That sounds pretty cool! I will give Adguard a go, but... Unfortunately, that won't help with Ghostery though.
I had dropped Ghostery long time. Tried 7 just to see. Also, got nothing (FF48.0.2x64). No trackers, nothing blocked. Ghostery 7 is gone now and Adguard (extension) is on-board in place of ABP. Thanks
Just installed it in Chrome to check out. Right click extension and go to options. General tab: I have disabled Purple Box, Notifications and Support Ghostery Blocking options: enabled all (the default is warn) Seems to work alright, so I don't understand the negative feedback posted (but I agree on Adguard being a great extension).
Well, perhaps if you read the last few posts in this thread you would see we were talking about the Firefox extension.
I also didn't plan to upgrade, but I just noticed that Ghostery updated itself in Vivaldi. I hope auto-update can somehow be disabled, I will ask about this on the Vivaldi forum. But the new GUI of Ghostery isn't that bad, perhaps it's even better now that everything is categorized. But of course it's a disgrace that you can not access the settings without it phoning home, hopefully they will change this.
To clarify, DoNotTrackMe is an extension similar to Ghostery, it doesn't have anything to do with the DNT standard. And I just noticed that Disconnect is still available as a single extension, I believe months ago you had to also download their VPN solution. So perhaps I will check it out again. http://alternativeto.net/software/do-not-track-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disconnect/
You are seriously using firefox on W10 while you could be browsing in AppContainers? Are you beating yourself as a sign of solidarity with Auzzie rugby team (After recent game against All Blacks),
BTW, make sure that you don't disable older versions of Ghostery in Firefox. I noticed that after re-enabling it, the new version was automatically downloaded. Browsers should really give more control when it comes to extension updating.
I DO NOT like the sound of that. I'll test that and see what happens (of course with my firewall on a very convenient "kill internet" switch setting) I've got an old ghostery for testing purposes on a FF portable. In any case, if before you disabled it you had your setting to NOT update automatically it shouldn't do that. I have all sorts of other settings / about:config tweaks as well because I DONT like stuff phoning home without me controlling it.
While I share disdain for Mozilla's default automatic-isms, your post has nothing to do with Ghostery. Each and every extension in the Firefox Add-Ons Manger (about:addons) has in its options an on-off for Automatic Updates. As well as a global "Reset All Add-ons to Update Manually" in the gear drop down. This is how I have it. In about:config there are prefs you can set to Off to completely lock down updating. Overkill IMHO. When I heard Ghostery went 7 for Mozilla, prior to updating from 6 I disabled and re-enable it several times while visiting abusive sites to take notes for comparison doing the same after the 7 update. Ghostery 7 never "automatically downloaded." The non-problem you perceive exists not with "more control when it comes to extension updating" but between your keyboard and your chair.
Well, I'm glad for you, but on my system it did, even though I selected "Reset All Add-ons to Update Manually". So I was just trying to give a heads up. And what's up with your style of quoting? You do understand that the idea behind it, is that people won't have to scroll back to the original post that you're responding to? Luckily I run multiple FF versions in separate sandboxes, so I can copy and paste my extensions and settings to fix it.
@Rasheed, still on at wilders but when I get off of here I'll go test. Yes I use sandboxie a lot to test, including extensions but I'm horrified at what ghostery has done with this control panel thing, so much so I don't ever want to even go to their website. My Kerio FW on XP has this setting that cuts ALL online traffic and plus I look at uMatrix and uBlock log windows to see whats trying to call out. I do this when I install anything, and sometimes you need to do that outside of a sandbox. That said, I installed an updated FF portable (38.02) over my V37 , but first I backed up the profile folder - and yeh, when I put that profile in the update it disabled prefbar and it wouldn't let me install it - so I did a separate install of 37 again and reinstated the backup profile - all good.
With Kerio FW set to blocking ALL internet traffic I disabled Ghostery on FF37 Portable. I was able to (subsequently) re-enable it (no re-starting browser). However, uBlockO and uMatrix had log entries when I DISABLED it, plus a dialog box. See the following screenshots. I also used uBlocks log (by clicking in the fourth column) to make a dynamic rule blocking Ghostery. Next, I disabled Ghostery again and closed FF and then re-started, then enabled Ghostery. No problems and nothing showing in uMatrix or uBlock logs. On disablement, I got the same entries in the logs. Conclusion. If I'm understanding things correctly (I'm still learning uMAtrix and uBlockO) it looks to me that Ghostery DOES attempt to phone home on disabling (not uninstalling) it. Major thumbs down. Edit: Not sure why my last screenshot isn't showing uBO's red cells in thumbnail image. It shows correctly by clicking on the image though. Edit 2: The thumbnail is partially cut off, that's why.
Yep, this is what I mentioned before. Ghostery now loads its configuration page directly from their server and it runs javascript which uMatrix or any other script blocker will block. It also phones home when you uninstall it and sends your browser to their website. Not only is this intrusive, it is not a sound design at all both from a security and functionality perspective. I still have an old version on Opera 12 and will keep it. I'm removing it from all other browsers.
@MisterB, forgot to reemphasize this version I tested was pre V6, although you can see that on my screenshots. I knew it was game over with V6 and later, but I didn't know V5 did this. Perhaps naive, or more likely still very much learning how all this happens but it only makes me all the more wary and disgusted with this company.
Fun with Adguard and Ghostery... This Web site is particularly aggressive in its tracking. The amount of garbage rendered with what is the desired content is beyond justification. Standing alone, Ghostery snags 80 trackers. Standing alone, Adguard evokes 19 filters from my setup (shown in #25, page 1). Either does an outstanding job of cleaning up the mess to render a nice clean page. In fact, one can't tell the difference between the two. But together in this instance, Ghostery snags three more. Without filtering it takes an insane 45 seconds to fully render the page with the desired content taking about 15 seconds to show up. Nirsoft's CurrPorts list hundreds (!) of total TCP connections. This is on a Win7 third gen i7 system with 50Mbps broadband using Cyberfox Intel x64. With Ghostery and/or Adguard, the page renders in less than two seconds with about a dozen connections. It's interesting how these two explicitly disparate technologies produce the same results in user experience. Note that these results will differ depending on the Ghostery tracker filter update and the user chosen and updated Adguard filter(s). And, of course, how a Web site does their ad/tracking thing. Overall, the ratio of detection for the two extensions varies greatly and neither can claim superiority. What is evident... both together snag more crap. And are more fun.
I obfuscated the data to avoid just that. My post is about the software and not the business model as much as we disdain that model. That site should not be singled out as teh webbuhnetz is saturated with the like. Think entertainment or sports.
I'm uninstalling Ghostery from all my machines. I always liked it because of it's extensive tracker database, usually blocked more than competing products, and the purple tracker window to give you a quick look on trackers that websites want to load. After Ghostery was acquired by Evidon, there was some negativity, but imo concerns were unfounded. The 'phone home' option was already in Ghostery long before it was acquired and always was opt-in, not opt-out. There were also concerns on the privacy policy, but that was the policy of the website, not the extension. However, since the latest versions, Ghostery seems to have moved the settings to their website instead of local settings and there are now accounts that you need for features available before without an account. Then there's also the fact that Ghostery got a patent on dislaying information about trackers on webpages. Aral Balkan put it nicely: "Basically, the advertising industry’s been granted a patent that allows only one of their own to warm people about trackers. Sounds legit." (https://twitter.com/aral/status/740870572700278784) Today however, I updated one machine to v7 out of curiosity and when I opened the Ghostery panel, it actively asked me to turn on the phone home option. Naturally I declined, but when I went into the advanced features, I noticed it has now 2 phone home options. The one I was asked about was disabled, but the one I wasn't asked about was enabled by default. So goodbye Ghostery, hope to never see you again.
I don't know much about patents, but I believe the invention must be novel/non-obvious and patents can be overturned through a challenge process. There is considerable prior art in the area of ad/tracker blocking. Going back to the late 1990's at least, and probably even further if you include general purpose features/tools that could used for such purposes. I'm inclined to doubt that their patent is a general threat to developers of ad/tracking/etc blocking tools. If this is it: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=9361631 it looks like they filed for it in 2010. I just finished read through it. Although I'd need to read it at least several more times to refine my impression, my initial feeling is that if there actually IS something that would be considered novel it is probably related to the central service. Which users would use to configure their blocking preferences and access some additional info about ads/trackers, which collects information about user activity/preferences, which displays/collects information for the benefit of advertisers/trackers, so forth. The part that is making clue full users uncomfortable and that other developers have tried to avoid.
