The great tracker blocker conundrum – Technical

julien_picalausa

In the spirit of keeping Vivaldi free for all our users, we are trying out some changes to the way our tracker blocker works. These changes relate to ways in which our tracker blocker was affecting our partnership with search engines in unexpected ways.

Click here to see the full blog post

LonM

Thanks for taking the time to write this up, Julien.

The technical write up at the help page is very good. It is clear that you've needed to make a compromise, but you've thought it through to be as privacy preserving as possible.

zakius

the technically best way would be working around extensions API limitations to just make uBO work as expected (not uBOL, not Chromium uBO, the Quantum version with all the features that are and were impossible on Chromium), but it's hard to tell whether that'd be easier than improving your own blocker
and search partners probably wouldn't be exactly happy

Pathduck

So, to clarify - if I go to say DDG and search for "cars oslo" I get sponsored results, they lead to a link like this:
https://duckduckgo.com/y.js?ad_domain=kayak.com&ad_provider=bingv7aa&ad_type=txad&click_metadata=<lots and lots more stuff>

This link gives a redirect to:
https://www.bing.com/aclick?ld=<loooooong code>
Which again redirects to the actual kayak.com site.

So in this case would the "landing page" be DDG or Bing?

Similarly, if I go to Bing, and click on an ad, it links to:
https://www.bing.com/aclick?ld=e8b...<long code>
This sends me, after a JS redirect to:
https://www.avis.no/?cid=pp_site-MICROSOFT_camp-348750705_adgroup-1361195525276188_target-kwd-85074801132628:loc-139_creative-_device-c_feed-&gclid=f96<...>

Would in this case the landing page be avis.no and in that case the adblocker be disabled on AVIS?

Bing also appears to no longer be a "partner" (at least here) so the adblocker is by default enabled on Bing. If I disable it then Bing's sponsored ads show as links to for instance: https://www.pnstmxgapyotm.com/grlvgjwgrinihh
This is actually not a valid domain. It's just there to hide the actual url of site it redirects to when clicked.

Argh, this just reminded me what a horrible, horrible search engine Bing is, I don't know how people can even stand using it.

julien_picalausa

@pathduck: In your first example, the landing page should be kayak.com (assuming everything works as expected). In general, the landing page should be the page of the company that was advertising.

Note that in no case does the ad blocker get disabled on ad landing pages. The only thing that changes is that a minimal list of exception is applied temporarily to the tracker blocker. All ads on the landing page should remain blocked.

And indeed, Bing is no longer a partner. At least for the time being, we are not worried about getting Ad Attribution to work for ads in the Bing search results page.

Stardust

If you would rather not see ads at all on our partner sites, and fully disable ad attribution, you can follow these steps

That's me! I hate ads, tracking, profiling etc and I will keep blocking them forever.

The work to improve the ad blocker will keep moving forward in the coming months, with the goal of reaching feature parity with uBlock Origin.

I hope you will ~~copy~~ take inspiration from uBO advanced UI where you can block domains (and 3rd-party scripts) per site or globally on the fly.

Advanced UI could be optional as well.

Also element picker, remote fonts blocker and logger maybe?

stpvid1

Really good article explaining about ads and tracking, thanks

Oh LOL took up, your suggestion about a donation to Vivaldi, tried 4 times didn't work ! Then I remembered to turn off the ad blocker to No blocking, then it was ok ! Looks like Vivaldi's ad blocker works real good...

Gort

@stardust said:

I hope you will copy take inspiration from uBO advanced UI where you can block domains (and 3rd-party scripts) per site or globally on the fly.

Advanced UI could be optional as well.

Also element picker, remote fonts blocker and logger maybe?

Add to those the ability for the Vivaldi content blocker to be able to support uBO's filter rules.

Stardust

@Gort said in The great tracker blocker conundrum – Technical:

@stardust said:

I hope you will copy take inspiration from uBO advanced UI where you can block domains (and 3rd-party scripts) per site or globally on the fly.

Advanced UI could be optional as well.

Also element picker, remote fonts blocker and logger maybe?

Add to those the ability for the Vivaldi content blocker to be able to support uBO's filter rules.

certainly!

Mikka

The work to improve the ad blocker will keep moving forward in the coming months, with the goal of reaching feature parity with uBlock Origin.

Feature parity means you both want to be able to somewhat block ads or does it mean the goal is that I can load the same filter lists (and import my custom filters) and experience the same level of protection that ubo-v2 offers?

Stardust

I think "Allow ads from our partners" option should be a separate option on the root Privacy page, not hidden in the list of ~40 ad blocking sources.