[qutebrowser] Extend ad blocking to allow single URL blocking.

[Florian Bruhin]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 08:28:30PM +0200, Viacheslav Chimishuk wrote:
> > How would the line to block Youtube ads look like?
> >
> > FWIW I'm against introducing another URL pattern format, and I'd rather
> > use the existing URL pattern class which is also used for ":set -u"
> > (aka "per-domain settings"). See:
> > https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4188
> 
> I was thinking more about simple substring matching, which is much
> faster then regular expressions we use for options. And should be
> enough for blocking.

Options/URL patterns don't use regular expressions.

> I propose to treat `~` prefix as a substring instead of domain
> name. For example, next file parses to substrings list.

Again, use URL patterns. I will not accept any contributions inventing
yet another URL format, no matter how simple. Let's be consistent with
what the rest of qutebrowser uses. With URL patterns, I think they
should even be backwards-compatible with the "one host per line" format.

> As a part of this change it would be great to support `file://`
> protocol in `content.host_blocking.lists` list, so user can serve the
> file from the disk without running web-server (if it is not
> implemented already, haven't checked it).

It already is.

> > Note that I'm busy with university work on qutebrowser at least until
> > christmas, so my time to look at PRs is quite limited currently:
> > https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/2018-September/000051.html
> > https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/2018-October/000053.html
> 
> Yeah... Maybe other people can help you with that and accept PRs? :) I
> can see Jay Kamat is very active in the project. In this case QB can
> progress and grow faster.

That's already the case, but it won't change that there'll be conflicts
when I'm refactoring things (like moving the adblocker to a plugin)
while people are contributing stuff. I won't be able to accommodate for
that.

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 08:54:58PM +0200, Viacheslav Chimishuk wrote:
> I can see ublock uses regexp for its list. Implementing regexp support
> we can reuse their files, which will get us a huge
> benefit. Unfortunately their format is not compatible with UrlPattern
> we use and looks much more complicated than a simple regexp. IMHO, it
> is better to start with simple substring match for now.
> 
> https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax

Yeah, the existing uBlock/ABP syntax would be great to support:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/29

I agree that's probably a bigger undertaking though.

Florian

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