[tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle

[krugar]

i tend to agree, but i guess theres several things to keep in mind:

- Usability. Ghostery is _very_ user friendly, but still it can break
widget based sites, e.g. iGoogle.
- Endorsement. If a Plugin is included into the TBB, that may be
considered as "the Tor guys think this is very safe!"

i run NoScript, RequestPolicy, Convergence.io and Ghostery together, and
that breaks like 90% of sites to some degree. i know what is going on
and i want it like this. someone who gets the same browsing experience
from TBB fresh out of the box might just assume the browser to be broken
and abandon it. thats not what we want.

just imagine you switch out the default browser of
$elderly_person_you_know... if they notice anything besides "the
internet is slower lately", they might freak out. thats the kind of user
that wont install AdBlock and Ghostery themselves and may benefit from a
default installation. it has to work smoothly for all their use cases.

i'm not sure how to adress the second concern i raised above, but if
thats a non-issue, maybe a little text on the TBB default homepage
educating users about those plugins might do the trick as well?

all the best
-k

On 02/12/2012 04:53 PM, Brian Franklin wrote:
> Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
>
> Two reasons
>
> 1. Privacy. Fairly obvious why we do this. Stopping ads and ad tracking is consistent with the privacy mission of the Tor Project.
>
> 2. Network health. Congestion has always been a problem on Tor. Installing these plugins to stop HTTP requests which don't help the user reduces congestion on the network and speeds up page loads for each user and everybody else. Browsers won't be slowed down loading tons of ads and ad scripts and the network won't have to process many requests for junk. I think we can save a ton of bandwidth by stopping the junk requests.
>
>
> While we are at it we should enable Firefox's do not track header. It won't help the network speed but it will marginally increase privacy for those who have it set. It will also protect the privacy of people who enable it manually if all Tor bundle installations are sending the same headers. It also increases the use of the header in the wild because the more browsers that send it the more advertisers and governments have to take notice of our desire for privacy. The Tor project can make a big contribution to making this header more widely used.
>
> The Adblock should be configured to work and not need setup. Select a few good lists and have them automatically in. This will save users the time of doing it themselves and help people who don't know how.
>
> Ghostery has to be configured to block tracking scripts and cookies before first use. The Tor project should have that done automatically.
>
> If anybody doesn't want to use Adblock they can disable it with one click. I don't know why anybody who goes to the trouble of using Tor would want to be tracked by ads but to each his own. Disabling it takes 2 seconds if somebody want's to.
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