Positively Critical: WebPositive and Haiku | Haiku Project

Just make a bug report as enhancement if not there already.

If ad blocker speed up loading webpages, it woul indeed important to have.

Everything to speed up Haiku I would welcome.
Haiku is already fast but…

Oh, ad blockers can make a huge difference especially with ad-heavy websites. They can easily make a website go from stuttery messes to completely fluid.

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Some workarounds:

  • Web+ does not support downloading web fonts, because app_server require fonts to come from files currently. However, if you install fontawesome (or other fonts) in your system fonts, they will be used on website that depend on them.
  • You can use a DNS blocking list as a limited (but already quite efficient) form of ad blocker. I have used https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts . Maybe we should try to package it in Haiku to make it easier to set up

Anyway, all known issues, but unfortunately not so easy to solve with the time I can dedicate to WebKit (which is not a lot at the moment).

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NextDNS is also a good adblocker, it works at the DNS level. https://nextdns.io/

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Been doing that for years, not seeing a single ad and having probably way fewer crashes from misbehaving ads:

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Do we need a tutorial how to use Ad-Blocker or DNS blocking?
Can it be easily included in Haiku?
Or HaikuDepot?

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For DNS blocking, configure your home router to use the config provided by NextDNS. This would block adverts (and known malicious domains, but you’re in control as to what you block) for all machines on your network. NextDNS has good tutorials and example configuration for a variety of devices. And if something is blocked that you’d like not to be blocked, it can be whitelisted.

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it is a method that worked in the early days with rooted Android, so much so that then I started using it on linux and windows …
AdAway adblocker creates a host file with all the various lists that are updated from time to time via the web, maybe it could be adapted to work quickly for HAIKU…

hblock does exactly this, and it is already in the depot.

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thanks I was not aware of that

EDIT:

i immediately did some tests:
i installed hblock i ran it on the shell, and created a hostfile which is now 7 mb, i also restarted haiku, but it seems that web+ does not block ads, nor those of duckcduck go, nor those of youtube, I just did these two quick tests, maybe I missed some steps?

Thanks for the hint to install Font Awesome as system font.I already did that with Noto Color Emoji so that Otter shows them but I would have never come to the idea to install icon fonts to solve that problem…
For the hosts file blocker: I know that solution but I maintain my own list of stuff I want to block (mainly all Google bullshit because it’s a disgusting data-kraken nobody needs) and I can easily do that with a wildcard entry in a Adblock-Plus-formatted list but I would have to specify every single subdomain they have (and that’s likely millions) in the hosts file or run a own DNS server that serves the block on a wildcard domain.

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Even with an adblock of some sort client-side it will still take away some system resources to process. Doing it from the network level is where I would recommend starting for others. Either using a 3rd party DNS service or setup a small pihole and let it do its job.

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Is it enough to install fontawesome via HaikuDepot to make it system wide?

I do not see them in: system/data/fonts
system/non-packaged/data/fonts
nor in:
/boot/home/config/non-packaged/data/fonts
after installing with HaikuDepot.
Do I have to restart?

Which website I can test for fontawesome?

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No packaged data will ever show up in the non-packaged tree. Look in the normal paths. If it is still missing: reboot.

They are installed in /system/data/fonts/ttfonts/fa-*.ttf

On that note ttfonts is correct? I would expect ttffonts?

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ttffonts would mean true type fonts fonts, which is wrong. ttfonts is true type fonts.

Thanks for explaining, didn’t check other OS’s about this, was just wondering because the extension of the fonts is ttf

.ttf => dot true type font, seems fine to me.

You can start by this forumas it was one of the reason why font awesome was packaged. For example, IIRC, the magnifying glass on top bar is not rendering in most fonts.