I was able to download and build the Gtk3 version of this in under 5 minutes. For compactness alone, gets my seal of approval. I'm posting this comment from NetSurf, HN works fine.
Asking because: DNS-level adblocking is stupid.
It's great, but DNS over HTTPS will end the party soon enough (if I was a smart TV manufacturer, I would be prioritizing adding dns over https to the device firmware to subvert network blocks).
Much easier I would think for application developers to just make an ad blocking extension, e.g., uMatrix, stop working. For example, they could say this is because the application now has its own built-in ad blocker. Nevermind that the developers are paid from the sale of web advertising services.
(It'll need to be a constantly-updating blocklist, but the DNS-adblock lists are also that already.)
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli...
I also use a local proxy in addition to DNS which allows me to serve alternative resources or block/redirect certain URLs based on prefix/suffix/regex.
It has made me lose my focus on work repeatedly, and Stack Overflow really is a site related to work for me. So I block that column.
I am more of a non-interactive user and do not use a graphical, javascript-enabled browser much.
Here is a snippet I used to remove the annoying "hot network questions" from the page:
sed '/./{/div id=\"hot-network-questions/,/<\/ul>/d;}' page.html
Some years ago, like 10 years or more, I was making some incremental page requests on SO, e.g., something like /q/1, /q/2, ... and I got blocked by their firewall. What amazed me at the time was the block was for many months, it may even have been a year. This is one of the harshest responses to crawling I ever encountered. One of the very few times I have ever been blocked by any site and the only time I ever got blocked for more than a few hours.
Things have definitely changed since then. To get all the networking questions, I pipelined 277 HTTP requests in a single TCP connection. No problems.
Here is how I got the number of pages of networking questions:
y=https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions
x=$(curl $y|sed -n 's/.*page=//;s/\".*//;N;/rel=\"next\"/P;N;')
echo no. of pages: $x
n=1;while true;do test $n -le $x||exit;
echo $y?page=$n;n=$((n+1));done
Fastly is very pipelining friendly. No max-requests=100. Seems to be no limits at all.
There were 13,834 networking questions in total.
Wondering just how many requests Fastly would allow in one shot, I tried pipelining all 13,834 in a single TCP connection. It just kept going, no problems. Eventually I lost the connection but I think the issue was on my end, not theirs. At that point I had received 6,837 first pages of answers. 211MB of gzipped HTML.
So, it is quite easy these days to get SO content non-interactively.
It was also easy to split the incoming HTML into separate files, e.g., into a directory that I could then browse with a web browser.
x=$(zgrep -c ^HTTP answers.gz)
mkdir newdir; cd newdir;
zcat ../answers.gz|csplit -k - '/^HTTP/' '{'$x'}'As an aside, I've seen mirrors of Stack Overflow pop up when I use DuckDuckGo to search. Google seems to filter these out.
Curious if those SO mirrors did not show cruft like "Hot Network Questions" on every page, would you use them instead of relying on an ad blocker.
133,215 network filters ＋ 155,733 cosmetic filters
In the stats. Network filters being URL based not just domain based. The lists are easy to view from the uBlock settings page if you want an endless supply of examples. They are used in pretty much any style list: ad, privacy, annoyances, cookie banners, tracking
I certainly block plenty of Google-controlled domains. I normally do not use Google search and even when I do I never seems to trigger any ads. Maybe I am just not searching for things people want to sell. In the rare event I do trigger an ad, because I am not using a "modern" browser to do searches, these ads are not distracting and I can easily edit them out of the text stream if I want to.
Literally any search that uses the "expensive" keywords[1]. "car insurance quotes" would do nicely, for instance.
[1] https://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords
Interestingly, the /aclk? Ad URLs do not use HTTPS.
Seeing that these Ad URLs are still unobtrusive, I am wondering why anyone would want to remove them from the search results page. For cosmetic reasons?
I prefer searching from the command line. To remove the /aclk? Ad URL's I used sed and tr.
#!/bin/sh
# usage: $0 query > 1.htm
#
x=$(echo y|tr y '\004');
z=$(echo https://www.google.com/search?q=$@\&num=100|sed 's/ /%20/g');
curl --resolve www.google.com:443:172.217.17.100 -Huser-agent: "$z"|sed "s/<a href=\"\/url?q=/"$x"&/g"|tr '\004' '\012'|sed -n '/url?q=/{s/.url?q=//;s/&sa=.*\"><h3/\"><h3/;s/&sa=.*\"><span/\"><span/;s/$/<br>/;/aclk?/d;p;}'