search

ghostery / ghostery-extension

Ghostery Browser Extension for Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge and Safari
Mozilla Public License 2.0
1.38k stars 141 forks source link

Ghostery 10 on Firefox does not block anything #1849

Open philipp-classen opened 2 months ago

philipp-classen commented 2 months ago

Help needed Ghostery 10 was released on 19th of August, 2024. Since then, we got reports that Ghostery does not block any ads or tracking requests. From the reports, it looks as if the adblocker was not correctly initialized.

So far, we could not reproduce the behavior. If you are affected, these questions could narrow it down:

If you have any insights, please feel free to comment on this issue. Thank you!

nathfy commented 2 months ago

I've got this issue on Firefox 130.0 (64-bit) with Ghostery 10.4.3 debugger details:

image

Removing Ghostery, restarting firefox, re-add Ghostery resolves.

philipp-classen commented 2 months ago

The problem here could be related to https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension/issues/1837 (report about performance problems). Thanks @nathfy, the errors in the logs you shared confirm that the startup times out and the adblocker engine is not initialized.

One class of problems that we identified on Firefox is that IndexedDB, which is used to persist the adblocker engine, is not available to Web Extension if browsing history is disabled in Firefox. This problem has been discussed in the developer community; there is also a bug report for Firefox.

If you are affected by problems after the Ghostery 10 rollout (August 19th), please check if you are running Firefox in "Never remember history" mode:

never_remember_history

There could be other issues; however, not being able to use IndexedDB does create problems. We are working on solutions to handle this more gracefully.

In the meantime: if you affected and have "Never remember history" enabled, does it work in a profile that uses the default ("Remember history") setting?

nathfy commented 2 months ago

@philipp-classen I've just checked and my Firefox is set to Remember history - Unfortunately as I have removed and re-added Ghostery I no longer have the issue. But thought I'd add that info in....

philipp-classen commented 2 months ago

@philipp-classen I've just checked and my Firefox is set to Remember history - Unfortunately as I have removed and re-added Ghostery I no longer have the issue. But thought I'd add that info in....

Ah, I missed that you mentioned already that reinstalling fixed it. Sometimes, profiles can get corrupted. It is rare, but perhaps that happened here; restoring it from a backup, or purging it by reinstalling is the only way to recover.

Still, it is possible that there are other problems that we have not found yet. Thanks for checking!