uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook

jcfrei

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

mdrzn

Original reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...

drcongo

It's easy, just block every Facebook owned domain there is. Works for me.

The-Old-Hacker

I use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years. https://www.fbpurity.com/

ImHereToVote

I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.

nticompass

Man, am I happy that I deleted my Facebook. No regrets.

baggachipz

Oh the irony: https://ibb.co/NnxGJyr1

drnick1

Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.

akersten

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of `<div>` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

OhMeadhbh

Oh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.

XorNot

My solution to this was just to stop using Facebook. Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.

lucrbvi

It would be fun to train a small vision neural network to recognize ads instead of relying on HTML or network requests. I don't know if anyone has done this yet.

amazingamazing

Assuming you insist on using facebook you can proxy it, using a simple script that removes all ads prior to serving. The problem of course is that this is not cheap. Easier to just not use facebook.

greenleafone7

Best solution is to never use any of those useless apps ever again.

gregoriol

So basically Facebook ads won and we are doomed

hollow-moe

This doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.

VCFundedGenYer

Facebook is trying so hard to defeat adblockers that the actual website is borderilne unusable. I have found in the past year or so that pages just get hung on "loading" transitional screens way more often, even in normal circumstances. They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)

nelsonic

Very simple: just block all Meta domains at your local DNS. Nobody needs Meta. And if there is something you desperately need to see on one of their platforms temporarily switch your DNS.

red_admiral

My setup: separate profile for Facebook. Targeted advertising turned off. FB domains blocked on main profile. Not perfect, but it works.

pavel_lishin

I've tried to write a tampermonkey script to at least block the Reels, but even that's hella difficult. The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it. I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.