Bug 458645

Summary:	Adblock is absolutely useless in the current state
Product:	[Applications] Falkon	Reporter:	kaesbertrichson
Component:	extensions	Assignee:	David Rosca <nowrep>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	major	CC:	inbox, jurajoravec
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Debian stable
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description kaesbertrichson 2022-09-02 18:00:16 UTC

Adblock does not work on countless sites.

Youtube does not block ads that run before (and between) videos.

On https://www.anime-loads.org/, the ads are blocked but the pop ups still pop up (i.e. empty windows that you have to close anyway), and you are constantly prompted to deactivate the adblocker.

On Voe.sx, during the streams, many pop ups jump endlessly into the middle of the picture, which you have to click away, and in addition, pop ups open from time to time (but they are empty again - so the content is at least blocked).

On Kinox.to the advertising windows also pop up and the page is blocked until you let the (empty) pop ups open and then have to close them again.

I could list many more sites but would like to leave it at that. I just want to say that your Adblock does not work at all. When will you finally add ublock origin to your browser? That would be the solution for everything (at least for now). Otherwise, you should at least offer customers the appropriate rules for the Adblock from you. Because as your Adblock is, it is of absolutely no use for a normal surfer. I have now seen so much Youtube advertising again in the last few days that I could freak out. That scares off an infinite number of users from your browser, why don't you fix this problem? Because the Youtube problem at least I see exists for several years apparently.

This should be a constructive criticism so that finally something changes because like this the browser is not really usable. I hope this changes soon.

Comment 1 Juraj 2022-09-12 08:02:24 UTC

Hello,

yes, AdBlock is not in the best state and is missing a lot of features.

At the moment there is an open Merge Request to add partial support
for snippets but the creator is not responding.
I am tempted to just accept it as is and do some changes to it after that.
https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon/-/merge_requests/29

But for the rest of AdBlock the features and bugs there is nothing going on
of which I am aware.



> This should be a constructive criticism so that finally something
> changes because like this the browser is not really usable.
> I hope this changes soon.
I will be honest, I was not happy when I read this for the first time.
The reason for that is that there is almost nobody working on Falkon.
So, people can demand whatever they wish for but it will not be done
unless they do it themselves

Comment 2 kaesbertrichson 2022-09-12 10:12:25 UTC

@Juraj 

I am very sorry if I have upset anyone with my comment. I apologize for that, but as a long time uBlock Origin user and Firefox and Chrome user, I'm not used to so much advertising I've seen lately and that's what made me want to contribute to this very important improvement in the first place (at least by focusing attention on the problem). I didn't expect the team to be in "such a negative situation" considering that your browser is being integrated and supported by KDE and is one of the only QT-based browsers that really works as it should. So I am really very satisfied with the browser apart from all the pop ups that really (incredibly extremely) annoy me. One could say I hate advertising... :D lol... But I didn't want to upset anyone in any way so at this point again my apologize!

Unfortunately, I don't have any possibility (or rather the needed knowledge) how I could support you with this issue. I have already searched the entire Internet for any manually written Adblock browsing rules or up-to-date lists but all to no avail, which was also very frustrating. Because as I said (of course only from my point of view) one of the most important things is not to be disturbed by ads while browsing.

But thanks to your feedback I understand the situation now, and one really has to wonder where is the free software movement, which should help in such matters as soon as possible. Especially for such a fantastic project. Very sad. :/

Comment 3 Juraj 2022-09-12 19:07:33 UTC

It is hard work as anything else.
It requires a lot of efforts and also time.

At the moment I am working on selectively enable/disable some features per website (like javascript) due to similar reasons.
But it takes a while to design it and make it work nicely.

The next stop could be some AdBlock improvement, but I cannot promise that, since I was only lurking around for a long time.

I would also think that the hope of original developer was to put this project to KDE so that someone can pick it up.

Comment 4 Will Chen 2023-04-09 05:59:37 UTC

> When will you finally add ublock origin to your browser? That would be the solution for everything (at least for now).

As I understand it, the problem is that it's really not as easy as to simply "add UBlock Origin". QTWebEngine does not support the same extensions API as Firefox, Chromium, etc (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=393358, https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-70370, https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-61676). As a result, any "Extensions" that are available for Falkon basically have to be completely reprogrammed starting from nothing. QT provides capabilities that make ad blocking possible, but bear in mind that projects like UBlock Origin, Adblock (Plus), and so on are major team efforts with multiple contributors that have built up their capabilities over many years.

Comment 5 Bug Janitor Service 2025-01-15 22:19:23 UTC

A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon/-/merge_requests/121