µBlock, a lean and fast blocker

why? ublock has its own dialogs for settings and changes have immediately impact on reload.
to compare settings (files) use notepad++ or similar.

for changes, why to care? i use lists where are altered when needed from those who invent such list. i am not that kind of idiot to create 150.000 entries on my own. seriously.

 

That's the whole point. You create own rules and aren't capable to oversee the consequences. If you get in trouble you think that something is wrong with uBO or a filterlist. And you post your for most members irrelevant problem in this thread.

 

Like Rasheed187, I'm not sure what you were trying to say.
Using the element picker is easy, and if I look at what I'm doing, I don't create any issues.
And if some new website code conflicts with some old filter rule, you won't see me complaining, I'll fix it myself.

 

Nope, most of the posts that I make in this thread is about stuff that I'm trying to block. And sometimes I'm indeed also trying to figure out why stuff is blocked like embedded Twitter or Instagram content. But the first thing I always do is to disable my own made cosmetic filters, but this time I made mistake. So your claim is false.

Exactly, I have made tons of cosmetic filters without any problems. Most of the time when I can't figure out why stuff is blocked, it's caused by some uBlock filter, and not my own cosmetic rules. For example, I still can't figure out why imbedded Twitter content is blocked on this page, even when I allow twitter.com in uBlock's matrix.

https://www.iexprofs.nl/Nieuws/780831/Must-Read/Must-read-Op-naar-een-nieuwe-rally.aspx

Not sure what you mean, but obviously uBlock's own filters don't remove ALL annoyances on websites, so that's why uBlock came up with the element picker, for an easy way to get rid of things. There is nothing weird or dumb about this.

 

EasyPrivacy was causing the UBO filters not to load at startup for me in Chrome. I unchecked it and the filters load now at startup.

 

It's blocked by Peter Lowe (probably for a good reason).

 

Does anyone know if cosmetic filtering simply hides elements on web pages, but it offers nothing in privacy and security? I've searched all over, pretty sure there is something documented about this, but I'm unable to find anything.

 

Cosmetic filtering affects only how the page looks, nothing more and nothing less.

 

I found this in the wiki:
[...] cosmetic filtering has no privacy value. [1]
[...] disable cosmetic filtering on a per-site basis, [...] this will keep you protected security- and privacy-wise (as far as your filters/rules allow) [...] [2]

 

IMO there was a state of uBo were DOM (cosmetics) were removed. then later i found a very long CSS at the end of each page with a lot of tags, some of my own tags set in "my filters". but i may be wrong first the first part of removal.
ages ago i used to use proxomitron - its code is ancient and not public, it died with the author - this were able to remove/replace unwanted parts. but like uBo (i assume) removing takes time, much more time than browser need to apply css to alter things.
anyhow the algorithm in uBo to hide is much more powerful than css itself.

 

Thank you both @Bertazzoni and at @Stupendous Man. That's what I thought, and I knew there had to be a good reason why I've had cosmetic filtering disabled by default in the settings for years now, enabled only on selected sites, just I couldn't remember why

 

PUP Domains Blocklist not being removed from list even after purge all catches.
Using uBO 1.52.2. Changelog states remove unmaintained urlhaus PUP filter list.

 

The removal of the unmaintained urlhaus PUP filter list is in 1.52.3b1 and 3b2 pre-release, not in 1.52.2 release.

 

On some sites, unblocking cosmetic filters is a quick fix to circumvent anti-adblocking (e.g., on apkmirror.com)

 

Thank you. Firefox ESR had the PUP Domains list under [Custom] in
uBO 1.52.2 and I was able to remove it from there.

 

If your browser and the site you visit, support reader mode, it can be a good alternative to cosmetic filtering. View: https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch002295.htm

 

That's most probably a misunderstanding. I'm pretty sure that you don't allow (-> green) Twitter (unless you've explicitly enabled allow rules in the advanced settings) - rather, you noop (-> grey) it. Which means that the filters (in the enabled filterlists or your own-made filters) apply. And there is probably a filter which blocks XHR to Twitter. Again, this can be seen in the logger where you can easily create an exception filter (or rule).

So here we are again. You've been following this thread for years but you're still unfamiliar with Dynamic Filtering and the Logger. That's why you're running into problems over and over again.

 

Well, on the other hand the wiki also says:

I think the last aspect can be important if it comes to 1st-party ads and tracking. I keep it enabled, if for no other reason to unclutter many sites.

 

I definitely need cosmetic filtering for that reason, for many sites I couldn't do without.

 

Not every user thinks of himself as being an advanced user, and as such does not enable the options for advanced users, among which dynamic filtering.
I, for myself, like the defaults, plus some extra filter lists, plus some personal filters. Over time, I may become more accustomed to using the logger. But it's no ambition to me to become an advanced user and use dynamic filtering and medium or hard mode, or even only Enhanced Easy mode. I think the same applies to many users. To some users in this thread as well.

 

I haven't even got a clue what stuff like medium mode and dynamic filtering means, and how it's related to the problems that I report. But in order to benefit from uBlock this also isn't needed. You're right, not everyone has to become an advanced user, so I disagree with summerheat.

Yes, I do allow twitter.com on certain pages, in order to make the imbedded content to load. Keep in mind, this is not a global rule. But in this particular case it didn't help. And you and others were right, this time I could see what was being blocked in the logger. It was consentmanager.net that I needed to allow, and now the imbedded Twitter content loads correctly on the IEX page. Is there also a way to make the logger load inside a tab, instead of a new browser window?

 

Well, disabling this filterlist didn't solve the problem. So I ended up having to disable uBlock on the IEX page. But I then had to disable the DuckDuckGo and EasyPrivacy tracking filters in Vivaldi's adblocker to make it work. So ads were blocked, but not the trackers.

But as said before, with the help of the logger I found out that I needed to allow consentmanager.net, so now uBlock is enabled again. You see that it isn't always so simple? But yeah, hopefully in the future, the logger will give me more clues in case of problems. Perhaps for educational purposes I will simulate the problem on AD, and see if the logger tells me what is being blocked.

 

Yes, it only hides, so apparently it's not possible from a technical point of view to block them from loading at all. You can test this by simply saving the websites and then run them from disk, you will sadly enough see all of the crap (including cookie alerts) that were hidden by the cosmetic rules. It's a bummer for me, because I sometimes would like to save interesting articles, but it's pretty much pointless.

 

Well, I'm afraid I have some bad news. I just did the test, but the logger didn't give me any clues about the cosmetic filters that I made on AD, so it would not have helped to determine what cosmetic filter caused the blocking. I'm guessing this is because the stuff that is blocked by cosmetic filters aren't actually blocked from loading?

This was the rule that I made:

 

Yeah, I've had to unbreak the odd website on occasion using this method.

I guess that's why it's aptly called "cosmetic filtering". I kind of remembered that it only hides undesirable elements, but that it doesn't outright prevent them, thus no privacy or security benefits. I just couldn't find anything in this thread using the search function that explained this. Bertazonni and Stupendous Man verified this in their posts 7658 and 7659 respectively.