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.
This solves the following remaining issues regarding specific cosmetic
filtering:
- High rate of false positives in last build
- High number of generated content css files in the package
First iteration of adding scriptlet support. As with cosmetic
filtering, scriptlet niijection occurs only on sites for which
uBO Lite was granted extended permissions.
At the moment, only three scriptlets are supported:
- abort-current-script
- json-prune
- set-constant
More will be added in the future.
Specific plain CSS cosmetic filters are now supported.
Cosmetic filtering will occur only after the user explicitly
grant uBO extended permissions for a given site, so that it
can inject CSS on the site.
A new button in the popup panel allows a user to grant/revoke
extended permissions to/from uBO Lite for the current site.
More capabilities will be carefully added for when extended
permissions are granted on a site, so specific cosmetic
filtering through plain CSS is the first implemented capability.
Generic and procedural cosmetic filtering is not implemented.
The current implementation for plain CSS cosmetic filters is
through declarative content injection, which does not require
the service worker to be alive, the browser takes care to
inject the cosmetic filters.
However declarative CSS injection does not support user
styles, so the injected cosmetic filters are "weak". I consider
this is a browser issue, since user styles are supported by
Chromium, there is just no way in the API to specify user
styles for the injected content.
Also:
- Fixed dark theme issues
- Added Steven Black's hosts file
Keep in mind all this is very experimental and implementation
details in this release may (will) greatly change in the future.
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.
Fixed serious regression in previous dev build in applying
`csp=` filters. Reported internally by uBO team.
Promote usage of `removeparam` in code instead of `queryprune`,
which is to be deprecated.
Removed test against previously tested hostname in
FilterHostnameDict since as per various benchmark, the
test does not really help.
Remove serialization API in Node.js code as the API is now
present in SNFE itself.
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.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1732
The regression affect filter with the `important` option when
the following conditions were fulfilled:
- The filter pattern is pure hostname
- The filter has not one of the following options:
- domain
- denyallow
- header
- strict1p, strict3p
- csp
- removeparam
- There is a matching exception filter
Related commit:
- a2a8ef7e85
A related mocha test has been added in order to detect this
specific regression in the future through `make test`.
This is a replacement for the dubious approach when the
extension itself was used to run benchmarks to detect
performance and filtering behavior regressions.
The main nodejs flavor is "npm", which is to be used to
lint/test and the publication of an official npm
package -- and by design it has dependencies on mocha,
eslint, etc.
A new flavor "dig" has been created with minimal
dependencies and which purpose is to easily allow to
write specialized code to investigate local code changes
in uBO -- and it's not meant for publication.
Consequently, "make nodejs" has been replaced with
"make npm", and a new "dig" target has been added to the
makefile, to be used for instrumenting local code changes
for investigation purpose.
Whereas before the string segment was encoded as:
LL OOOOOOOOOOOO
where L are the upper 8 bits and used to encode the length
of the segment, and O are the lower 24 bits and used to
encode the offset of the string data in the character
buffer, the new code encode as follow:
OOOOOOOOOOOO LL
And furthermore the most significant bit of the length
LL is now used to mark whether the current string segment
is a label boundary.
This means a cell can't reference a segment longer then
127 characters. To work around this limitation for when a
segment is longer than 127 characters (a rare occurrence),
the algorithm will simply split the segment into multiple
adjacent cells.
As a result, there is no longer a need to encode
"boundariness" into special cells, which simplifies
both the storing and matching algorithms.
Additionally, added minimal documentation for the NPM
package on how to import and use HNTrieContainer as a
standalone API.
For clients who may wish to persist the intermediate compiled form
in order to be able to skip costly parsing operation when the
list is fed to the static network filtering engine.
In the static network filtering engine (snfe), the
compiling-related code was spread across two classes.
This commit makes it so that all the compiling-related
code is in FilterCompiler class, which clear purpose is
to compile raw filters into a form which can be persisted
and later fed to the snfe with no parsing overhead.
To compile raw static network filter, the new approach is:
snfe.createCompiler(parser);
Then for each single raw filter to compile:
compiler.compile(parser, writer);
The caller is responsible to keep a reference to the
compiler instance for as long as it is needed. This removes
the need for the clunky code used to keep an instance of
compiler alive in the snfe.
Additionally, snfe.tokenHistograms() has been moved to
benchmarks.js, as it has no dependency on the snfe, it's
just a utility function.
Ports can be disconnected under certain conditions,
and in such case runtime.lastError must be accessed
to avoid the extensions framework from emitting
error messages in the console.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1664
The changes are enough to fulfill the related issue.
A new platform has been added in order to allow for building
a NodeJS package. From the root of the project:
./tools/make-nodejs
This will create new uBlock0.nodejs directory in the
./dist/build directory, which is a valid NodeJS package.
From the root of the package, you can try:
node test
This will instantiate a static network filtering engine,
populated by easylist and easyprivacy, which can be used
to match network requests by filling the appropriate
filtering context object.
The test.js file contains code which is typical example
of usage of the package.
Limitations: the NodeJS package can't execute the WASM
versions of the code since the WASM module requires the
use of fetch(), which is not available in NodeJS.
This is a first pass at modularizing the codebase, and
while at it a number of opportunistic small rewrites
have also been made.
This commit requires the minimum supported version for
Chromium and Firefox be raised to 61 and 60 respectively.
Disconnected ports could still happen Even when the port
was still seen as valid internally. Using a try-catch
block makes invalid port detection more reliable. This
is an occurrence I often encountered when stepping into
content script code, causing suprious error messages to
be thrown into uBO's background dev console.
Though Firefox shares a lot of WebExtensions code with Chromium,
these platforms have their own specific code paths, for various
reasons.
The reorganization here makes it clear that Chromium platform is
just one flavor of WebExtensions, and as such all Chromium-specific
code paths should no longer be automatically pulled by other
platforms where these code paths are not needed.
Given that the filepath of many files changed, here is the
parent commit to quickly browse back to the previous directory
layout:
ec7db30b2f
There were spurious error messages in the dev console of
uBO in Firefox, because Firefox does not silently ignore
duplicate contextual menu entries, which could occur
transiently when the contextual menu entries were updated.
The fix simplifies contextual menu code, and actually
fulfill the original goal of avoiding to call extensions
framework API as much as possible.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1513
Prior to this commit, the ability to enable/disable the
uncloaking of canonical names was only available to advanced
users. This commit make it so that the setting can be
toggled from the _Settings_ pane.
The setting is enabled by default. The documentation should
be clear that the setting should not be disabled unless it
actually solves serious network issues, for example:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1694404
Also, as a result, the advanced setting `cnameUncloak` is no
longer available from within the advanced settings editor.
The managed `userSettings` entry is an array of entries,
where each entry is a name/value pair encoded into an array
of strings.
The first item in the entry array is the name of a setting,
and the second item is the stringified value for the
setting.
This is a more convenient way for administrators to set
specific user settings. The settings set through
`userSettings` policy will always be set at uBO launch
time.
The new entry is an array of strings, each representing a
distinct line, and all entries are used to populate the
"My filters" pane.
This offers an more straightforward way for administrators
to specify a list of custom filters to use for all
installations.
The entry `toOverwrite.filterLists` is an array of
string, where each string is a token identifying a
stock filter list, or a URL for an external filter
list.
This new entry is to make it easier for an
administrator to centrally configure uBO with a
custom set of filter lists.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1433
The new "extraTrustedSiteDirectives" policy is an array
of strings, each of which is parsed as a trusted-site
directive to append to a user's own set of trusted-site
directives at launch time.
The added trusted-site directives will be considered as
part of the default set of directives by uBO.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1744
A new context menu entry, "Block element in frame...", will
be present when right-clicking on a frame element. When
this entry is clicked, uBO's element picker will be
launched from within the embedded frame and function the
same way as when launched from within the page.
The condition has been spotted occurring when bringing
up the DOM inspector for a page on which cosmetic filters
are being applied.
Not clear why this happens, but uBO must be ready to
graciously handle such condition.
Reported internally by @gwarser.
In rare occasion, a timing issue could cause uBO to redirect
to a web accessible resource meant to be used for another
network request. This is a regression introduced with the
following commit:
- 2e5d32e967
Additionally, I identified another issue which would cause
cached redirection to fail when a cache entry with redirection
to a web accessible resource was being reused, an issue which
could especially affect pages which are generated dynamically
(i.e. without full page reload).
