Comment by ufmace

Comment by ufmace a day ago

0 replies

Thanks for providing a specific example! That does make more sense.

So I suppose Lite is indeed at least somewhat worse at blocking tracking. It's a legitimate concern. I admit that I don't have a ton of awareness of just how much tracking we're all subject to on the public mainstream web. Unfortunately, I fear it may be a losing battle.

What concerns me more is that there are dozens of medium to huge tech companies working full-time to track the hell out of us. That's not exactly great. uBO Lite blocks some of their stuff. I suppose uBO Full blocks more of it. But how do I know what either of them isn't blocking? It's got to be more than a full-time job to keep track of all the ways and means by which we're being tracked. Can a few determined independent individuals really effectively stop them? I tried using Firefox with NoScript for a while, but it's just too much work to fiddle with it on nearly every random site until that site works well enough to be usable.

I tend to think that, if one is truly concerned about ads and tracking, it's better to focus on staying on smaller, independent sites that do not do that at all. At least, more effective than being an individual in the middle of a full-time war between ad companies and individuals trying to block ads, trying to go to these big sites but not see the ads or be tracked.

Maybe the Brave solution is the better one - keep actual extensions to a more limited API, but more thoroughly integrate blocking of ads and tracking into the browser core. I know some people have other beefs with them, but there aren't any perfect solutions in this world.

It's also worth keeping in mind, in my opinion, that upwards of 95% of the world isn't using any ad blockers at all. Have you seen a "mainstream media" news website without any adblocking at all? Good god there's a ton of ads! How can anyone handle that! I guess we're already in a minority for trying to block ads at all, and it's an even smaller sub-minority that really cares about creating complex rules to actually block all tracking.