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Comment by aorth | Hacker News Reader

In related news, uBlock Origin has finally (today) been converted to a WebExtension and is now fully compatible with Firefox 57 and beyond.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

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it's been a webextension for a while now, the only reason it has been listed as otherwise by Mozilla is because of the update wrapper

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/2576#issue-22541793...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/2862#issuecomment-3...

Yep. I've been running it on nightly for a while now just by going to the development channel version.

I’ve switched to Ghostery, and it seems to work fine. Should I go back to uBlock Origin?

Ghostery has or has had some controversial analytics called GhostRank that it collects(it may be opt-in I'm not sure). But uBlock Origin is definiently the best content filtering extension I've ever used.

I think it’s opt-in. All the “share data” checkboxes in the “Support Ghostery” panel are unchecked for me.

It's opt-in, and has also been acquired by a company building a privacy-focused browser (I think?).

From what I see, it’s a small German startup that puts emphasis on user privacy. Sounds fine to me.

I personally prefer privacy badger over both. You can't add trackers to Ghostery, and I don't much care about ads that don't track me (I don't watch internet videos, I might not have this opinion if I did), and any particularly annoying ads just get blocked manually in privacy badger.

On mobile, there unfortunately is no such thing (no user scripts on chrome or Firefox, no privacy badger either), so I usually just disable JavaScript or use whatever privacy browser I have installed (currently Firefox Focus).

Privacy Badger is available on Firefox for Android. You might want to take a look at it if you use Android.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/privacy-badge...

Firefox Focus also applies its privacy features to Safari browsing; are there any benefits to actually using Focus as a browser?

I use both. uBlock Origin catches pre-roll ads on YouTube as well as some other things that Ghostery lets through.

I use Disconnect rather than Ghostery in addition to uBlock.

Note that updating to the web extension version will wipe all your ublock settings, custom filters, rules etc. Back up your settings first

It means it will work in Edge out of the box as well?

There has been a uBlock version for Edge for quite a while now; or am I missing something?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ublock-origin/9nblgg...

Yeah but it's a fork to work with Edge. But AFAIK Edge can work with all webextensions because it is using exactly the same APIs as Firefox.

Ah, interesting, I hadn't heard about that. Seems like it should work in Edge then, at least with minimal changes:

WebExtensions APIs are inspired by the existing Google Chrome extension APIs, and are supported by Opera, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. [1]

On the other hand the Edge version seems to no longer be very actively maintained, but the original repository[2] still links to the Edge repository[3] for installation.

[1]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Wh... [2]https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ [3]https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge/

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