Here’s the skinny:
- Ghostery’s library is getting large (and ever more comprehensive) – we’re up to 486 trackers and 337 cookies. That means Ghosty is working his sheet off trying to scan when you open a page. We did a couple of regex/string matching tricks to make this go much faster, and the regex engine in Firefox 4 gets lots of improvements, so we’re confident things will work better going forward. Lab testing indicates that this versions performs much faster than 2.5.1.
- Previous versions of Ghostery included options for
scanning things like images, dynamically included elements, object tags, and embed tags. We left those out of the UI when we updated the options screen… so we added them back, and included the option of looking for redirect chains (one script launches another, which launches another, etc). These features are enabled by default – but if you’re experiencing performance issues, you can pick and choose how you’d like Ghostery to work. Every one of the features that is disabled might give Ghostery a little performance boost, but it also means less comprehensive scanning and blocking. - Cookie blocking should be used carefully. Like we suggested in the last release post – it’s like turning Ghosty into Rambo and giving him a bazooka. We’ll do our best to make sure that it’s not behaving any way it shouldn’t, but know that sometimes blocking cookies has unintended consequences. If you see strange results on a site, try disabling cookie blocking. Whitelisting the site will not keep cookies from being blocked – we currently don’t have a way to associate a cookie request with a particular browser tab.
- Ghostery now comes with a End User License Agreement – you can see it by checking the “credits” section of the help screen. Ghostery is transparent, meaning that we don’t encrypt or obfuscate the code or any part of Ghostery’s operation – but we do retain rights of distribution and development. That just means we don’t open Ghostery to disassembly and reverse engineering for any purpose other than personal edification, it’s not a GPL or CopyLeft license. You can find the agreement in the Ghostery directory (<Firefox Profile Directory>/ghostery/) or available here.
- We’ve added a lot of features, and changed the UI, and even had some reports of some lost settings. So now is the time to double-check your Ghostery options, and make sure everything is set how you like it. Hopefully that’s all the auditing you’ll have to do this year.
Thanks for all the feedback – as always, our community is the most valuable part of improving Ghostery. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of the new release, or send any other thoughts and suggestions to feedback(at)ghostery.com.
Happy Browsing,
Andy
Nice, but where can I find the list of companies using these 448 trackers and 337 cookies?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ghostery, Henry Bemis. Henry Bemis said: RT @Ghostery: Ghostery for Firefox 2.5.2 released: now featuring cookie blocking. Go ahead, take it for a spin: http://bit.ly/ijhFmT [...]
Please don’t state that Ghostery is “open”, even with the quotation marks.
Most people that do not program themselves don’t understand the significance of “… meaning that we don’t encrypt or obfuscate the code – but we do retain rights of distribution and development” and will confuse it with open source.
I don’t think that this is what you intend, but is someone misunderstands and learns about his/her misunderstanding later on, it will leave them with a bad aftertaste and discredit your great tool.
Keep up the good work!
Ingo,
Thanks for the suggestion. You’re right that we never intended to misrepresent our license, but you’re equally right that it could be easily confused.
We’ll avoid using the word open in the future.
> Ghostery is “open”, meaning that we don’t encrypt or obfuscate the code
> it’s not a GPL or CopyLeft license.
(This comment was edited for the sake of language – AK)
Phooey on you guys. What in the world is wrong with you? Release the high-fallootin‘ code like a responsible human being. You guys really aren’t my favorite. Your code is NOT open and I take an incredible amount of offence at you misleading people by using the term in such a way.
Hi Anyone,
I’m sorry you’re offended, that wasn’t the intention. You’re right that our failure to license to the code under a GPL keeps us from meeting the definition of open-source. We never intended to be misleading there, and we won’t use that word in the future.
What we mean to say is that Ghostery code is easily unpackable and human-readable. We purposefully don’t obfuscate anything so that it’s easily reviewed if you have a familiarity with Javascript.
Aside from our care-taking of the code base, Ghostery lives up to all the standards of Open Source software. It’s free to use, it’s collaboratively improved (through feature and library suggestions), and its operation is completely transparent. We feel like that is pretty responsible, in terms of software development and generally as human beings.
How much did you pay for it? Then shut up or quit using it.
Will this cookie blocking thing help with stupid Facebook? That place is poison – talk about Big Brother. Privacy settings are all bull$*!#
Nevermind! I see it is! Sweet, thanks for a great product.
Hey,
When is Ghostery for Chrome getting updated?
We have a few updates planned for release in the very near future, Philip. We’ll let you know here, for sure, when a new version is available.
If you’re looking for something specific, hit us up at feedback(at)ghostery.com.
Thanks!
Please don’t perpetuate the myth that “Open Source” is synonymous with GPL. This popular misconception is probably the number one [wrong!] reason why commercial entities shy away from Open Source. GPL implies Open Source, but Open Source does not necessarily mean GPL.
The Open Source Initiative [www.opensource.org] provides a widely-accepted definition for Open Source, and recognizes over five dozen software licenses as being in conformance. As far as Ghostery is concerned, the main sticking point is going to be whether derivative works are permissible. If not, Ghostery fails to qualify as Open Source, but instead falls into a related category, often referred to as Disclosed Source.
The most distressing thing about the current EULA is that anyone who had been developing an Opera Extension must “fork” an earlier release, and forgo (or re-invent) subsequent improvements to the code base. Obviously, this issue would be moot if Evidon were to commit to producing their own officially-supported version for Opera (hint, hint).
After upgrading from 2.4.x to 2.5.2 Firefox performance is really slow when opening new pages, either in new tabs or existing tab. Deactivating Ghostery helps, of course, but then there’s no point in having it. Is there any performance issues being looked at in the coming versions of Ghostery? No offence intended, by the way, I love Ghostery and sluggish performance is a price I’m willing to pay.
Hi Bob,
Sorry to hear you’re experience a sluggish Ghostery. Check out the performance options on the Ghostery control panel. There are a couple of different options there for speeding things up without sacrificing all of Ghostery’s features.
If you’d like for us to dig deeper for you, give us a shout at support(at)ghostery.com – and let us know which other Firefox addons you’re using as well.
Thanks for using Ghostery!