Forum Discussion
Is there going to be any conflicts between Microsoft Edge tracking prevention and Ad blocker addons?
HotCakeX - That’s a good question. I know Google Chrome is sort of taming away from them, but there’s some still in their store. Ad blocks are hard one. I know their suppose to block ads on websites (and people use them on Youtube) but at the same time I’ve experienced them to cause a website or my browser to break (meaning crash on my end possibly because of a badly coded third party app) when going into a site. That or a pop up from the website telling me their independently funded and my ad blocker is preventing revenue to help their site running. So I tried two for awhile, but stopped using ad blockers altogether. I’ve also seen both sides of this debate. One side says that blocking ads prevents users from being bombarded with unwanted solicited ads, but on the other side I’ve heard the debate of how shutting out ads from a website hinders their freedom of speech to advertise goods especially small business or independent (news) websites. Both make valid points. I’m leaning towards hoping Microsoft keeps away from them. It's also believed that the more extensions you add to your browser the more fingerprints you leave on the web meaning ways to be traced back via your browser through your IP address. I guess it's a matter of preference. I did just now download ublock from the Chrome store out of curiosity from your post, and it seems to work fine on my Edge Canary. Many (not all) Chrome apps from the Chrome store will work on Edge. I have my tracking block option set to on, and I am also using the "DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials" and "HTTPS Everywhere" apps (I guess technically they call it extensions sow) which I also have set to block all tracking and the Ublock still works. I'm going to delete Ublock now as I'm not advertising for or against ad blockers, but it seemed to work for the few websites I just traveled too (Yahoo and the LA Times).
Thanks for the effort but it doesn't answer any of my questions.
however i'm going to reply to some of your comments
when you install ublock, you have to tick all of its filter checkboxes, expand each category by clicking on + and tick them all. i've tried all those extensions you mentioned and always went back to ublock because of its effectiveness and because it relies on dynamic filters made by community and not static rules. also for the sake for online fingerprints it's better to use 1 extension instead of those 2 or any others, specially when it does both of their jobs and more.
if you're really worried about your fingerprints you should stop using Internet. there are Tons of other ways to fingerprint you among millions of people. the installed fonts in your computer, your computer time and time zone, your browser version, your OS version etc...even the way your type. your best bet is to use TOR in a Virtual machine and modify that VM to look as different as you can from your main OS.
HotCakeX Personnaly i have asked in precedent post, if they can let us add list in the tracking prevention, but they didn't response, for me, it would be nice to let (ad block add these list in the anti track) rather than let them modifying the page them-self.Deleted Not sure if i understood it correctly but if you're referring to the Edge tracking prevention then there is a whitelist.
Or maybe you meant 3rd party adblockers such as ublock should respect that list as well so we won't have to add a website to both of their whitelists?
I'm not really worried about my fingerprints. Heck, I'm using my real name in these forums as an example of that lol. Like you said, If I really wanted to stay under the gun I would use The Tor Browser (a modified version of Firefox by The Tor Project that is used on the Tor Network). Tails OS and Tor together basically keeps you anonymous as it's going to get, although one can still be tracked through malware or intervention which is why Mozilla flipped their lid against the FBI a few years back haha. There's some talk about Firefox officially at point point adding Tor into a "private tab" of their current browser projects...when or if that happens who knows. I installed Ublock and demo tested it here again with everything checked. It worked fine even with Chromium running in the background. I filter out over a dozen Youtube tabs, and other ads in other websites. AdBlocker is the one that's kind of not working well with Chromium browsers of late. DuckDuckGo I'm experimenting with beta wise. Https Everywhere (created by EFF and Tor Project) is good because it can auto-redirect you to https sites if you stumble on a http site of that site. I'm not overly impressed with the DuckDuckgo extension. It's okay...it does it job...but I think most other browsers or one single extension can cover it. The new Brave browser seems to be hard coding all the pro-privacy add-on's into their browser which is a turn off for me. Only time you really have to worry about fingerprinting is if you're doing something illegal. None of us here are...but many on the Tor sites do which is why they're over-the-top paranoid of being traced back. However the more apps, extensions, and so on we add the more we open up up to malware being added especially from third party app designers that we don't know added what to their apps/extensions.
