adlocker for firefox

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ChrisGreaves
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adlocker for firefox

Post by ChrisGreaves »

FF 82.0.3 (64bit)
Note that the name is AdLocker, not adBLocker.
Correction 2020/11/12 the name is AdLock, not AdLocker] My excited y-posted mistake
I installed this about 30 minutes ago and have been giving it a trial run on YouTube.
In the past I have felt that the videos that pop up when I url to YouTube.com are predominantly revenue-generating videos. Once I get down to the "Pathe-News of British Rail", the ads drop away.
So for half an hour I have tried to do what I normally do on YouTube - look up a specific video and then treat myself to a few minutes (OK, 25 minutes) of what I think is called Click-bait.
So far so good.
Not a single annoying "your ad can be killed in 5 secs" or worse "the second ad can also be killed in 5 seconds".
Too, I have yet to see a 30-minute video split into three 10-minutes sections, punctuated by an addjust when the movie gets interesting!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ent=search
I think that this was the page from which I installed AdLocker.

Cheers
Chris
Last edited by ChrisGreaves on 12 Nov 2020, 12:00, edited 1 time in total.
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stuck
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by stuck »

What does this do that uBlock Origin, which is probably the adblocker everybody here uses, doesn't do?

I note that your find:
1) is not monitored by Mozilla for security
2) has only about 1.2K users and only four reviews

Meanwhile, ublock Origin:
1) is recommended by Mozilla
2) has 4.7 million users and >10K 5 star reviews

Ken

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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by HansV »

I too use uBlock Origin...
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by StuartR »

HansV wrote:
10 Nov 2020, 19:24
I too use uBlock Origin...
Me too
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by BobH »

I have used ublock but just checked and see that it is not currently installed. Hmmmmm.
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by John Gray »

BobH wrote:
10 Nov 2020, 23:25
I have used ublock but just checked and see that it is not currently installed. Hmmmmm.
You are Chris Greaves and I claim my £5!
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by stuck »

Should have also mentioned in my earlier post that uBlock Origin also allows you to select any element on a page and block just that element.

Amongst other things, this is handy for killing FB's irritating right hand panel that suggests people you may know. I don't think I've ever known anybody that FB has suggested to me.

I've never tried but I guess you could use this feature to hide YouTube's right hand panel and thus remove the temptation of the click-bait it offers.

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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by Argus »

stuck wrote:
11 Nov 2020, 14:43
... uBlock Origin also allows you to select any element on a page and block just that element.
I use it a lot. :evilgrin: (Though not on FB, since not there, nor Y-tube.)
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by BobH »

How does uBlock Origin compare with Adblocker Ultimate?
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by HansV »

I wouldn't really know - I installed uBlock Origin years ago and never looked back...
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by stuck »

BobH wrote:
11 Nov 2020, 20:48
How does uBlock Origin compare with Adblocker Ultimate?
I don't know.

Back in the day, AdBlock Plus was king of the adblockers but then Mozilla changed the way add-ons worked and the people behind AdBlock Plus were behind the curve. Their revamped version did work but it really did make FF grind. It was then that I learnt of uBlock Origin, probably via The Lounge. I switched to that and have never bothered to look for anything else since because it still does the job.

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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by Leif »

BobH wrote:
11 Nov 2020, 20:48
How does uBlock Origin compare with Adblocker Ultimate?
Googling that exact phrase appears to show a better review rating for uBlock.
(PS: I've never looked back either.)
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by ChrisGreaves »

stuck wrote:
10 Nov 2020, 18:27
What does this do that uBlock Origin, which is probably the adblocker everybody here uses, doesn't do?
Hi Ken. I answer this question with 'I don't know". I watch YouTube when I am on hold (Your call IS important to us), and was growing tired of ads. I had no advertisement blocker installed on the system (since July) and started closing a tab (Ctrl-F4) when an ad popped up. Then I thought "search for a means of blocking advertisements". AdLock (I have corrected my initial post) popped up. I installed it and it stopped ads. Problem Solved!
Location, location, location in a small way. Alphabetic sequence still has an impact on selection; "A" versus "U".
I don't have a lot riding on my use of YouTube; it is a pass-time after all, so, problem solved and move on to something more important.
I did not examine AdLock closely; tried it out, it worked, and that was good enough for my purposes.
I note that your find: 1) is not monitored by Mozilla for security 2) has only about 1.2K users and only four reviews
Meanwhile, uBlock Origin: 1) is recommended by Mozilla 2) has 4.7 million users and >10K 5 star reviews
I note this now (and will probably switch to U-block). But I didn't know it then. I thought I had uBlock installed on the pre-July Toshiba, but just checked, and I have on that AdBlock, Adblock Plus, and AdBlocker Ultimate.(below).
Untitled.png
I know that herd behaviour works on most kinds of selection processes. A good review puts a book on a best-seller list and then the rest of the population decides that they should read it. I think that happens on the web, too, although portions of the users (Eileen's Lounge (except for me!)) are more discerning than the general public.
I did not search by popularity (no matter how well deserved). At that stage I was thinking that most ad-blockers I have used have worked fairly well with pop-up ads, but I had never tried, had not known, that blockers could remove/ignore embedded ads within videos.

BobH wrote:
10 Nov 2020, 23:25
I have used uBlock but just checked and see that it is not currently installed. Hmmmmm.
Hi Bob. Me too! I knew of uBlock and as I write this turned, expecting to see it installed on my old Toshiba; to my surprise it was not. It might be on my even-older DELL, but that is in a stack of papers on the floor. Your brain might have been fooled like mine was: I have heard people speak of uBlock, I have advertisement blockers on my machine, when someone asks "Have you installed uBlock?" I know that I installed blockers, and the name uBlock is familiar, so my mind connects the dots and figures that I must have uBlock installed because I have blockers installed and the name is familiar.
Note especially my correction in my initial post: I have heard so many variations on "blocker" that my mind took in "AdLock" and stored it as "AdLocker"
stuck wrote:
11 Nov 2020, 14:43
Should have also mentioned in my earlier post that uBlock Origin also allows you to select any element on a page and block just that element.
Amongst other things, this is handy for killing FB's irritating right hand panel that suggests people you may know. I don't think I've ever known anybody that FB has suggested to me.
I've never tried but I guess you could use this feature to hide YouTube's right hand panel and thus remove the temptation of the click-bait it offers.
Thanks for this, Ken. Once I switch to uBlock (Real Soon Now) I shall try these features. The FB fix is not of great concern to me. I have seen the near-naked ladies I am supposed to have caught up with sometime in the past 74 years, and am still pondering my chances (grin).
Of most concern to me is real-estate on my screen. I want to be rid of anything that reduces the volume of data that my eyes can collect.
BobH wrote:
11 Nov 2020, 20:48
How does uBlock Origin compare with Adblocker Ultimate?
Hi Bob. The full answer to a question like that will be dependant on the user.
For example, "embedded ads". Some folks might tolerate one embedded ad at the start of the video, and click on <skip> after five seconds, using that 5 seconds to shift their chair position, grab a sip of coffee, blow their nose and so on, while others like me might begrudge every second that keeps me from my goal.
In my case I was not too worried about embedded ads in videos until I started "using YouTube" as a pass-time. Then I became annoyed that my unproductive time was being wasted (!) and went looking for something that blocked embedded ads as well as pop-up ads. Up to that time I didn't care about embedded ads, because I didn't see them that often, because I didn't use YouTube that often.
I use Tubemate a lot to download music videos/MP3 from YouTube, but in TubeMate the keystrokes necessary to start the download take place while the embedded ad is trying to start, and so I don't see the ad, and TubeMate doesn't download the embedded ads.
Perhaps that was the seed that made me think that add-ons/aps/extensions could filter out embedded ads.
stuck wrote:
12 Nov 2020, 08:31
Back in the day, AdBlock Plus was king of the adblockers but then Mozilla changed the way add-ons worked and the people behind AdBlock Plus were behind the curve. Their revamped version did work but it really did make FF grind. It was then that I learnt of uBlock Origin, probably via The Lounge. I switched to that and have never bothered to look for anything else since because it still does the job.
Thanks again, Ken, my educator and mentor!
That last sentence describes my use of AdLock, the first extension that I tried to remove embedded ads. "… never bothered to look for anything else since because it still does the job".
But see my critique of AdLock in a separate response coming sometime in the next fifteen minutes!
Cheers
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by ChrisGreaves »

ChrisGreaves wrote:
10 Nov 2020, 18:02
Note that the name is AdLocker, not adBLocker.
Correction 2020/11/12 the name is AdLock, not AdLocker] My excited y-posted mistake
Well, after a couple of days running AdLock (and reading responses), last night a strange thing happened. I was hammering away at YouTube, checking out videos which used to throw up embedded ads ("Seinfeld, Kramer's faux pas", various US aircraft carrier flight deck videos, etc etc) and after thirty minutes or so, tried https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSqk-XV2QM, a video titled "How Kodak Exposed The Atomic Bomb"
The darn thing wouldn't run; it would load, and I clicked on the Play triangle, but no run.

I tried a few casual fixes: Clear my RAMDisk cache of Firefox, reload Firefox after clearing the cache; re-install Firefox 78 (replacing my FF 82), rebooting the system, and finally, initiate a System Restore and go to bed.

This morning I have a system restored to Nov 2nd or thereabouts, so I load FF 78 which immediately updates to 82.0.3, note that there are no extensions (and a new user profile still to be properly loaded with my old toolbars and menus), and installed AdLock. I want to know if last night's inability to run this video was some sort of corruption on my then-system, or whether the video itself is flawed.
AdLock001.png
I did several trivial URLs: Can I get to chrisgreaves.com, a passive web site? Can I get to Eileen's Lounge? Can I get to YouTube? Watch a video that I know has no ads? Watch a video that I know does have ads ("Seinfeld, Kramer's faux pas"), and finally the Kodak video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSqk-XV2QM, which I know has embedded ads (two of them, from memory). AdLock ran the video without a hitch.

Which leaves me wondering if AdLock can only deal with a set number of videos or ads or minutes, or whether my system had tied itself in knots.
And most likely I will never know, for I am not about to do destructive testing on an extension.
I will switch to uBlock, because my super-peeriors on Eileen's Lounge use uBlock. And that is how I have chosen most of my various applications and add-ons over the years.

The Kodak video turned out to be worth watching. It is a detective story The youngish narrator uses "kilometres" when he speaks, and good grammar ("…the three quarters have…" rather than "has"). Detection of painted art forgeries, and even wine forgeries is covered. I liked the Kodak research scientist who worked out that a fission bomb had been exploded on the US mainland, when even the governor of New Mexico didn't know about it.

One more point: We cannot block all ads, as the Kodak video shows us. The narrator/producer acknowledges sponsorship by HBO max, and many videos have a two to five-second corporate (or channel) logo that we have to watch. I suspect that eliminating these flashes would be as hard as eliminating a ten-second pan of a cropped pasture to prove a point; I already know what a cropped pasture looks like and would gladly skip nine seconds of it, but of course, you might like staring at a cropped pasture for ten seconds, right?

Cheers
Chris
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by ChrisGreaves »

ChrisGreaves wrote:
12 Nov 2020, 13:13
...last night a strange thing happened. I was hammering away at YouTube, checking out videos which used to throw up embedded ads ("Seinfeld, Kramer's faux pas", various US aircraft carrier flight deck videos, etc etc) and after thirty minutes or so, tried https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSqk-XV2QM, a video titled "How Kodak Exposed The Atomic Bomb"
The darn thing wouldn't run; it would load, and I clicked on the Play triangle, but no run.
And now this: YouTube restored after unspecified issue prevented playback


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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by ChrisGreaves »

So while we are on the subject: -
I have two FF extensions loaded "Facebook Container" and "uBlock Origin".
Untitled.png
Within YouTube I choose a Seinfeld clip - typically 3 minutes long, prefaced by an annoying ad - and detect a delay of five or ten seconds of effectively blank screen (PrtScr image above).
The "Skip Ads" button is visible.

I suspect that for this clip, UBlock Origin is not skipping the ad. It is suppressing the display of the ad until UBlock Origin can send a signal to "Skip Ads". It is "suppressing the display of the ad" rather than skipping it.

So What?

Well, if I were looking for something to not waste my precious time (5 seconds, or 10 seconds), this approach would not save me time. It would leave me bored, staring at a screen. It would be marginally faster on the trigger than my old gnarled fingers, but only by a second. It would save a bit of wear and tear on my track-pad or mouse.

I am not complaining, but the more I look at this business the more I see that there are ad-blockers, and there are ad-blockers.

The perfect "ad blocker" for me must be near impossible to create.
I have seen sheep being herded on a stubble paddock; A movie clip that has a ten-second pan of a stubble paddock with sheep would bore me. I want a "blocker" that can skip over the remaining ten seconds of paddock.
Of course that is too much to expect! But I believe that we each have our own level of tolerance over what is acceptable to us, and what is not.

I scream like the spoiled three-year old I am when two trailers for the following movies pop up on the last ten seconds of a clip, hiding from me the results of the explosion/car crash/demolition, or whatever.
Cheers
Chris
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by HansV »

I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. The latter lets you specify which JavaScript you want to allow temporarily or permanently. I initially set it to allow nothing, and over time have trained it to allow only what I trust. This is annoying, but it stops a lot of nonsense - I don't see any ads or delays.
(The number of items that want to run scripts on a single web page can be amazingly high...)
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Re: adlocker for firefox

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stuck wrote:
10 Nov 2020, 18:27
What does this do that uBlock Origin, which is probably the adblocker everybody here uses, doesn't do?
Up to two days ago I was using AdBlock Plus in my three browsers. Have used it for years ... not knowing better! :hairout: Yesterday I uninstalled ABP and installed uBlock Origin in all three.

:thankyou: :chocciebar: :thankyou:
Regards,
Bob

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Re: adlocker for firefox

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HansV wrote:
14 Nov 2020, 21:08
I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. The latter lets you specify ....
Reporting for duty, Cap'n! :salute:
Chris
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Re: adlocker for firefox

Post by Argus »

ChrisGreaves wrote:
14 Nov 2020, 20:41
So while we are on the subject: -
[...]
I haven't finished reading what you wrote above. :laugh: :evilgrin:

As Hans, Bob, and several others I'm sure, I've relied on NoScript and uBlock Origin for quite some time.
(That said, there can be certain pages that block you a soon as they notice these add-ins; and then it almost doesn't matter what you do (this of course depends a bit where your "starting point" is). Check basics such as cookies (temp. allow/for session/perm.); temp. disable uBlock Origin; allow some of the scripts (based on experience and rain dancing); somewhere along the way disable Fx ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection, the little switch/toggle behind the shield, top left); finally you are left with forgetting the site or restarting Fx in Safe Mode (with Add-ons Disabled) and allow the whole shebang to load.)
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