Alaknar

I don’t understand what did you intend to respond to with this. as filtering instructions get more out of date, the addon’s privacy protections will also fail.

OK, I get what you mean. I guess if you require 100% certain and absolute privacy, then yeah, uBO is the way to go. Seems like a pretty narrow user-base, tho.

on youtube? if you fire up firefox, install uBO, ocannote uBO logger and open a youtube video page, you’ll see what it does. I don’t know what it does different because I don’t happen to have an itemized list of what does uBO lite do, but I suppose it has a logger function too, and you can compare it.

If there is a difference, it's not noticeable to me. I fired up YT on FF with uBO and then the same video on Vivaldi with Ghostery. Honest to God, I do not see it loading longer on Vivaldi.

to set variables used by youtube, to unfuck youtube in other technical ways, and to block behaviors it shouldn’t even think about doing (why does it need a scriptlet that blocks writing the clipboard??), blocks ad video segments, hides annoying things from the UI because I have lists enabled that do that.

Most of this sounds like I get in Ghostery too. Blocking specific HTML elements is the one feature I feel is missing from Ghostery, but that's not really an adblock/privacy feature, is it?

lol. can you give me a few examples when tracking is noticeable?

Various forms of suggested content based on searches/purchases, etc.

how? you do not seem to be trying to understand this.

People mentioned the technical differences a bunch of times. If you mean that I should get a PhD in network traffic and filtration to fully understand how these technical differences affect end-user experience, then yeah, i guess I'm not trying to understand it.

If not - maybe you'd be the first to give me some actual info?

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)

None of this explains what I"m looking for. Seems like you're arguing in bad faith. :)

ublock has many tools to defuse tracking mechanisms (...)

Fair. What I still don't understand is the level of impact this has. Considering I'm not being tracked in any noticeable way, or that I'm not seeing any ads, I just don't get why people in this post are acting like uBO being blocked is a significant downgrade to the user experience.

I’m starting to think that you might be not arguing in good faith.

Sounds like someone not arguing in good faith would say, if anything. How is me trying to understand the impact of the mechanisms used by uBO vs those used by, say, Ghostery, "arguing in bad faith? WTF are you talking about?

you should look up the wast documentation of uBlock Origin and you will get all the answers

I will not. Because I get the technical details, a bunch of people already talked about them here. But nobody was able to tell me what do these features actually do compared to other adblocks.

of course you didn’t. on youtube ads are not served from different domains. have you ever heard about pihole not being able to block youtube ads? that’s why. every ad is literally a video uploaded to youtube, it is even possible to watch them as videos, with their own video page.

So it's not a privacy issue, it's an ad issue. Which doesn't show, it's blocked.

What does uBO do different here?

or when ads start reappearing. the needs to wait for the next addon update, which may take multiple days.

Just FYI - that only happens to me on YouTube every once in a while. Like, three times this year for a day or two.

OK, that's a good write-up of what capabilities are missing. What I don't see there is the end-user impact.

Ads are blocked nicely, so that's not the issue. I'm assuming that some privacy related stuff falls through the cracks?

uBlock Origin and any other effective content blocker had that as its most important weapon, without exaggeration. it has many other techniques for specific circumstances, but preventing to load the ad scripts, and preventing network requests that send back data to the advertising company, are universally a powerful tool.

You're just repeating what you already said.

My question is: since there are (and always have been) other privacy-oriented extensions (e.g. Privacy Badger, Ghostery) and they still work just as they always have, what is the advantage of specifically using uBO with Mv2?

you don’t see them because addons can still insert unlimited cosmetic tweaks. CSS snippets that make specific elements hidden. but the ads are still loaded, consuming network and CPU resources, and the ad framework still collects usage, interaction and device data.

I just loaded up YouTube and didn't see a single call to a known ad server, so this seems to be false.

Also: the CPU usage of loading even a couple MB-worth of ads is negligible compared to the overall resource hungriness of Chromium.

(...) list updates are released much less frequently (...)

I did notice that every now and again YouTube would block me from using it due to detecting the adblocker, but is that an inherent disadvantage of Mv3? And why wouldn't the extension developers then embed the updated filter lists and just release them as extension updates? Does Google limit the frequency of those?

this is false. and instead of just claiming so, here is proof: there are built-in (but disabled by default) blocklists specialized for cookie prompts and such

Let me rephrase then: cookie prompt blocking capabilities are not tied to the Manifest version (clearly, as exemplified by things like Ghostery). uBO could easily switch to Mv3 and still do those things.

and as I said, uBO is not just an ad blocker, so saying xy ad blocker can replace it well is false.

But we're discussing the ad-blocking features, because these are the ones affected by Mv3, no?

All these other features exist and are perfectly fine in other extensions.

except that not really. Because again, the required browser APIs were removed, and even before that, privacy badger was not so effective

Define "not so effective". What's "effectiveness" in this case?

everything is effected that:

• needs to block network requests, including loading of certain site scripts
• depends on an up to date list of things to block

OK, but again: what's the difference for the end-user? Does it impact resources utilisation? Website loading times? Reactivity? I don't see a difference in how my uBO browser behaves vs how my Ghostery browser behaves, so what am I losing because of the Mv3 switch?

You see it in the edge cases I presume, how fast it reacts to Youtube nonsense and such

Reacting to YT's attempts to block the ad-blockers faster is a good advantage, but it's not something inherent in the Manifest version, is it?

It is blocked by Google for a reason I would think.

Well, yes, the reason being: it didn't switch to Manifest v3. Just like AdNauseam. BTW - both can still be installed, you just need to manually pull the .zip file and import it.

Not true since 2017 (and even before that it was kinda' disputed). The adblock part of the business went to Cliqz, a German privacy-focused browser, backed by Mozilla.

I have downvoted your comment because it's repeating a popular myth, nothing against you personally.

What capabilities did it lose? Like: what user-facing consequences are there of that lack of functionality?

Again: I haven't been using uBlock for a while now, I don't see any ads on any websites, including those within YouTube videos. So - what am I missing for not using uBO?

Ghostery blocks trackers. So does AdGuard. So does Privacy Badger. All of them work perfectly fine regardless of Manifest version.

So? What's the issue here, exactly?

I started using Ghostery because it had a cookies auto-reject mechanism. The ad-blocking stuff came in later, which I didn't even realise, but I installed it first on a new device, did some browsing, noticed there's no ads, and thought "well, good enough".

I do miss the custom HTML-element cutting, though.