[Support] uBlock Origin

Best for this is to enable advanced user mode to unlock access to dynamic filtering.

By default, there are no rule, so at first the dynamic filtering pane can be used to see all the domains to which a web page connects.

From there, you may look where web sites connect, and work to block specific domains when you find out they are not really needed to make web pages render properly. I give an example here using Facebook domains which most of the time is really not needed for web pages to render properly.

As time go, you will have build yourself a list of rules to block undesirable domains which do not add real value to web pages ā€“ rather the opposite, they slow down page load, increase bandwidth consumption, increase privacy exposure, etc.

I personally do use medium mode, and yet I still follow my own advice here, because sometimes I may want to disable medium mode for a specific site, and thus I still benefit from my own blocking rules for domains I consider superfluous (examples of domains I block everywhere by default: fonts.googleapis.com, linkedin.com, gravatar.com, twimg.com, etc.)

Hi Gorhill,

I was wondering if you had something against providing uBlock Origin on the Safari extension store? Maybe the Safari platform isnā€™t actually maintained anymore, would you be okay if I helped in this direction? Or maybe it is actually working fine but being accepted on the Safari extension store isnā€™t trivial.

Note: I never developed Safari extensions yet, but I should handle it.

Any news regarding the keyboard shortcut option to block page elements? Would be verye handy and is missed. I switched from AdBlock Plus and a missing shortcut is slowing the workflow tremendously.

Hi, just a quick question, I think this is the right place for thisā€¦

I just noticed that I couldnā€™t trigger an update in the ā€œ3rd-party filtersā€ pane.
Auto-update was checked, I think Iā€™ve never changed that, so that is the default, but unchecking did not change anything.

I tried to manually update some of the ublock filters, but the ā€œUpdate nowā€ button only became active after I used ā€˜purge cacheā€™ on those filters.

Is this intentional, or is something wrong?

Well, I am not sure, but since you can add shortcuts to any extension via chrome://extensions, as demonstrated here, for example, maybe the Element picker mode could be triggered this way?

Of course not, as long as it is a faithful enough port, i.e. the vapi-* layer is adapted for Safari while the rest stays the same. If you want to help that would be great. I know some good work had been done on the old uBlock (Chris Aljoudi) regarding storage issues (cache vs. settings), but this would require some code change on the platform-independent side, this could be addressed if and once we get there.

Wiki documentation:

This button is available for use if and only if there is at least one filter list which is deemed outdated. If this condition is fulfilled, you can force an update of all filter lists which are deemed out of date.

Yes, but there was at least one filter list with a newer version, one of uBOā€™s own lists.

I donā€™t know the intervals the updater uses for update checks. Could also be a caching issue, though. I donā€™t know how uBO fetches info for updated resources internally, but I would assume that is the source: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/master/assets/

Maybe there was some kind of CDN in between, I donā€™t know.

Anyway, itā€™s not important, and not an issue. And you can always do a manual/forced update if you purge the cache. This first seemed a little counter-intuitive to me, but it works, and now I know it, so, yeah, fine :wink:

Thanks very much for your answer. Looks like very good instructions that even I can understand!
Thanks much for your work and this great add-on!

UOL, a brazilian news portal, tracks clicks by making all like go to a ā€œclick trackerā€ URL, which then redirects to the destination URL, eg http://click.uol.com.br/?rf=homec-manchete-topo-modulo1&pos=mod-1;topo&u=http://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2016/03/11/dilma-diz-que-nao-pretende-renunciar-resignacao-nao-e-comigo-nao.htm which redirects to http://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2016/03/11/dilma-diz-que-nao-pretende-renunciar-resignacao-nao-e-comigo-nao.htm

Is is possible to have uBlock Origin rewrite the URL instead of blocking it? Itā€™s currently being blocked by the ||click.uol.com.br^ filter in EasyPrivacy.

Thanks.

I declined such feature request in the past, for many reasons. Most important is that I consider such feature worthy of a separate extension, as this would require maintaining a list of rewrite rules, something which I do not have time to maintain. Another one is that I prefer users to be made fully aware that a click tracker has been used on them.

However, you can ask uBO to parse the blocked URL, and it will decompose it as much as it can. Often one can spot the real destination URL in there (using your example), click the magnifier on the right-hand side of the blocked URL:

So it becomes a matter of simply clicking the proper URL in there when one can spot it.

Hi, Iā€™ve just recently switched to uBlock from Adblock and Request Policy and having a slight issue making a rule.

There is a deals site I visit that uses an ad site redirect when clicking links to products (so clicking a link goes to ad referrer, then destination site). The ad site is blocked so I get a block page, so Iā€™m trying to set a rule to allow requests to that ad site ONLY from the deals site but I must be doing something wrong.

This is what I thought it should be, but doesnā€™t work:

hotukdeals.com awin1.com * allow

Iā€™ve been all through the wiki and canā€™t see why that isnā€™t working, also tried several variations on that rule and canā€™t make it work. What am I missing?

(I donā€™t want to disable strict filtering just because of one site, and donā€™t really want to allow ALL requests to the ad server just for the sake of one site either)

I notice that the documentation for script:inject says that ā€œthe resource library is completely under control of the uBO projectā€. As an end user, does this mean thereā€™s no way for me to add resources of my own short of modifying uBlock itself?

The block page is never triggered by dynamic rules, only by static filters. You will have to use the Temporarily or Permanently button on the block page.

Correct.

Ok, thanks. Looked exactly like a Request Policy style block, didnā€™t realise it was the dynamic (adblock) filtering. Maybe something to look at in future - more info on the block page about which type of filter is causing the block page? Maybe even just changing the wording to ā€œBecause of the following dynamic/static filterā€

Or maybe itā€™s just my years of use of Adblock and Request Policy fogging my brain :grin:

Hi, how can I block all third party requests except images and CSS with dynamic rules? I tried this

    • 3p block
    • image noop

But thatā€™s completely breaking pages.

The closest to what your are asking is medium mode. If you want higher granularity than what medium-mode offers you, consider uMatrix.

New Thread ā€“ New User Feedback

This looks like an interesting project. I began reading your documentation and experimenting. Here are a few observations, comments and questions. Please let me know if it would be helpful for me to continue and if so, the appropriate place for this type of feedback.

uBlock Origin v1.6.4
Firefox 43.0.4
linux 3.16.0-38-generic
Test sites:


===

  • I had understood from multiple sources (sorry, donā€™t recall them) that uBOā€™s default settings provide blocking equivalent or superior to ghostery. Is that the intent? It doesnā€™t seem to be the case using the two test sites mentioned above. Iā€™m experimenting with using ghostery 5.4.11 in a different instance of the same version of Firefox. With uBO I see some ads that ghostery blocks.

  • https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-popups

Using the test site you provide (http://jessehakanen.net/adblockpluspopupaddon/test.html#), if I enable popup blocking, all the popup tests still succeed.

  • It was unclear that by ā€œthe context menuā€ you mean that shown by Firefox by right-clicking within a web page. Initially I thought it was something within uBO.

  • Leaving ā€œBlock media elements larger thanā€ unchecked, I changed 50 to 5 and enabled the per-site switch. The images under ā€œWunderBlog & Newsā€ were not loaded as expected. Selecting ā€œTemporarily allow large media elementsā€ from the context menu with the web page results in the images being displayed. So far so good. However there does not appear to be a way to regain that capability. The images are not suppressed and the context menu changes to only ā€œBlock Elementā€ despite disabling the switch and then re-enabling it. I verified that ā€œMy rulesā€ within uBO removes and then adds ā€œno-large-media: www.wunderground.com trueā€. This behavior is the same for other sites.

thefreedictionary shows two elements hidden. When disabled, the only difference I see is the addition of whitespace. However if I reload the page, all the InstantGrammarChecker ads and the bottom FeedChildProgram ad disappear. Why is that? BTW, ghostery blocks those ads.

Despite preventing remote fonts from being downloaded, I canā€™t perceive a difference in the test sites. Is there a way to know what areas of the page are affected?

The eraser (revert) icon almost entirely covers the gear (settings) icon.

===

Thatā€™s as far as I got and is probably enough for you to decide if this type of feedback is useful.

Jim

Unfortunately both of variants has some disadvantages. And uMatrix has no such flexible thing as static filter. It would great if some day the uBlock will acquire mechanism allowing use something kind of static filter syntax combined with only blocking rules from third party lists (with no influence of their exceptions). So user could block any type of requests in conjunction with lists and precisely un-break sites on his own.

P.S. Thank you for that great add-on.