308684 - [adblock] Provide context menu to add servers to adblock/flashblock list.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Warren TenBrook]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050914 Camino/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050914 Camino/1.0+

RFE to add a context menu item when ad images and flash ads are right-clicked 
allowing the user to edit server URL with wildcards and add the string to the
blocked server list.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to Anandtech URL
2.Right-click/Ctl-click on flash ad


Actual Results:  
Get flash 8 default context menu

Expected Results:  
Add context menu selection to "Block foo.bar..." followed by a dialog to allow
editing of the string with wildcards.

Also see adblock context menu feature in Firefox.

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Simon, is this bug (or a subset thereof) possible from a Gecko/programming view?

Even if it is possible, I'm not sure we could come up with a solid,
user-friendly UI, given that we use CSS ad-blocking (and/or hostperm.1).  

It's easy enough to add a server to hostperm.1 (for preventing loading images on
that server), I assume, because we already do that for cookies, but the problem
comes when the image is served locally (instead of from an adfarm server) and
suddenly no images on the site load.  Or when some ad is hosted on akamai on one
site, and suddenly apple.com and half the internet have no images.

With CSS blocking (can we even write to that file, or a supplemental user
ruleset file, live?), the only sure-and-clean way I can see of doing this would
be to add each individual image/object as its own rule in the form of
img[src="http://server.domain.tld/full/path/to/item/itemname.jpg"]
That gets tedious pretty quickly, the CSS ruleset file gets large (perf?), and
the method as a whole still likely fails (from a user p-o-v) when an ad on a
site is dynamically generated/rotated; you've only blocked one instance, not all
images appearing in that "slot".

I'm all for this idea, but I'm not sure it's possible--or possible to do
well--given the limitations of the technology Camino currently uses to do
blocking, which are not as fine-tuned as something like the Fx Adblock extension.

Comment 2

[Jasper]

Seamonky has a "simple" server black list which I think we could use. A long
time ago (I thik stephan) made a patch that did this and used the code gecko
already has. We should see how usefull that could be.

Comment 3

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

It seems that the number of ways to block content (adblocking css, AdBlock
extension, hostperm stuff etc) is proliferating. I don't think we want to add
another mechanism; we should just choose one and make it work well. The most
frequent request seems to be to port AdBlock to Camino.

Oh, and we can't add any items to Flash's context menu.