R. Hill
@gorhill
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Also:
WikiLeaks has grave concerns about the state of health of our publisher, Julian Assange, who has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison. - See full statement:
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When Adblock Plus extension updates, it opens a webpage to sell users a "premium" version of the extension. But before showing the actual content of that webpage, there is a 8-second progress bar.
This is a fake progress bar, it measures nothing, no work is being done.
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About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported", see
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There is a lot of chatter in the last days about how Youtube is slow with content blockers.
Those performance issues affect only the latest version of both Adblock Plus (3.22) & AdBlock (5.17), and afflict more than just Youtube.
uBO is *not* affected.
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There is no "uBlock Origin Premium", the ability to block annoyances is and has always been available in uBO through volunteer-maintained filter lists -- look under "Annoyances" in "Filter lists" pane.
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Seriously: Do NOT use similar-purposed blocker(s) along with uBlock Origin: this will cripple uBO's ability to defuse anti-blocker mechanisms and its ability to minimize likelihood of site breakage. ("similar-purposed" = any other blocker making use of EasyList).
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About uBO/Youtube: please do not follow advice from random sources, most likely they don't know what they are doing and this ends up burdening volunteers who have looked into all this and know exactly what they are doing.
Carefully follow instructions at
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You can see the progress bar-related code with the browser dev tools. In ABP's source code, it's accurately commented as "Artificial installing update loader"
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Same fake progress bar for AdBlock (both extensions are owned by the same entity).
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So many sleazy "content blockers" out there, it's disheartening to see people being taken advantage of.
"Total Adblock" is badly assembled code from AdGuard's filtering engine, but with an extra 6MB of minified JS injected in all pages/iframes.
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From a BBC article: "services [can] take advantage of the labour illusion to, intentionally or otherwise, trick us into valuing their service more"
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In uBO 1.55.0, the "Purge all caches" button was removed because it caused people to download MBs of filter lists with no guarantee that the fix to a specific issue was present in any these lists.
There is no longer a need for such crude way of updating filter lists because...
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It's just a marketing trick, the fake progress bar is shown immediately before asking you to "contribute". Excerpt from
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This is a spurious warning, there are no performance issue. This can happen when repeatedly creating filters or rules in a short time.
See for explanation.
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"it feels incredibly underhanded for Google to push some code that silently just wrecks performance"
It's an incorrect diagnosis: In the current instance, the issue is specifically Adblock Plus 3.22 and AdBlock 5.17.
Has YouTube performance on Microsoft Edge suddenly got really bad for you?
You're not alone.
READ MORE:
#YouTube
#MicrosoftEdge
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What's the purpose of these fake progress bars? They measure nothing, they only add an 8-second delay before showing the webpage. There is no benefit to users.
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Filter list maintainers should be thanked as well since Ghostery is using uBO's filter lists and uBO's scriptlets--this is what take care of those popups on those sites.
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I've seen mentions that uBO Lite (uBOL) is proof that MV3-based blockers are as capable as MV2 ones. I can't speak for other blockers but this is not the case for uBOL vs. uBO, see
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One thing MV3 doesn't change are the sleazy rip-offs in the Chrome Web Store. I will keep track of those uBO Lite rip-offs here.
First, the original uBO Lite is at
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Since it affects both Adblock Plus and AdBlock, the performance regression hits harder those who had the bad idea to use both at once.
I keep repeating it: do not use more than one content blocker:
Seriously: Do NOT use similar-purposed blocker(s) along with uBlock Origin: this will cripple uBO's ability to defuse anti-blocker mechanisms and its ability to minimize likelihood of site breakage. ("similar-purposed" = any other blocker making use of EasyList).
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I remember that time in 2017 when Youtube people where spotted using uBlock Origin... (@ 55m44s mark)
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@KingAnon_Hex
Pi-hole is not a replacement for a browser extension-based content blocker, even pared-down uBOL performs far better than pi-hole, see
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I used quotes for "contribute" because ABP/AdBlock are first monetized through paid allowlisting "Acceptable Ads" program (enabled by default), and now also from the selling of ads through AAX LLC.
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The "labor illusion" works, this is backed by 2011 "The Labor Illusion: How Operational Transparency Increases Perceived Value" PDF link:
Except that in the case here, there is no "transparency" because no actual work is being done, it's 100% fake.
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See issue tracker for both Adblock Plus and AdBlock:
A reminder that both blockers are owned by the same entity and use the same filtering engine -- using both at the same time make no sense.
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You can see the webpages load fast if you use a cosmetic filter to get rid of that fake progress bar (remove backslashes):
adblockplus\.org,getadblock\.com##.update-loader
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For 2022, how about unlisting your abandonware "uBlock" from the Chrome Web Store?
It hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and by all appearances the sole purpose of this unmaintained extension is to mislead people who seek to install the uBlock Origin.
We're excited to reflect on all we accomplished in 2021 and can't wait for the year ahead. :)
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Interesting project:
It measures the use of 3rd parties across a collection of 25 high traffic sites using Firefox Lightbeam extension.
Left pic = no blocking
Right pic = uBlock Origin with default settings
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All browsers have profiler tools, so it's actually easy to quickly spot the cause of severe performance issues, no need to speculate.
I used Firefox profiler tool with ABP 3.22. Results shows over 19s over 41s was spent in ABP's content script code injected in Youtube webpage.
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Lot of people want to remove Twitter's "Trending now" & "Who to follow" sections: here are filters to accomplish this (remove backslashes):
twitter\.com##[aria-label$="trending now" i]
twitter\.com##[aria-label="who to follow" i]
Far better than what the picker will suggest.
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Those lists are constantly maintained by volunteers silently fixing the web behind the scene. This is not easy, trivial work. Install-and-forget content blockers are nothing without these lists.
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Keep in mind uBO is not monetized and we can't afford to end up having to pay tens of thousands of US dollars to CDN providers to host the lists.
See
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Since blocking Youtube Shorts is a common request... We have official filters for these, just pick and add those which fit what you want to "My filters":
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I investigated a bit the performance regressions, and the cause is many distinct code paths, and affect many sites, those for which the problematic code paths are triggered.
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The lists available in uBO are maintained in full public view by volunteers, and you can contribute by reporting missed cases or false positives (you can use the chat icon in the popup panel for this) -- this is typically addressed quite rapidly.
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Though this will be fixed eventually, both ABP/AdBlock will still suffer this issue which was reported almost 10 years ago:
This May 2014 article is what motivated me to create uBO, first published in June 2014.
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Example of bad advice from random sources (i.e. not long-term uBO volunteers), unfortunately spreading since end of June, probably causing issues with all those who followed it, and further burdening filter list volunteers.
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These sleazy blockers use filter lists which are publicly maintained by volunteers who donate their free time to ensure your blocker works seamlessly.
There is no need to purchase a content blocker extension, *especially* when it uses volunteer-maintained filter lists.
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Differential updates ensure you have the most recent filter lists multiple times per day instead of once every 6 days without it.
A "Purge all caches" button prevents differential updates because raw lists are being fetched instead of diff-updatable ones.
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Also, be aware that only disabling ABP or AdBlock is not sufficient to make the performance issues go away: When disabling an extension, its content scripts are still present in webpages.
You need to force a reload of those webpages -- best is to reopen webpages in new tabs.
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I disagree with the highlighted text from :
See
Tip: If there is little chance you visit a site using an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN), add the following filter to trigger a warning before you fall prey to an IDN homograph attack:
||xn--$doc,frame
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In the Releases section of uBlock Origin's repo, I state "uBO works best on Firefox". Here is an demonstration of this: the dark green/red bars are uBO before/after it gained ability to uncloak CNAMEs on Firefox. Link to article:
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@SwiftOnSecurity
It's a rip-off of an old AdBlock version.
Removed: GPL license/copyright notices.
Added: permissions for explicit remote code execution in extension context and ability to modify proxy settings.
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Reminder: Don't do this. Any reason you may want to come up with to rationalize using more than one similarly-purposed blockers is flawed.
what the heck kinda adblock are yall using?
I have uBlock & AdBlockPlus active and I havent seen or heard any ads
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As said above, the performance issues affect more than one code path. The issue on Youtube is in the injected content scripts, but performance issues in the background script may affect other websites, especially those which webpages update dynamically (Yahoo ↓).
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For a *new* installation of uBO, you need to wait for the filter lists to be brought up to date to ensure it properly filters using the latest changes to filter lists. See
Once lists are all updated, newly opened webpages will be properly filtered.
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Beware: Honey invites users to install its custom filter list in uBO without warning how it broadly disables privacy-protecting filters in uBO; i.e. google-analytics, taboola, pixel trackers, and so on. Mind this broad undermining of privacy protection if you import Honey's list.
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Please do not use those online tools which claim to measure how good is your content blocker, they are often flawed.
Here I show that the despite blocking unconditionally all network requests (through dynamic filtering rules), the tool still reports uBO as "85%".
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You have filters solving a thorny filtering issues? Just submit your work to the official repo to validate it with experienced volunteers.
uBO defuses anti-blockers by default (and has for years), so we will be genuinely happy if you contribute solutions to the default lists.
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If a fix is added to a list and immediately needed, we provide a click-to-update link in support channels to guarantee you receive it with minimal bandwidth burden.
Clicking a link to get a sure fix is far more user-friendly than to fetch MBs of data with no guarantee of a fix.
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What is said there is false. I do agree to let users see ads: it's the big blue power button, and users can use it *whenever they want*.
What I disagree with is for uBO to make that choice on their behalf — they know better what's good for them.
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The performance issues had already been acknowledged on AdBlock/ABP issue tracker on Jan. 12, more than a day before the 9to5google article came out:
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What pains me is to see volunteers behind the scene spending countless hours of their personal time investigating filtering issues (Youtube being currently the most prominent one), just to have mere copy-paste of outdated/bad filters being hyped out there as a solution.
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Be warned of what happens on Daily Motion () if you disable your blocker:
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I profiled AdBlock 5.17.1, and the performance regression introduced in 5.17.0 is gone.
However profiling shows AB's injected scripts on Youtube still account for over 20% of CPU usage (ABP shares same code).
For reference uBO accounts for less than 1%.
Left: AB. Right: uBO
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@endermanch
These filters have been obsolete since a long time, no content blockers is using these. They are just being spread by non-official sources since at least last June
Example of bad advice from random sources (i.e. not long-term uBO volunteers), unfortunately spreading since end of June, probably causing issues with all those who followed it, and further burdening filter list volunteers.
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Please be considerate toward volunteers and avoid submitting duplicate issues, which only add burden.
When submitting an issue, we have a button to make finding duplicates one-click away.
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@Manastorm
The progress bar says "Installing the latest Adblock Plus update": it was already installed by the browser, the extension was merely notified about this. The payment widget is ready in less than a 1s -- the predefined amounts & currency are JS loaded from same server.
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This is the front page of Daily Mail UK without a blocker. Someone at DM-UK decided that ridiculous level of code bloat is a good move.
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You can see the constant work it takes to solve filter issues by looking at the commit history of the main sources of default filter lists in uBO:
uBO:
EasyList:
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We do not actually know whether the several "Acceptable Ads" products are completely independent of each other:
Adblock Plus → Eyeo
Adblock Browser → Eyeo
Crystal → Eyeo
AdBlock → BetaFish
AdBlock Premium → Betafish
uBlock (not uBO) → Betafish
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Pic shows filters which can be broken by other similar-purposed blockers. This on top of wasting CPU/memory resources: uBO already enforces EasyList. Also, Adblock Plus/AdBlock still suffer from (possibly worst now, filter lists have grown since then)
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Following instructions to the letter is key to unburden volunteers and resolve issues sooner for the user.
When investigating an issue, the idea of completely disabling all other extensions is to first fully rule out issues outside uBO. Example:
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This can be verified by visiting this webpage:
Keep in mind content blockers are not filtering anything in that webpage.
Results in task manager for Chromium-based browsers:
ABP (default minus "Acceptable Ads"): 544 MB
uBO (default config): 182 MB
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5. Result: Happy user heaping praise on Ghostery, unaware of that behind-the-scene reality.
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@SwiftOnSecurity
@AugustPamplona
People will have to find an alternative before Google Chrome disables it for good. I consider uBO Lite to be too different from uBO to be an automatic replacement. People will have to explicitly find a replacement to uBO according to what they expect from a content blocker.
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About
It would be more fair and ethical to disclose on the "Donate to
@AdblockPlus
" page that Eyeo already earns $50 million/year out of its "Acceptable Ads" product -- a key piece of information for an informed decision by users willing to donate.
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Beware: plenty of copies of top blockers popping up in Chrome store w/ (at best) absolutely NO added value. Avoid, stick to the genuine ones
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Results in about:processes for Firefox:
ABP (default minus "Acceptable Ads"): 692 MB
uBO (default config): 144 MB
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Why would the team-responsible-for-AdBlock "acquire" GPL-licensed abandonware "uBlock"?
IMO, there is no sensible reason to "acquire" a long abandoned fork of GPL-licensed uBlock Origin, except for lust over the name recognition of "uBlock"
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Of course it gets worse for people who have the unfortunate habit of using multiple content blockers. The undue memory usage will also be higher when enabling more filter lists.
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Sometimes someone will report ads not being blocked by uBO in some search engine page. It is often found that another extension is injecting those ads.
So here is a case that was reported today: 1+ million extension found to inject ads in Google Search results
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The fake "updating" progress bars are now gone from Adblock Plus 3.22.1 and AdBlock 5.17.2.
Maybe this thread had something to do with this.
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@SwiftOnSecurity
@AugustPamplona
I have been working on a uBO Lite FAQ since a while, I will keep adding to it.
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Quick example of negative interference from using Adblock Plus along uBlock Origin.
uBO: default settings
ABP: check "Block additional tracking", uncheck "Allow Acceptable Ads"
Result: a 4-sec delay at page load time. No such delay with only uBO.
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The unseen reality behind the scene that led to a very happy user of Ghostery:
1. uBO scriptlet provides filtering capability
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3rd-party requests disguised as 1st-party requests to work around content blockers/hosts file are a thing now:
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There is this "Ad Remover" extension in the Chrome Web Store, which upon install opens a webpage asking you to subscribe for 50$/yr.
Don't. It's essentially a years-old version of GPLv3-licensed uBO's filtering engine.
No mention of uBO anywhere.
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"AdBlock Max - ad blocker"
200,000 users
Essentially a copycat of uBO Lite, with only the name and icon changed.
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3. After investigation, uBO filter list volunteers provide a fix. Investigating is typically time-consuming part.
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Many tweets advise filters to remove the "Analytics" button. Many of those suggested filters I fear will stop working soon or end up targeting wrong visuals. My suggestion, which I believe is safer (remove backslashes):
twitter\.com##\article a[aria-label][href$="/analytics"]
filters for ublock origin (or any similar adblocker extension i imagine) to remove the new view count thing
text for you to copy/paste into your filters:
nabbed the pointer info from this wonderful user, but i do not use stylish:
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Tip: If there is little chance you visit a site using an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN), add the following filter to trigger a warning before you fall prey to an IDN homograph attack:
||xn--$doc,frame
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4. Ghostery imports 1 & 3. The screenshot shows a minified version of 1, injected according to filter in 3.
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Again, a reminder that using another blocker along uBO leads to worse results. For instance: left = uBO + ABP; right = uBO only.
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Profiling with the simple repro steps in the issue tracker, the result is a fraction of 1% of CPU usage for uBO's JS code when repeatedly toggling on/off the JavaScript switch and reloading the page. After 40 toggles the browser emits a warning regardless of the actual CPU usage.
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It's not "client software", it's just a webpage -- nothing is being installed. I am pretty sure nobody ever would complain that a webpage loads too fast.
This isn't unique. Some devs have stories of finding a fake progress bar in client software, eliminating it, and users complaning why it's so quick now. Plus, if you're demanded an update overnight and you can shave 0.5sec off a fake progress bar for 'optimization'.
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New 2024
@DebugBear
Chrome Web Store extensions benchmark:
Did you know many Chrome extensions can slow down your browsing experience?
We tested 5,000 extensions to see how they impact performance.
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It is not possible for uBlock Origin ("uBO") to retrofit its matching algorithm into the set-in-stone matching algorithm of the declarativeNetRequest API.
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Note to users of
@AdblockPlus
and
@getadblock
, which consider Outbrain ads "acceptable" and consequently do not block them by default. These "blockers" are not standing for you, they are standing for Outbrain.
Note to publishers. If you put Outbrain on your site, you have lost everything you ever stood for.
No seriously. I don't care if you have won several Pulitzer awards and uncovered incredibly important stories. The second you put Outbrain on your site, you are nothing.
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This isn't a thread about page load speed, it's about deception through "labor illusion" for financial gain. Fake install/update pages do this (remove "\"):
- welcome\.adblockplus.org/installed
- new\.adblockplus.org/update
Uninstall page doesn't:
- adblockplus\.org/uninstalled
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.
@windscribecom
: Can you please drop uBO's code from your VPN extension and tell your users to just install actually maintained uBO?
You are silently integrating an OLD version of uBO (+ disrespecting the GPL license) and WE have to deal with the issues
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