As per discussion with uBO volunteers.
Volunteers offering support for uBO will be able to craft links with
specially formed URLs, which once clicked will cause uBO to automatically
force an update of specified filter lists.
The URL must be crafted as shown in the example below:
https://ublockorigin.github.io/uAssets/update-lists.html?listkeys=ublock-filters,easylist
Where the `listkeys` parameter is a comma-separated list of tokens
corresponding to filter lists. If a token does not match an enabled
filter list, it will be ignored.
The ability to update filter lists through a specially crafted link
is available only on uBO's own support sites:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/
- https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/
- https://ublockorigin.github.io/
Additionally, a visual cue has been added in the "Filter lists" pane
to easily spot the filter lists which have been recently updated, where
"recently" is currently defined as less than an hour ago.
Additionally, finalize versioning scheme for uBOL. Since most updates
will be simply related to update rulesets, the version will from now
on reflects the date at which the extension package was created:
year.month.day.minutes
So for example:
2023.8.19.690
Related issue:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/2773
The `randomize` paramater introduced in https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/418087de9c
is now named `directive`, and beside the `true` value which is meant
to respond with a random 10-character string, it can now take the
following value:
war:[web_accessible_resource name]
In order to mock the XHR response with a web accessible resource. For
example:
piquark6046.github.io##+js(no-xhr-if, adsbygoogle.js, war:googlesyndication_adsbygoogle.js)
Will cause the XHR performed by the webpage to resolve to the content
of `/web_accessible_resources/googlesyndication_adsbygoogle.js`.
Should the resource not exist, the empty string will be returned.
Additionally:
Use `export UBO_VERSION=local` at the console to build MV3 extension using
current version of uBO code base. By default, the version is taken from
`./platform/mv3/ubo-version' and usually set to last stable release.
Since in uBOL filter lists from various sources are combined into
a single list, there must be a way to turn on/off trust level
inside the resulting combined filter list so as to be able to
validate the trust level of filters requiring trust.
This commit adds new parser directives understood only by MV3
compiler to turn on/off trust flag internally.
See `managed_storage.json` for available settings. Currently
only `noFiltering` setting is availale.
`noFiltering` is an array of strings, each being a domain for
which no filtering should occur.
Related discussion:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-issues/discussions/35
Avoid using updateContentScripts() as it suffers from an unexpected
behavior, causing injected content scripts to lose proper order
at injection time. The order in which content scripts are injected
is key for uBOL content scripts. Potential out of order injection
was causing cosmetic filtering to be broken.
Use actual storage API to persist data across service worker
wake-ups and browser launches. uBOL was trying to avoid using
storage API, at the cost of somewhat hacky code (using DNR API
to persist settings).
Make use of session storage if available, to speed up
initialization of waking up the service worker (which at this
point is necessary to properly implement cosmetic filtering).
Related issues:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-issues/issues/5#issuecomment-1575425913
- https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/403
Currently, there is no other way to inject CSS user styles than to
wake up the service worker, so that it can inject the CSS styles
itself using the `scripting.insertCSS()` method.
If ever the MV3 API supports injecting CSS user styles directly
from a content script, uBOL will be back to be fully declarative.
At this point the service worker is very lightweight since the
filtering is completely declarative, so this is not too much of
an issue performance-wise except for the fact that waking up the
service worker for the sole purpose of injecting CSS user styles
and nothing else introduces a pointless overhead.
Hopefully the MV3 API will mature to address such inefficiency.
Specifically, avoid long list of hostnames for the `matches`
property[1] when registering the content scripts, as this was causing
whole browser freeze for long seconds in Chromium-based browsers
(reason unknown).
The content scripts themselves will sort out which cosmetic filters to
apply on which websites.
This change makes it now possible to support annoyances-related lists,
and thus two lists have been added:
- EasyList -- Annoyances
- EasyList -- Cookies
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-issues/issues/5
These annoyances-related lists contains many thousands of specific
cosmetic filters and as a result, before the above change this was
causing long seconds of whole browser freeze when simply modifying
the blocking mode of a specific site via the slider in the popup
panel.
It is now virtually instantaneous, at the cost of injecting larger
cosmetic filtering-related content scripts (which typically should
be garbage-collected within single-digit milliseconds).
Also, added support for entity-based cosmetic filters. (They were
previously discarded).
---
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/scripting/RegisteredContentScript
Source code of scriplets is now fetched directly from uBO
project, so there is no longer the need to keep duplicate
versions of scriplet code.
All scriplet filters are now supported.
Some filters with entity-based domain option can be salvaged
when there are non-entity-based domain option, but since we are
throwing away the entity-based entries, we are only partially
converting to DNR. This commit will log a warning about this
in log.txt. Before this commit, only non-salvageable filters
were logged.
This reflects the _world_ of the MV3 scripting API:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/scripting/ExecutionWorld
MAIN: page's world
ISOLATED: extension's content script world
Some scriptlets are best executed in either world, so this
commit allows to pick in which world a scriptlet should execute
(default to MAIN).
For instance, the new sed.js scriptlet will now execute in
the ISOLATED world.
Also added additional safeguard against sticky unprocessed-request
status: all unprocessed-request statuses will be cleared after a
minute elapsed following intialization. The idea is that if the
user hasn't care to force a reload of the page, then it's assumed
to be by choice and uBO should stop informing about the status.
Raymond Hill