rules

No, uBlock Origin depends on community-driven EasyList/EasyPrivacy, just like many other blockers: ABP, AdBlock, AdGuard, BluHell, Adblock Fast, etc.

[1] https://forums.lanik.us/

[2] "Acceptable ads" list: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...

Honest question: is it really that difficult to make your site not broken by ad blockers?

(Your response worries me in that it is an exceptionally convenient argument for sloppy developers not to fix their sites)

Yes.

In the final analysis this question is equivalent to "Is it difficult to make a site that can have any piece of it fail to load or be removed at any time?" since website developers have no control over what may or may not make it onto the list of an adblocker.

JavaScript has had try/catch since forever though?

Ad blockers don't just block third party things though. Or even necessarily sane things. Our site is a classified ad aggregator. At the time at least, we learned that Adblock Plus would just blithely delete any element with 'ad' as part of its class. (A major section of our results page had the class 'ad block' (ironically) and was blocked.)

Yes, these things can be worked around, but not every site maintainer will bother. (Especially since those adblock users likely don't earn them any direct revenue.)

The most egregious site breakage from ad blockers is when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe or Google JS. Some sites have large amounts of content that is only loaded via three levels of third-party-JS indirection. Others will try to fire an event to Google Analytics on every click, but if GA doesn't load, an error is thrown that prevents the click's default action.

I was making a $1000-range purchase on an ecommerce site that was utterly broken by my refusal to be tracked in intimate detail, and their product manager was basically, "eh." So I worked around it by catching the errors for them in the browser inspector. This is the type of breakage that site developers absolutely should be fixing.

>when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe

When sites that require flash break, isn't that a win for the user?

Adobe makes more than Flash. They have a number of user tracking, profiling, and A/B testing systems, plus an email delivery and segmentation system. Some or all of those things started as Omniture. Google also has Google Tag Manager, which is a third-party JS for injecting more third-party JS. When half your site's content is loaded by Adobe into "mbox"es, triggered by JS loaded by Google Tag Manager, it's a nightmare for real developers and end users alike even with everything working.

You expect people to go out of their way to support ad blockers???

Do you want your shop to work despite people blocking the tracking? Do you want to sell stuff in your shop or did you build it to track people?

Ad blockers don't just block ads.

Depends on what their business is. Apple's $99-a-year developer portal recently broke because I block Adobe's Omniture tracking. The same happened to me on an ad-free, crowdfunded news site that I've backed. In these cases, "does not work with ABP/ublock/Ghostery" is a valid bug report.

There are situations when it is difficult or at leas annoying: sometimes blocking rules are too loose that generates false positives. Few examples from my personal memory:

- "Block any image on any domain that has `/ad/` in its path." (Encountered in certain local block list, not present in such pure form at time of writing.) Found this one while inspecting bugreport of our client who complained he cannot see some images on his presentation we maintained. Our CMS serves static binary data with "folderized hash paths" where occurrence of `/ad/` is not completely avoidable. Even now Easylist [1] inludes many general `adsomething` rules that FMOPW could do many false positives.

- "Block any flash that has `clickthru` parameter." This rule is still present in aforementioned easylist [1]: `.swf?clickthru=`, but amusingly is very easily avoidable (rule insists that this parameter is first). Back in times this parameter was de facto standard for embedded flash serving as hyperlink to tell it where to link to. Found this one when another client complained that his flash-based part of main navigation (supplied by third party studio) does not work.

- Even now the question "Have you disabled your adblocker?" often relevant response to general WTFs during web-development.

[1] https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

If the site has a proper layout and the ad blocker does its job, i.e. blocks only elements with ads, you won't have to do a thing.

Yes, you are right, but just to make this point clear: The whitelisting that occurs in EasyList doesn't allow ads to pass through and is in no way related to the "acceptable ads" feature in ABP. The whitelisting in EasyList is because some sites check for Adblock and blocked elements, so EasyList needs ways around that.

I'm not too sure if the "acceptable adds" whitelist is built in, they still allow you to turn "acceptable adds" off.

Haven't investigated it thoroughly, but if I recall correctly the adds on reddit.com are block by uBlock, but not by AdBlock Plus (unless you disable the "acceptable adds").

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Seems like an entirely reasonable comment to me.

Because the comment has nothing to do with the parent.

The fact that uBlock uses ABP lists is completely irrelevant. People choose uBlock because it uses compute resources more efficiently. Regardless of the list.

It's not irrelevant. People may assume they are switching to an entirely independent project when moving to uBlock, but a dependency has now been pointed out. Whereas previously, I may have assumed that if Ad Block ceased to be, or their servers were having problems I would be completely unaffected, now I know I might be. This is useful information for anyone who "switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back."

Because while some of the facts are true, most are are not and are baseless speculation. As it stands, the "acceptable ads" list is not in uBlock Origin.

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