ad block in OmniWeb

[Paranoid Randroid]

I'd appreciate a bit of advice. I've never been able to get Adblock to work correctly in OmniWeb.

Let's say I wanted to go to block the OMNI logo at the top of the forums. The url is:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/images/omni/omnilogolarge.gif

Why doesn't adding *\.gif* to the blocked URLs list get rid of the image? ("From blocked URLs" is checked.) *omnigroup* doesn't work, either. Where am I going wrong?

(This is on the 5.5 "sneaky peek", but I had the same issues with 5.1; I just checked to make sure. This is so obvious that I'm just going to assume I'm doing it wrong, not that it's a bug.)

[JKT]

It would be /.\*.gif I believe (at least that is what works for .swf).

However, the easiest way by far to block specific images is to control-click the image and select Filter Image from the contextual menu (it may be in the Image sub-heading). If you want to make it less specific, open the Blocked URLs list and trim back the automatically regexpressed URL to the level you want.

Edit: Made a typo (see later posts). This should have been /.*\.gif

[TommyW]

Thanks for that tip Jonathan.

[Flounder]

you could always use a custom CSS sheet and tell OW to use that for the default pages.

Look for it here (http://www.floppymoose.com/)

[Paranoid Randroid]

However, the easiest way by far to block specific images is to control-click the image and select Filter Image from the contextual menu (it may be in the Image sub-heading).

Hrm. I tried that and it wasn't blocked. :/ Tried reloading, tried restarting OmniWeb.

Is there anything else I could be doing wrong? Should I post a bug report or something on the sneaky peek board?

[JKT]

Do you have anything in your White List? If you have anything related to the filtered URL, could it be superseding your filter in the Black List?

[Paranoid Randroid]

Do you have anything in your White List? If you have anything related to the filtered URL, could it be superseding your filter in the Black List?

Nothing. Here are some screenshots to demonstrate my attempt to block the OMNI logo:

My preference pane (http://locker.uky.edu/~jhcunn3/adblockshot1.png)

My black and white lists (http://locker.uky.edu/~jhcunn3/adblockshot2.png)

This is with 5.1. 5.5 is concurrently installed, but I had this sort of trouble before.

Edit: fixed second link

[troyb]

Nothing. Here are some screenshots to demonstrate my attempt to block the OMNI logo:

My preference pane (http://locker.uky.edu/~jhcunn3/adblockshot1.png)

My black and white lists (http://locker.uky.edu/~jhcunn3/adblockshot2.png)

This is with 5.1. 5.5 is concurrently installed, but I had this sort of trouble before.

Edit: fixed second link
What happens if you remove all the entries in your black list except for the Omni logo?

[Paranoid Randroid]

Hey, that worked - thanks! Was there something objectionable about something else on the list?

[Len Case]

We have a bug that if one item in the black list doesn't correctly parse as a regular expression, all following items are ignored (or is it all items--I forget).

It's on our internal list of bugs, but since it was true in 5.1, it's not a priority for 5.5 until all the 5.1 features work again.

[Ken Case]

Was there something objectionable about something else on the list?

For the record, my guess is that the problematic entries in the black list were the ones that started with an asterisk (*): the asterisk indicates that you can repeat the previous character any number of times, but there weren't any previous characters to repeat.

I assume the asterisk was meant as a wildcard, as you might use it in file name pattern matching? To achieve that sort of wildcard with a regular expression, you would use ".*": the dot (.) will match any character, and the asterisk (*) will repeat any number of times.

But there's no need to start or end a regular expression in OmniWeb with ".*", because it already looks for the expression anywhere in the URL. (If you want to anchor the expression to the beginning or end, you can use "^" or "$".)

So, change expressions like "*/ads/*" to be "/ads/" and you should be all set.

Hope this helps!

[superjoppe]

Can someone block the image at the top of this site? http://www.flashback.info/
I click filter image, but no difference. Reload, no difference, Restart program, no difference
Other images I have tried has been blocked

[Forrest]

I just tried blocking the large banner at the top, worked fine.

[troyb]

Can someone block the image at the top of this site? http://www.flashback.info/
I click filter image, but no difference. Reload, no difference, Restart program, no difference
Other images I have tried has been blocked

I would take a look at the earlier posts to this thread. You might have a item in your blacklist that is breaking things. If you've manually entered in anything to the black list, try removing it and see if the problem continues.

[Jan]

Wouldn't it be nice to have an list(online) of most common ad-servers
stored in OW's ad-block style? This would be helpful for much OW-users I guess.

[cjedj]

Sorry guys, I really want to love this browser, but with the tabbing problems already mentioned in a previous thread, and the problems I'm now having with ad blocking and flash, I don't think I can.

Pages that I regularly view in Camino with few or no ads, render in OW with ads all over them that I never even knew existed until now. The flash ads are the worst, ruining the appearing of a page, and distracting the eye. Frankly, I can't be bothered adjusting ad blocking prefs for each of these pages, managing white and black lists, and so on. Doing it globally just blocks things that I do want to see, and Camino already does what I want with just the CamiTools pref pane.

Jan's suggestion above, would be what would work for me.

Its a shame because there's a lot here that is cool, and that I would use often, but these two things are showstoppers for me, especially when there's a price tag attached.

Hopefully these are niggles which will be ironed out by the time it comes out of beta, and I look forward to having another go then :)

[Forrest]

Pages that I regularly view in Camino with few or no ads, render in OW with ads all over them

It would be cool if you posted an example.

[cjedj]

It would be cool if you posted an example.

Oops, of course, sorry...:o

TUAW (http://www.tuaw.com/)
Mininova (http://www.mininova.org/)
Macworld (http://www.macworld.com/)

[Forrest]

Well, I just setup Camino clean and it has way more ads than OW does after 30 seconds of configuring, at least with the TUAW site.

[cjedj]

Well, I just setup Camino clean and it has way more ads than OW does after 30 seconds of configuring, at least with the TUAW site.

Fine, maybe you are more experienced than me at this kind of thing, I don't know. Maybe CamiTools is doing the job for me, again I don't know.

What I do know is that I have spent two days using OW as my default browser, and still have not been able to get the ad block settings the way I want them, and I'm now out of patience with it. Camino is doing what I want, and although I can't remember how long I spent setting it up, I can guarantee you it was nowhere near two days, and probably closer to two minutes otherwise I would doubtless have run out of patience with that too.

I'm not trying to get into a competition about which browser is better here (as I already said, there are things about OW which I love), I'm just sharing my experience as an end-user, for whatever that's worth. If this is just going to turn into a "my browser's better than your browser" debate, then lets leave it there.

[jcraig]

Another Camino/Firefox user here giving Omniweb a spin, having not used it since the early days of OSX. I, too, am having problems with the adblocking feature. I don't know too many "regular users" who are well versed in the use or syntax of regular expressions. I've tried copying/pasting filters from my Firefox adblock list (adding them one at a time is a rather cumbersome process). Right-clicking unwanted images is fine, as long as they are not Flash ads. Then, the process becomes opening Site Preferences, finding the source of the unwanted image/ad, then hopefully write the filter correctly in regex so that it works. Unfortunately, when I go to Foxnews' site for example, it's just full of ads in Omniweb. I don't see any in Camino (using Camitools).

Something to consider would be one click importing of filters, whether from the Pogo site, or something hosted by Omni. I'm afraid when adblocking was implemented, people were thinking like developers rather than end users. It really hasn't evolved much since the v.4 days and OSX 10.1.

Otherwise, I've been pretty impressed with this beta. It's fast, stable, looks good. Add in a user-friendly adblocking scheme and I'm sold.

[Jan]

Something to consider would be one click importing of filters, whether from the Pogo site, or something hosted by Omni. I'm afraid when adblocking was implemented, people were thinking like developers rather than end users. It really hasn't evolved much since the v.4 days and OSX 10.1.
I must agree with that point. I think there're some people out there who know
how to handle OW's way to ad-block and who set up a big list of blocked pages.
Why shouldn't we give those a way to contribute there lists and make OW
more useable for the end-user, who's not always a developer himself.

[blet]

Would Filterset.G (http://www.pierceive.com) be compatible with Omniweb? Obviously there needs to be a way to import it but are the rules as the are compatible or do they only work for firefox's adblock?

[Forrest]

IMHO, it sounds like new OW users are thinking adblocking is complicated like the other options. Sure there are complicated solutions, but there are simple ones that work very well.

[jcraig]

No pussyfooting around, let's obliterate ads once and for all. First, go to the yoyo site (http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/) and copy the list of evil ads servers in the proper format. Hosts file format is good. Copy the whole thing (you don't need the comments at the top). Now, hang on to this for a minute. Now comes the tricky part. You have to open Text Edit as Root via Terminal. Here's the command: sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts Again, this opens Text Edit as root user, so be careful. PLace your cursor at the end of the list in the hosts file, hit Return so you're on a new line, then Paste the list you copied from yoyo. Each entry should look something like:

127.0.0.1 js.adsonar.com


As your are now a root user, be sure to save your changes to the Hosts file, Quit Text Edit, Quit Terminal, log out or restart. These ads won't even make it to your browser now, as the front door will be slammed in their face. Omniweb, Webkit, and others are much nicer to browse with.

If you find too much is being blocked, you can go back into Hosts the same way, and remove servers you don't want blocked.

[Forrest]

Yeah, but that doesn't allow me to do it on a per-site basis :)

[mjuengling]

I haven't read the whole thread, but I'm guessing some of us don't know how to block flash ads.

For me is that a way:

Surf to the site. Open the site "preferences inspector". Jump over to "Page Info". There you can search for PlugIns with flash content, mark it with one klick and then choose "Display".

A new window appears with the flash content and the original adress in the adress bar. Now you can copy the adress and insert it in your blocking list.

You can either choose the whole adress or set an asterix (*) in it.

Example: http://www.forums.omnigroup.com/ads/realmedia/flash/?wjdnch332wmdcnhdhe

This is better: http://www.forums.omnigroup.com/ads/*

I hope that will help someone.

[zottel]

Just a hint for those who don't know how to cope with regular expressions:

The following entry in the blocked URLs list filters out nearly everything:

/ad[^dm]

Translated, it means: Filter any URL that has "/ad" somwhere in it's path, but not if a d or an m follows (in order not to block stuff like "/additional" or "/admin").

Additionally, I have the following two known adserver that aren't matched by the above:

\.falkag\.
some\.ad\.com

These are in my whitelist:

\.wikimedia\.
/adsense/

The first because there are alphabetical dirs on wikimedia, including /ad/; the second because I have a Google Ads account myself which I can't look into if /adsense/ is blocked. :-)

I also have \.swf in my list to block flash, but it depends on if you really want to block all flash or not.

Might have some false positives, but not many. And blocks nearly everything.

Btw, please don't suggest OW should use glob patterns for ad blocking. (Glob patterns are those most of you are probably used to, where "*" means "any char, 0 or multiple times".) They are BY FAR not as powerful as regular expressions. The example from above wouldn't be possible, e.g..

And, if you want to play around with regular expressions, a Google search for "regular expressions tutorial" will probably yield some good results.

[LewistonianExonian]

Thank you to the other posters! My greatest frustration with omniweb has been getting ad blocking to work to my satisfaction. This forum has helped me do that in a matter of minutes. (unfortunately it took hours of googling to find.)

Here's my blocklist: (so far)
\.falkag\.
/ad[^dm]
/.atdmt\.com/*
\.advertising\.com/*
\.tribalfusion\.com/*

I also have a whitelist, as suggested above:
\.wikimedia\.
/adsense/

[zottel]

It would be /.\*.gif I believe (at least that is what works for .swf).

Didn't see that when reading it for the first time. It's wrong (typo?). X-)

This regex would block any URL that has in it: a slash (/) followed by any char (.) followed by an asterisk (\* - normally, an asterisk woud mean "the char before, zero or more times"; it is escaped by the backslash, though, so \* just means "one asterisk"), followed by any char (.), followed by the string "gif". I would, for example, match on the URL http://some.host.com/a*bgif/index.html - if * was allowed in URLs. ;-)

You probably meant /.*\.gif - which means: a slash (/) followed by any char (.) zero or more times (*), followed by a period (\. - this time the . is escaped and thus literally means "one period") followed by the string "gif".

This is somewhat more and also less than needed, though. Why look for the slash? There will be one already at the beginning of the URL (in http://), so it makes no sense to use it for the match. Additionally, "/.*\.gif" also matches anywhere inside the string, not only at the end. So the (hypothetical) URL "http://home.user.com/great.gifs/me.jpg" would be blocked, too.

a) You don't have to match the whole string via .* - the regex "bart" will match "bart" as well as "bartsimpson", "simpson, bart" or any other string containing "bart" anywhere inside.

b) If you want the end, use "$", which stands for "end of string" (or end of line, to be precise).

So, to match all URLs ending with ".gif", the most straightforward way will be to use "\.gif$". (A literal period (\.), followed by the string "gif" (gif), followed by the end of the string ($).)

Similarly, \.swf$ can be used to block all flash content (at least if the URL really ends with .swf, but that's the case, normally :-) ).

[JKT]

You're right, it is a typo. It should have been /.*\.gif

[FredH]

So do you have to add those regular expressions one line at a time into the ad-blocking preferences?

Agree with above, you really need a user-friendly ad-blocking feature. I'm coming from Camino, and CamiTools lets you import filters with one click, and they work quite well.

[zottel]

Yes, one line at a time.

[Len Case]

We definitely want to add importing (and exporting) to the ad-blocking.

[gumby]

You're right, it is a typo. It should have been /.*\.gif
\.gif$ is just as good. Actually better since it terminates the match expression at the end of the line so wouldn't trigger on (e.g.) wedding.gifts

[cjedj]

Guys, why does this have to be so complicated?

I kind of gave up on this after my original question a few weeks ago, but the announcement of 5.5 has made me look through the thread again, and the whole topic just seems to get more and more involved. I'm not a coder or developer, just a regular Mac user who wants my browser to work "out of the box". All this setting up strings or blacklists or whatever, sorry but I just don't have the time or inclination to learn it.

Everything else about OW is slick and smart. Why is ad-blocking so damn complex in comparison? :confused:

[Forrest]

All I do is check Matching known ad sizes, From third-party sites and From blocked URLs. This gets the vast majority of the ads. It's super quick, and I really don't think it gets much easier.

If I find something that should be blocked but isn't, I right click on it and chose filter. If I find something that shouldn't be blocked but is, I click on it.

Seems pretty simple to me.

[cjedj]

All I do is check Matching known ad sizes, From third-party sites and From blocked URLs. This gets the vast majority of the ads. It's super quick, and I really don't think it gets much easier.

If I find something that should be blocked but isn't, I right click on it and chose filter. If I find something that shouldn't be blocked but is, I click on it.

Seems pretty simple to me.

If its that simple, then great, that's what I need. But what's all this stuff about filters, blocklists, regex (WTF?? :eek: ) and so on. Does your regular / casual user not have to worry about all that?

If not, then cool, but reading all this makes me think I'm just not going to get it working :(

[Forrest]

If its that simple, then great, that's what I need. But what's all this stuff about filters, blocklists, regex (WTF?? :eek: ) and so on. Does your regular / casual user not have to worry about all that?

If not, then cool, but reading all this makes me think I'm just not going to get it working :(

It all depends on how detailed you want to get. I do, on occasion, add my own stuff in. But that is pretty rare.

[kaarlows]

I use Omniweb from a long time, but since my old iBook G4 wasn't being able to pick up enough processing power for the memory hog which is OW (yeah, I like this browser but it consumes way much memory), I switched to Opera and I've been using it ever since very happy until I upgraded to the latest version that simply turned off all my keyboard shortcuts, which upset me to the point of making me switch back to OW.

So far, I've been enjoying it (it's very good and now I don't suffer more of sluggishness since I use a top of the notch MacBook Pro) but it's ad-blocking is annoying me. I was so used with the sleek way I could shut off almost any ads using Opera's "content blocking” that when I reach this 90's hacker way to block known ads I just get amused. How come the guys of Omni Group, makers of so many nice software can't create a smarter way to block ads, like an improved way of the content blocking available natively on Opera.

[Handycam]

See my post here, which includes most of filterset G converted for OW use: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=9113

[zeddemorew]

This browser has some good points, aside from the tabs rigidity, but it is astonishing how poor the ad-blocking is. Seems like people have been saying this for years and no progress.

In my prefs I have:

/ads\..*.net/
/ads\..*\.com
/.*\.doubleclick\.net
some\.ad\.com
googlesyndication.com
/ad[^dm]

The defaults plus a couple of suggestions I saw on here.

and also in Terminal I did this:

defaults write -app OmniWeb ABIsEnabled -int 1
defaults write -app OmniWeb ABSubscriptions -array -string en
defaults write -app OmniWeb OWAddressFilteringEnabled -int 1

To plug it into Safari Ad Block.

That's already going way further what an ordinary user would be bothered to do for basic ad blocking that other browsers do without the user doing anything whatsoever once their blocker is installed.

And yet all of the above can't even get rid of google ads consistently. I thought maybe the ads are still there due to caching but no.

I struggle to see how even the most fervent fanboy of this browser can defend such daftness, excluding the sort that might say "well you know you could just recompile OmniWeb.." or consider the difficulty with which sufficient ad blocking is to be achieved through OmniWeb as some sort of geek elitist rite of passage (and I say that as a borderline one myself).

Ah that feels better now I've said it. Any suggestions to simply stop google / youtube ads - the most basic ad blocking task that there can be - in OW most welcome.

[whpalmer4]

Some of us just ignore the ads. Takes almost no time to configure and maintain :-)

[derekJAB]

Some of us just ignore the ads. Takes almost no time to configure and maintain :-)
My method too. Works every time.

I've never understood this obsession with blocking advertisements, especially as they effectively fund the "free" content online.

[Brian]

This is kind of a classic "your mileage may vary" situation, but out of curiosity, I set aside my preferences and restarted OmniWeb into my "All the stuff I read for entertainment" workspace.

That workspace opens 36 tabs onto a number of sites. Obviously, it's not a comprehensive test, but it does open tabs onto sites that include BBC & Google news, the New York Times, Slashdot, Politico, and a number of other fairly "big" websites.

I didn't enable the blacklist at all, but I did enable the "block images from third-party websites" rule, and the "block known ad sizes" preferences. For the sites I visit, at least, those two preferences blocked the vast majority of the ads, with the 'known ad sizes' one appearing to do the bulk of the work.

There were several sites where the "3rd party" one blocked too much content, but I was able to use the site specific preferences to disable the rules on those sites while leaving it active on others.

Kinda makes me want to go back and nuke the other regular-expression based rules I've added to my "real" preferences over the years. Aside from the ".swf" one that blocks flash files from running, I'm not sure they're doing me much good.

[Morto]

the 'known ad sizes' one appearing to do the bulk of the work.

This is very much my experience. I don't have the 3rd party sites rule enabled because I find it blocks too much, but between known ad sizes and my blacklist:

/ads\..*\.net/
/ads\..*\.com/
/.*\.doubleclick\.net/
/.*\.googlesyndication\.com/
/ads\.telegraph\.co\.uk/
/.*\.facebook\.com/

I hardly see any ads at all. The only time I see ads from google is when I am on google's site, which isn't often since I switched to duckduckgo.