Hacker News Reader

Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

The biggest and most important lists (Easylist and its localizations) are heavily maintained by eyeo GmbH, the company behind AdBlock Plus. It might be a community project but in reality it's more like Chromium or Go.

View on HN

Not really, no. The lists themselves are ultimately less interesting than the technology used to run them; there are other lists, and if easylist soured, a community-sourced alternative could be made relatively easily.

I actually doubt that. Finding the right rules is quite a bit of work and hobbyists will only look for such stuff for so long until they get bored. Programming can be fun but adding the nearly but not exactly the same rule to a filter list for the 2,000th time will eventually get tedious. Especially if you are playing a cat and mouse game and you are the (unpaid) cat and the mouse has quite strong incentives to get paid.

Doesn't that argument work for the plugin too. I mean most people using uBlock Origin probably started with Adblock (and maybe moved to ABP), or uBlock.

You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.

Back in the day I used a local proxy tool, Proximator or something.

AFAIK uBo isn't doing anything particular unique technologically (which doesn't mean I'm not grateful, nor that anyone could make it).

> You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.

You can't. uBO has contextual information for each network request, something not available to external content blocking solutions.

For example, many filters are meant to apply only on specific domains or whether they are 1st- or 3rd-party, and for this to work you need to know from which origin a network request is fired.

Also, uBO has an advanced-user mode that let you create rules to override filters in static filter lists; allows to work in default-deny mode; or even allows to work with no static filter lists at all. Contextual information is key to advanced-user mode features.

I use element filtering to strip Google News links off of the search page on the offhand chance I can't find something on DuckDuckGo and have to go back to it.

  www.google.com/search*tbm=nws^$document
  www.google.com##g-section-with-header:has(h3:has-text(Top stories))
  www.google.com##g-section-with-header:has(h3:has-text(Videos))
  www.google.com##div[role="tab"]:has(a:has-text(News))

It's a great feature that would be impossible with something like pihole. `has-text` is very powerful.

EasyList/EasyPrivacy and other lists are maintained by volunteers, not by Eyeo GmbH.

How would this make the uBlock Origin project like Chromium? The lists work and if the bigger lists choose not to block everything you'd like, you can simply enable additional lists. It's just a data source.

It makes the list like chromium, not ublock origin.

Okay, sure. I interpreted it as the OP referring to the extension itself since the grandparent post was primarily talking about being impressed with it being run by a single person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com