therube wrote:I don't really know all the ins & outs, but ... Was Filterset.G effectively banished by Wladimir?
I developed the Adblock Filterset.G Updater back in the day, so I was closer to the situation... Filterset.G was not at all banished by Wladimir, he wouldn't do that. He was rather vocal about the inefficiencies of Filterset.G, and encouraged users to switch to EasyList, but he even built in (specifically for AFGU) the capability for an external extension to add a "filter subscription" that would keep its filters separate from the main filter list. He didn't have to do that... when AFGU was originally released, it was written for Adblock Original, and we were just modifying the "adblock.patterns" preference to add filters. We could have kept doing that, but that new feature in ABP let us avoid the need to keep the current version of Filterset.G in two places so we could remove the old filters line by line before adding newly downloaded ones.
It's true that Wladimir added a "Please don't use Filterset.G" prompt to ABP later, but by that point, the filterset hadn't been updated in months. I heard Graham Pierce, or "G", got a girlfriend, and the update rate dropped quickly in the next few weeks. Since an updated whitelist was the only thing holding it together at the end, it was causing increasing problems as the state of the internet diverged from the old version the whitelist was written for, and those problems ended up being attributed to ABP. He only put in the warning because Graham Pierce had dropped off the face of the web. In fact, I bet most of the Filterset.G problems came to him... as a developer of the extension, more of the "Filterset.G doesn't work" mail came to me than to Graham Pierce, and you'd be surprised how little mail I got from an extension with 3 million downloads. I bet that's because Wladimir got it all.
therube wrote:Not sure I understand?
A NoScript/FlashGot install will now add a filter to an existing Adblock Plus setup that subverts the blocks that are now being added by the EasyList filter set?
And Wladimir is OK with that?
I'm kind of wondering at that myself, as if externally-updated filter list (as filter sets added by other extensions are called in ABP parlance) entries are being added to ABP without user approval, that's clearly not using the feature the way it was intended. I think Wladimir would be well within the bounds of propriety as the developer of ABP to update Adblock Plus to include a permission prompt each time an externally updated filter list is added. However, that would cripple the feature, which was intended to allow behind-the-scenes interoperability with ABP. He might just ax the whole externally-updated filter list feature, which I think would be a grave mistake, but since the only extension that I know of other than NoScript that uses the feature is the (obsolete) AFGU, he might be inclined to.
I don't like my web experience being messed with without my consent... that's why I installed NoScript, why I installed ABP, and why I installed EasyList. (Obviously, I'm trusting that whoever is maintaining EasyList shares the same values.) I was expecting EasyList to block stuff, though I think that the specific rules we're all discussing here went way overboard... but I wasn't expecting NoScript to add anything to ABP. If someone wrote an extension that was incompatible with NoScript, I wouldn't expect NoScript to (without prompting me) detect it and uninstall it, either. It should prompt me first. When AFGU caused problems for ABP, Wladimir didn't detect it, remove it, and say "Oh, BTW, I uninstalled AFGU," he asked users if they wanted to uninstall it. I'd advise that NoScript take the same approach. Tell me that EasyList can cause problems with your website, and I'll be more than likely to let you whitelist it. But shove something in ABP and alert me after the fact, and I'll be more than likely to raise a ruckus about it, especially if the title of the filter list in ABP is "NoScript Revenue Enhancement Filterset." (Seriously man, that was just stupid. If you're trying to sell the whitelist filters as fixing stuff EasyList broke, don't say "that and also to make me money," everyone will think it's the primary reason, because it's the one you'd most want to hide.)
All that said, Ares2, claiming that overly-restrictive filters on specific websites are OK as long as there are no observable false positives is equally boneheaded. It's like putting a security system on your car that electrocutes car thieves, and saying its a good idea because it deters car theft... you're right, but as soon as someone actually tries to rob the car, you'll be hauled up for murder (or at least manslaughter or wrongful death). Just because it doesn't produce any false positives RIGHT NOW doesn't mean it isn't a bad idea.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) XPCOMViewer/0.9a