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elementary / default-settings

Default settings for elementary OS
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Block tracking ads by default #136

Closed moonmehta closed 2 years ago

moonmehta commented 4 years ago

Out of the box, Firefox, GNOME Epiphany and Brave block tracking ads, for enhanced privacy. Safari is going to join the list with the new WekKit tracking protection spec. It'd be great for elementary's Epiphany to ship a privacy enhancing default that also saves a lot of annoyance while browsing on the web. This PR fixes elementary/browser#68.

Firefox hasn't shown any functional regression since over a year of enabling the setting there. And in my limited testing, Epiphany is working fine too with some popular sites.

cassidyjames commented 4 years ago

We intentionally did not turn on the ad blocker because we've been told it makes performance worse, plus it's a heavy-handed ban-hammer, taking revenue away from sites with legitimate, safe ads. We didn't feel it was appropriate for us to make that decision on the platform level.

moonmehta commented 4 years ago

I thought the blocking took place explicitly for tracking ads based on a list like Disconnect?

mcatanzaro commented 4 years ago

We intentionally did not turn on the ad blocker because we've been told it makes performance worse,

It did prior to 3.34, although memory usage was probably a larger concern than performance. Nowadays we use WebKit's built-in adblocker, which is very fast and memory-efficient.

I thought the blocking took place explicitly for tracking ads based on a list like Disconnect?

No, it just blocks all ads.

Prior to 3.34, we had a separate EasyPrivacy blocklist, but that doesn't exist in JSON format so we don't use it anymore.

cassidyjames commented 4 years ago

Still have to decide if this is worth it, though:

it's a heavy-handed ban-hammer, taking revenue away from sites with legitimate, safe ads. We didn't feel it was appropriate for us to make that decision on the platform level.

jeremypw commented 3 years ago

@uncertainquark @cassidyjames Converting to draft as has conflicts and undecided design issues. Please feel free to close or reopen for review after fixing conflicts as desired.

danirabbit commented 2 years ago

It looks like GNOME Web has the ad blocker enabled by default these days. It's not clear overrides here have any effect on the Flatpak.

Closing since we probably should move any default settings changes to https://github.com/elementary/browser anyways

mcatanzaro commented 2 years ago

The adblocker has been enabled by default for nearly a decade. ;)

danirabbit commented 2 years ago

@mcatanzaro I meant in elementary OS specifically 😅 It probably has been since we migrated to the Flatpak