Setting up an adblocker in firefox

Install uBlock Origin - that should be straight-forward, if a bit unintuitive on recent Firefox versions, unless there's something odd about Firefox for Raspbian. Click the 4-horizontal-lines icon at the left of the title bar, select Extensions and pick uBlock Origin from the list.

FWIW I'm running FireFox on this Lenovo laptop and have uBlock Origin, Cookie Autodelete, Ghostery and PKC11 Loader installed. uBlock Origin and Ghostery might look like similar tools, but I remember having reasons for installing both: their capacities aren't a total overlap.

On a slower system than this thing (Lenovo T440 with a 1.9GHz i5 and 8GB RAM) a better combo is probably uBlock Origin plus Cookie Autodelete because there's little or no capability overlap, or just install Ghostery by itself and see it that does enough to keep you ad-free and tracker- free.

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

For 'Click the 4-horizontal-lines icon at the left of the title bar' read 'Click the 4-horizontal-lines icon at the *right* of the title bar.

Sorry 'bout that. That braindead symbol-littered replacement for a proper menu bar is why I switched to Palemoon. Now that seems to be abandonware, I'm using Brave as my standard Browser - its fast, pretty stable, and the various blockers are built-in and configurable.

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

And it's 3, right? (I'm not behind a desktop.) That's why they call it the hamburger menu.

Yep. Wrote 4 at the end of a long coding session. I must say that hamburgers, or that stack of lines, don't immediately make me think of a configuration menu.

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Universally Incomprehensible Imagery innit - instead of words that only a fraction of the world can understand we have little pictures that nobody can understand. Thus equality is achieved.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

I can distinguish the word for male and female in several dozens of languages and at least half a dozen different scripts and could easily add to that list, should the necessity ever arise. But I have often stood musing in front of lavatory doors trying to make out those incompehensible pictures and more than once have I made the wrong choice afer all.

The invention of writing was the one single greatest cultural achievement ever -- and we are giving it up.

--




/ \  Mail | -- No unannounced, large, binary attachments, please! --

"Axel Berger" wrote

But I have often stood musing in front of lavatory doors trying to make out those incompehensible pictures and more than once have I made the wrong choice afer all.

That's easy: If you're not a transexual in a wheelchair, or at least a crossdressing cervix owner, wait until you get home. :)

Last I saw, Firefox still provided the option to have a menu bar. It's a lot easier than a hamburger menu. Though I don't think Chromium will allow that. At least I couldn't find it. The best I found was a half-functional extension that put the menu bar under all the others.

One other note that might be useful: I think I set up ublock Origin in FF on the Pi4. I haven't had occasion to get too picky. I'm using Chrome to stream movies from the library and FF to visit Youtube. I don't do much else so far. But have people considered a decent HOSTS file? I've used them for many years and can't remember the last time I saw an ad on Windows. Yet I don't use any adblockers. HOSTS is also nice for blocking tracking bugs from the likes of Facebook and Googletagmanager.

Combined with a DNS proxy like Acrylic, or a DNS resolver like Unbound, you can have a HOSTS file with wildcards. Only a few entries will block most everything. But again, I'm mostly on Windows and haven't had occasion to do such things on Pi/Linux.

Pi-hole made my life a lot easier.

And PiVPN with Wireguard, so my mobile devices also get their DNS from Pi-hole too.

--
Regards, 
Kees Nuyt

For some reason I got the idea that extensions in general were platform specific and therefore didn't expect to find much support for Raspberry PiOS outside of the apt-get infrastructure. In any case, it turned out uBlock Origin was already installed and turned on, so I added Ghostery for good measure and will play with it further.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

4 lines does make me think of a Bacon double cheeseburger.

Anyway blame mobes.

---druck

Aren't they written in Java or Javascript? So platform independent? I assumed they used the browsers own javascript interpreter.

--
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight  
and understanding". 

Marshall McLuhan

I like to tell people that I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body.

When Firefox switched to the hamburger menu in release 29, I switched to Seamonkey

Seamonkey is based on the Mozilla code base, but stubbornly holds on to the classic user interface. I find FF's hamburger menu to be totally incomprehensible - try to find Preferences, for example.

On Seamonkey I'm running Adblock Plus and NoScript. They work well enough that a lot of web sites get quite upset with me.

--
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  Microsoft is a dictatorship. 
\ /        |  Apple is a cult. 
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  Linux is anarchy. 
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |  Pick your poison.

By the same token, I've been telling everyone who will listen that, for my money, SeaMonkey Mail is a much better MUA than Thunderbird.

I guess what I really want in a GUI MUA is for it to work well with IMAP, stay out of my way, and display HTML mail well.

That last one can be a doozy for MUAs that don't have the codebase of a heavy hitting HTML renderer at their core, like Gecko or WebKit.

Everything *just works* with SeaMonkey Mail, and I like that the UI remains consistent. I don't *want* my MUA's UI to change over time. I've been reading and writing mail pretty much the same way for the past

20+ years, so there is no reason for there to be constant UI changes.

Unfortunately for me, the gContactSync extension which I use to be synchronise my Google Contacts with my SeaMonkey Mail address book is no longer supported.

I've told the developer that the version he claims works with SeaMonkey no longer does, but that an older version that he had since removed worked perfectly. He gave me a direct link to the older version which has been working ever since, and I just keep my fingers crossed that it won't stop working one of these days, with no upgrade path.

The dev told me I'm pretty much the only person who has ever written to him about it, so I guess in fairness he knows his audience.

"Charlie Gibbs" wrote

| When Firefox switched to the hamburger menu in release 29, | I switched to Seamonkey

They switched but it's just a click to get it back. I'm running FF52 on XP with an old style UI. I have recent Firefox on Pi4 and Waterfox on Win7 -- both almost up to date. Both allow me to bring back the menu bar. Bu I think you're right about the appeal of FF variants. I'm running New Moon as my primary browser. That's got nice touches like incorporating the Status-4-Eva status bar that I used to have to get as an extension. And it has updates for XP.

I don't mind if I have to fix things, but Chrome seems to be mostly unfixable. And newer versions of FF won't allow me to do basic things like disabling tabs and blocking auto-update. It gets less flexible with every version.

Most of the extensions are platform agnostic, but there are some few that depend on the OS itself for some of the their functions. It's usually fairly clear from the descriptions about which ones are OS dependent.

GP