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by dotdi
436 days ago
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I haven't been on slashdot in a long time, and boy is it a shitty experience. Using Orion browser with uBlock Origin, initially the site loads fine. Then it tries to load ads. It detects that the ads don't load, so it displays an overlay that looks like a crash modal "oops, something went wrong", shaming the user into believing THEY did something wrong. Dismissing the modal reveals that the CSS was unloaded in the background. Thanks but no thanks. |
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In-browser blockers are interesting because they’re actually modifying the DOM, and any JavaScript which expects the DOM to have certain elements, and doesn’t handle them being missing, can cause these kinds of failures. Network-level blocking should at least cause the requests to the ad services to fail in the first place, which has a much higher likelihood of being a tested code path (ie. Not breaking the site just because a request failed.)
Basically I’m not surprised that in-browser, DOM-manipulating ad blockers cause failures in a lot of sites’ JavaScript, and I wouldn’t necessarily chalk it up to maliciousness on Slashdot’s part.