WebPositive has been blocked

Agreed. If people find ads in youtube so inconvenient ( I also dislike them ) , just find other places for listening music/whatever. Like, show google with the wallet.

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I just block tracking and analytics everywhere. If that gets rids of ads too that is tough luck for companies, but I don’t care. Advertising tailored to my person is not something I support.

Advertising for people that visit the site generally that’s perfectly fine though, and funnily enough tracking ads don’t make more money because of hacked browsers. It’s only a matter of time untill that bubble collapses.

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So far uBlock Origin and other WebExtension-based adblockers have been effective at countering Google’s attempts at stopping them. To go towards a more Haiku-relevant discussion, what would be needed to have WebExtensions support in WebPositive?

I think this is the start of the destruction of all the big tech companies corruption of the internet. I do not think Google made these changes voluntarily, I think they were forced. People are fleeing the Alphabet ecosystem en-masse.

I think WebKit2 is needed, I didn’t look very closely yet. Maybe there’s a way to do it in WebKitLegacy, but WebKitLegacy is largely dead now, and so we are on our own if we add things there, and it wouldn’t be upstreamable.

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uBlock origin is faulty by design, the extension api just randomly fails and so sometimes ads just get through.

Luckily… we don’t need this at all. Webkit has a built in blocking api that is much more powerfull, performant and free of such design flaws. No addons required.

maybe it needs webkit2 to work, maybe it doesn’t. I honestly don’t know.

Ad & Anslytics blocking will be a build in feature in webpositive once I get around to it, just like gnome web and safari have it.

Haven’t really heard of WebKit’s adblocking API preventing Google’s adblock defenses so as far as I know, uBlock Origin and other similar extensions are still more effective in this particular instance. Also uBO and others are being updated constantly now to keep up with the current arms race against Google, which Haiku prolly doesn’t have the resources to do the same by itself.

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No, we just use the same lists everyone else does.

What’s the point of using an addon designed to work only on firefox and chromium when we have a much more comprehensive solution available for free?

I get you wanting webextensions for some stuff, but fixing browser deficienses should not be the primary goal or motivation for them. So if the question is how do we adblock I, for my part, will do the proper solution, and not work on webextensions for this case but rather the proper api.

If someone else wants to add webextensions in the meantime that would be fine, I’m happy to review and merge such patches, I just won’t be working on it myself (and I suspect pulkomandy already has his plate full keeping up with upstream and the occasional progress in webkit2)

Did a bit of looking around and apparently uBO is no longer available for Safari:

Even worse, gorhill (uBO creator) outlines limitations of the adblocking API in WebKit preventing uBO from working at 100% capability. Damn, guess we’re boned until Gecko or a Blink-based web browser with WebExtensions support is ported.

Or alternately, a Haiku-native client for Invidious/Piped instances is developed.

That issue is from 2019.

It has nothing to do with the native content blocking api you can use, it makes uBO origin obsolete.

The ticket outlines that uBO support for safari was removed because safari extensions were removed. These are NOT the modern webextension api, which webkit has added in the meantime.

What made you reach that conclusion???
We literally have the superior option right at out fingertips. Why do you want to port a browser instead that requires workarounds in the forms of addons to get even close?
Especially a browserframework from google, the exact company that is causing this mess in the first place.
Google has tried time and time again to deprecate or make useless the api uBlock origin uses. It’s not a safe bet on any account.
Apple on the other hand has a vested interest in keeping this api working, unlike google their primary income is NOT tracking based advertisement.

Are there any known reports of the WebKit adblocking API being effective in thwarting Google’s adblock defenses? At least for uBO, Adguard, etc. there are even news articles saying that they do work. It’s one thing to wax lyrical about the technical or theoretical superiority of solutions, but quite another in the practical sense.

Have there been reports that it is ineffective…?

It’s quite wierd to just claim something doesn’t work and then demand evidence of the contrary.

I wouldn’t know, I’m never on youtubes site. And since webpositive doesn’t even support html videos currently I’m really confused why you want to port uBlockOrigin so much on the basis that maybe it could work better on a website that doesn’t work in the first place.

Nope, not accepting another question as an answer for another question. It’s not an ambiguous question:
Is the WebKit adblocking API known to be practically effective against Google’s adblock defenses?

No, I’m saying that my mind can be changed if there is evidence to the contrary. Practical evidence, not just in theory.

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You are asking for negative evidence, if you claim, without basis, that webkit is ineffective in this case the onus of proof is on you.

Otherwise you can just keep playing this game, then asking for evidence for other sites all day long.
I am not interested in made up assumptions.
Webkits content blocking has worked for every case for severall years for me.

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Searched around a bit more and Safari users are reporting unreliable to ineffective for the WebKit adblocking API:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/17cxwqp/cant_play_youtube_videos_i_use_adblock_engine/
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/17cp9xj/youtube_ad_block_for_safari/

People are recommending using Firefox with uBlock Origin or Adguard. If you’ve got more recent reports of Safari’s adblocking API being effective against YT’s defense, please provide them.

We could separate the two things. Ad-Blocking is much more encompassing than just youtube ads. For most site, the WebKit API work correctly.

As for youtube, people that do not want ads can sign for youtube premium, or look for videos/music in other places. Or is it right to pay for software that allows you to watch netflix just because you don´t want to pay for a netflix account ?

Youtube basically is a monolopy, doesn’t seem right to reward their practises.

That link also sais youtubes practices are illegal. So… why should we care?
this is a temporary inconvenience at best, as I mentioned above webpositive does not support html5 video.

And no, I will not go looking for news articles on that, for two reasons:

  1. webkit updates for apple devices only ship with apple OS point releases, so any improvements webkit does would not be shown untill such a point release.
  2. What is blocked depends on user selected filtering lists, so there is no evidence that youtube cannot be blocked, just that whatever filterlists those two users used doesn’t.
  3. I really don’t care about youtube
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OK cool, so the suggestions here here are still mostly relevant for YouTube specifically. This will become a bigger problem when WebPositive does support HTML5 video. Guess in the meantime, using Invidious or Piped in Epiphany will be the way to go.

No, unfortunately it doesn’t.

As Youtube clearly shows nowadays, the fight between ad blockers and ad providers is getting more serious. The content blocking API in WebKit has better performance, but it does not allow as much things as WebExtensions (whivh let extensions run arbitrary javascript code and do, essentially, whatever they want).

The content blocking system will work well in cases where the advertisers didn’t try too hard, but when it’s youtube and a full-time team of people changing the code in realtime as ad blockers manage to block it… that won’t do.

Because people want to watch youtube in their web browsers. Maybe you don’t care, that’s fine. But someone will, and hopefully they will fix video playing and also find a way to block ads?

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I asked why we would care about youtubes illegal practices. I figure that it will be stopped sooner than we have had time to implement any solution.

Webextensions do use js, but they can also only reach the conslusion of wether to block or not block a ressource if they use the webextension api.

They could in theory rewrite foreign js code or provide premade replacements, which would be an advantage. But I do not know of any addon that does this, so while this is theoretical and youtubes practice illegal I do not care about it, there are no tangible benefits that I see currently.

Youtube already works in Haiku, in qmplay2, vlc etc.