The Firefox version of uBlock Origin is considered the version that offers the best protection, as it supports protection against CNAME tracking, which the Chrome versions do not offer.
Hill calls uBlock Origin a "wide-spectrum content blocker" instead of an ad blocker. The extension blocks more advertisement but also trackers, miners, popups, malicious URLs and more by default. Users may add more lists, for instance to deal with annoyances on the Internet.
Many users hold uBlock Origin in high regard because of its memory and CPU effectiveness. Hill, who never accepted donations or compensation for his development work, is another core reason why the extension is as popular as it is right now.
Of all the browsers I tested, only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future.
Click-tracking is controlled in Firefox with the
browser.send_pings
preference and, as of v97, it is still disabled by default.
On one hand i'm glad that Firefox's market share continues to plummet because it puts a dent in the piggy banks of the corporate clowns at Mozilla, but on the other i'm glad it's still around. How much longer it will remain so, i don't know. Perhaps quite a long time should the "woke", inclusive jackasses at the corporate level ever decide to return to their earthly senses.
Google has introduced declarativeNetRequest (DNR) to replace the blocking webRequest API. This impacts the capabilities of extensions that process network requests (including but not limited to content blockers) by limiting the number of rules an extension can use, as well as available filters and actions.
After discussing this with several content blocking extension developers, we have decided to implement DNR and continue maintaining support for blocking webRequest.
Manifest V3, Google Chrome’s soon-to-be definitive basket of changes to the world of web browser extensions, has been framed by its authors as “a step in the direction of privacy, security, and performance.” But we think these changes are a raw deal for users. We’ve said that since Manifest V3 was announced, and continue to say so as its implementation is now imminent. Like FLoC and Privacy Sandbox before it, Manifest V3 is another example of the inherent conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.
Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit. Under the new specifications, extensions like these– like some privacy-protective tracker blockers– will have greatly reduced capabilities. Google’s efforts to limit that access is concerning, especially considering that Google has trackers installed on 75% of the top one million websites.
It’s also doubtful Mv3 will do much for security. Firefox maintains the largest extension market that’s not based on Chrome, and the company has said it will adopt Mv3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility.
I'm not sure why i like reinventing the wheel since there's probably hundreds of tutorials about how to hide Firefox's context menu items, but reinvent i did. One of the cooler things i haven't seen much of in the existing tutorials is how to get a list of all the CSS selectors for all of Firefox's context menus (all 476) by searching the source code. I also cover how to grab them the ol' fashioned way, with Firefox's Developer Tools. Have a read.
James Corbet just posted another very good and instructional video addressing those of us who are new to figuring out how the world really works as opposed to how many of us think it works.
A portion of the video is dedicated to how James feels about the permanency of the internet or, more accurately, the information stored on the world wide web. He thinks much of it, meaning the content pumped out by us "conspiracy theorists", will be obliterated by the-powers-that-be-in order to control the narrative. Personally i'm not so sure about that, but i will concede that this is a possibility. In that light i would recommend, as James does, that we all store the important data which we discover on-line.
What James doesn't tell us, other than to do a search, is exactly HOW to grab the data we want to store and so i shall provide some brief suggestions in that regard, limited to my personal experience.
When you come across content you want to save, the most obvious solution is to press Ctrl+S and your browser will guide you through the process. You can save textual and imagery content this way, but not video. If you want to streamline the process, you can install a browser extension. For instance, the Firefox add-on repository (AMO) has several add-ons you can use to save content, one of them being SingleFile by gildas.
Saving video is another matter and while there a plethora of browser extensions that can accomplish the task, i would highly suggest avoiding all of them and using youtube-dl instead. youtube-dl can be installed on multiple platforms including Linux and Windows and it can save videos from many more video sharing websites than just YouTube. If you can find the link to the actual video however, such as a URL ending with .mp4, .avi, .mov, etc., then you don't need any extension because you can just press Ctrl+S or right-click the link to save it. For many video sharing websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc., it either isn't easy or is simply impossible to find a single source for a video and so youtube-dl is a wonderful tool in these cases because it goes way beyond what Ctrl+S can do.
I would also highly recommend archiving any content you want to save on an archive website. The best archive service i can recommend for textual and image content is archive.today. They don't obey robots.txt files (or at least not completely) and so once you archive something with them, it *should* be permanent. The next best service, and one that works for virtually all content including videos, PDFs, etc., is archive.org. While the WayBack Machine, as it's called, will not archive videos embedded in a page, one can use it to archive videos separately. If you create an account you can have your own archive library if you wish. Here's mine.