[dev] [surf] adblocking

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:27:39 +0100

Greetings comrades,

I have been thinking of adding some easy way of adblocking to surf. My
conclusion is, that it is not needed.

By changing the default parameters of surf to »‐ips«, which will disable
all the scripts, the images and plugins by default, nothing wrong is
loaded when some URI is opened. Then, based on what I want to see I en‐
able first images and then scripts and then maybe plugins.

The only annoying part in this algorithm is that when scripts and images
are enabled all ads are viewable and this can be filtered with complex
solutions like adblock plus or some hosts filtering. Hosts filtering re‐
quires some callback to filter on a specific hosts file with >15k
lines on every request. This could be optimized using better data
structures, but still, the complexity is high.

Such a feature would only be useful when you have to save on bandwith
but need for a specific website all features enabled. I don’t really see
enough benefit to justify some big callback communication for
javascript loading and such, like a full adblock plus compatibility
would require.

What are you comrades thinking of this?


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann
Received on Tue Nov 20 2012 - 13:27:39 CET