The Milky Way, Aurora Borealis, a meteor, & A Ghost town all in the same shot - Old Hachita, New Mexico.

#Photography #Meteor #MilkyWay #Aurora #Astrophotography #NightSky #GhostTown #NewMexico

Ad-Blocking, then. The literal difference between constant annoying internet harassment and privacy invasion, and a peaceful web experience.

Google have played funny-buggers with Chromium's extension format so Manifest v3 is here to effectively castrate all of your fave Ad-Blocking tools.

I've been testing Vivaldi browser this morning to see how it's own in-built Ad-Block works. Vivaldi are supporting Manifest v2 for the time being but only until mid 2025 when the Chromium code for v2 will be entirely removed.

Vivaldi's own Ad-Block solution has been described as less-capable but what does that mean in real terms? Does it offer the same level of protection as purpose-specific extensions like uBlock Origin? Is it even capable of offering that level?

I found the following web site that gives me an lovely visual representation of ad-blocking with a list of anything blocked and anything that slips the dragnet.

d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock…
Let's do some informal testing:
Vivaldi Ad-Block OFF | UBlock Origin OFF = 4%
That's to be expected. Truly appalling, the raw unfiltered web. Every market-store vendor in the world up in your face selling things at you.

Vivaldi Ad-Block OFF | UBlock Origin ON = 99%
Yep, also expected. This is why people swear by uBlock Origin. All of that advertising and tracking nonsense annihilated. NB: That 1% is the test dev admitting there may be other Javascript web pages it doesn't specifically cover with their test.

Now here's the meat of this post:

Vivaldi Ad-Block ON | UBlock Origin OFF = 74%
That's actually reasonable, if not all-encompassing. The Test's own score-banding lists this as a good result. However, a glance down at some of the blocking reveals big names like Google and Amazon are slipping through the net. I personally wouldn't accept this.

Luckily, though, you can import your own block lists to Vivaldi's own default lists. The Toolz test itself lists a couple that they claim will plug the gaps in the testing. Vivaldi's forums linked me to a couple more. Four url imports later (importing the urls rather than text files means they'll update automatically)

Vivaldi Ad-Block ON with Imported Lists | UBlock Origin OFF = 99%
99% again, natively inside Vivaldi without uBlock Origin! That's really great to see although there are tonnes of caveats around this, for example it is only ONE test that might not test for everything needing blocked; it's far from a definitive finding so please don't take this as recommendation just yet.

Vivaldi have said they'll improve the Ad-block in the future as we approach v2 shut-down, and I think it's currently missing Dynamic Blocking which is a bit of a biggie, but my tests above are still very encouraging for the plucky Norwegians. I'll post the url sources in the post below. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts and experiences!

#AdBlock #Vivaldi #Browsers #Software #ManifestV3

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Wenn Bumble die Dating-App für die LinkedIn Community ist, was ist dann die Plattform für neurodiverse Cyberpunks (aka Mastodon)?

Ernstgemeinte Frage!