gcarq / inox-patchset

Inox patchset tries to provide a minimal Chromium based browser with focus on privacy by disabling data transmission to Google.
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
365 stars 25 forks source link

Proposing search results click-tracking removal patch #108

Closed csagan5 closed 7 years ago

csagan5 commented 7 years ago

I have now added this patch to Bromite that removes onmousedown from all Google search results hyperlinks; I have not tested if there is any broken functionality in other Google search results pages; normal search results work just fine.

To be honest, I didn't expect a sensible change in page load speed bypassing the Google click-tracking redirect. But it's there and I could notice it from the very first moment...seems like from 0.2 to 0.5 seconds.

Let me know if there are suggestions for improvements; for example the domain check could be moved to the Document object, but the patch would be more complex afterwards. Or also the internal listener/events subsystem could be used.

csagan5 commented 7 years ago

To be explicit: I wrote this from scratch and I am okay to release it under the terms of Inox-patchset license (although BSD benefits also people that want to sell it without contributing at all..just repack and sell, perfectly allowed, that's why I chose GPLv3 on Bromite).

Eloston commented 7 years ago

Interesting workaround for the lack of extensions support and neat hack, but I'm personally not too comfortable with site-specific changes that aren't built upon some public documentation (mainly because they usually become high maintenance, e.g. adblocking and youtube-dl). Also, I feel the users here would rather have a working but slow page as opposed to a fast but potentially broken one.

Obviously I have no authority here, so these are just my two cents.

csagan5 commented 7 years ago

@Eloston I understand the concern. But I will fix the patch (for Bromite) as soon as there are issues reported.

I was expecting that maybe some users here are also interested?

Edit: btw, the tailoring would be rather simple and I am probably going to do it anyway: do not remove onmousedown if it's not a hyperlink of the correct class. I mentioned that it might remove too much from search results right now (so the broken experience would be limited only there), like from maps and images embedded results, but I do not have proof yet (from rapid check seems okay)

Eloston commented 7 years ago

@csagan5

I was expecting that maybe some users here are also interested?

It's possible. I don't know what the users are like here; I'm just assuming that Inox is similar enough to ungoogled-chromium that my experiences could be helpful.

csagan5 commented 7 years ago

Sure, feel free to pick it up for ungoogled-chromium if you like (although you already mentioned the downsides). I am proposing it here because I thought this project is more up-to-date.

I think/hope it's not high maintenance because it's in the WebKit core.

As for bugs in search results, so far nothing broken. Images work, maps work, videos work. But of course more testing is always better, it's a relatively young patch I made.

csagan5 commented 7 years ago

Closing for now, might propose again after https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/7 is fixed