uBO will now verify that at least one unprocessed network requests
at launch should have been blocked in order to warn users of
unprocessed network requests through the `!` toolbar icon badge.
For example, with default filter lists, there is nothing to block
on `wikipedia.org`, and hence in this case it's not useful to
present the user with the `!` badge.
Therefore uBO will not show the badge *only* when at least one
unprocessed network requests should have been blocked had uBO been
ready when it was fired by the browser.
Related commit:
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/769b8da664be
Related feedback:
- 769b8da664 (commitcomment-104695781)
The incomplete filtering status of a given tab at browser launch
will be carried over visually as a yellowish `!` badge until the
web page in the tab is force reloaded, navigated away, or closed.
The purpose is to make it obvious to end users that a web page
has not been filtered properly and to avoid issue reports
related to this.
It is expected that Firefox should never be affected by cases of
yellowish badge -- that is unless the setting "Suspend network
activity [...]" has been disabled, in which case the new behavior
will also be useful to those who disabled the setting.
Related discussion:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/discussions/16939
Until uBO's filtering engines are properly initialized, there will
be a distinct toolbar icon to help users understand that uBO may
not be fully initialized when a webpage is loaded -- often the
cause of improper filtering of trackers/ads at browser launch.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1861
The "exceptor" feature has been rewritten, with the following
changes as a result:
- The excepted filters cease to exist when closing the logger
- It's now possible to temporary except network filters
When toggling on/off a temporary exception, filter lists are now
fully reloaded. This simplified managing temporary exceptions, and
made it easy to implement temporary exception for network filters,
but this also means there might be a perceptible delay when
adding/removing temporary exceptions. At this point I consider
this an acceptable side-effect just to bring the ability to easily
create temporary exception for network filters, while this
simplified the existing temporary exception code throughout.
The new parser no longer uses the browser DOM to validate
that a cosmetic filter is valid or not, this is now done
through a JS library, CSSTree.
This means filter list authors will have to be more careful
to ensure that a cosmetic filter is really valid, as there is
no more guarantee that a cosmetic filter which works for a
given browser/version will still work properly on another
browser, or different version of the same browser.
This change has become necessary because of many reasons,
one of them being the flakiness of the previous parser as
exposed by many issues lately:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/2262
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/2228
The new parser introduces breaking changes, there was no way
to do otherwise. Some current procedural cosmetic filters will
be shown as invalid with this change. This occurs because the
CSSTree library gets confused with some syntax which was
previously allowed by the previous parser because it was more
permissive.
Mainly the issue is with the arguments passed to some procedural
cosmetic filters, and these issues can be solved as follow:
Use quotes around the argument. You can use either single or
double-quotes, whichever is most convenient. If your argument
contains a single quote, use double-quotes, and vice versa.
Additionally, try to escape a quote inside an argument using
backslash. THis may work, but if not, use quotes around the
argument.
When the parser encounter quotes around an argument, it will
discard them before trying to process the argument, same with
escaped quotes inside the argument. Examples:
Breakage:
...##^script:has-text(toscr')
Fix:
...##^script:has-text(toscr\')
Breakage:
...##:xpath(//*[contains(text(),"VPN")]):upward(2)
Fix:
...##:xpath('//*[contains(text(),"VPN")]'):upward(2)
There are not many filters which break in the default set of
filter lists, so this should be workable for default lists.
Unfortunately those fixes will break the filter for previous
versions of uBO since these to not deal with quoted argument.
In such case, it may be necessary to keep the previous filter,
which will be discarded as broken on newer version of uBO.
THis was a necessary change as the old parser was becoming
more and more flaky after being constantly patched for new
cases arising, The new parser should be far more robust and
stay robist through expanding procedural cosmetic filter
syntax.
Additionally, in the MV3 version, filters are pre-compiled
using a Nodejs script, i.e. outside the browser, so validating
cosmetic filters using a live DOM no longer made sense.
This new parser will have to be tested throughly before stable
release.
Related discussion:
- a0a9497b4a (commitcomment-62560291)
The new setting, when disabled (enabled by default), allows a user
to prevent uBO from waiting for all filter lists to be loaded
before allowing network activity at launch. The setting is enabled
by default, meaning uBO waits for all filter lists to be loaded in
memory before unsuspending network activity. Some users may find
this behavior undesirable, hence the new setting.
This gives the option to potentially speed up page load at launch,
at the cost of potentially not properly filtering network requests
as per filter lists/rules.
For platforms not supporting the suspension of network activity,
the setting will merely prevent whatever mechanism exists on the
platform to mitigate improper filtering of network requests at
launch. For example, in Chromium-based browsers, unchecking the
new setting will prevent the browser from re-loading tabs for
which there was network activity while in "suspended" state at
launch.
Not sure this can really happen, but if ever Math.random() would
return `0.9999999999999999`, the attribute name would start with
`{`, i.e. an invalid attribute name.
Raymond Hill