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Oblada 0.5.0

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@callb4ck callb4ck released this 27 Oct 16:01
0.5.0
d5b9db9

Oblada 0.5.0 brings the Barrier: Brave's protections from trackers, ads and fingerprinting, Brave's Shields, on by default. It blocks trackers and ads with Brave's engine, adblock-rust, and its lists (EasyList, EasyPrivacy, uBlock Origin's, Brave's), shows every site a slightly different you, and forgets what third parties leave behind. Its button at the end of the address bar counts what it blocked and turns it off for a site, if one doesn't work right. Thanks to Brave for all of it.

Oblada is a Chromium web browser with Zen's sidebar, Firefox's containers and add-ons from both the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons. Its design follows Zen's: if you like it, consider supporting Zen. For Macs with Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later.

What's new

Added

  • The Barrier: Oblada now blocks trackers and ads with Brave's engine and its lists (EasyList, EasyPrivacy, uBlock Origin's, Brave's), including the elements they leave on pages, cookie notices and the scripts that fight ad blockers.
  • The Barrier's button at the end of the address bar shows how many trackers and ads it blocked on the page, and opens its controls for the site: turn it off for the site, block aggressively, upgrade to HTTPS strictly or not at all, block scripts, fingerprinting, cookies, forget the site when you close it. In the sidebar layouts, the controls are at the top of the site panel.
  • Fingerprinting protection: sites see slight changes to canvas and audio readouts, to your processor, memory, screen size, fonts and speech voices, and generic GPU names, the same on a site until Oblada restarts but different from site to site and from container to container, so they can't follow you around. It reaches sites' workers too, and limits how many connections a site keeps open.
  • Third parties' cookies are blocked, and what they store on a site is erased once you close it. Sites can be set to be forgotten when you close them.
  • Tracking parameters (fbclid, gclid…) are removed from the addresses you open, tracking redirects are skipped for where they lead, and AMP pages, on Google's cache or the sites' own, for the original.
  • Trackers hiding behind a site's own addresses (CNAME cloaking) are blocked too.
  • Global Privacy Control asks sites not to sell or share your data.
  • Sensitive sites, like those that help against domestic violence, can open in a temporary container, which keeps nothing once you close it: Oblada asks first.
  • Before a site lets you sign in with Google in a way that needs Google's cookies on that site, Oblada asks.
  • With aggressive blocking, Oblada warns before opening a tracker's address as a page.
  • Block an element: pick anything on a page to hide it for good, from the Barrier's controls or the page's context menu.
  • Settings > Oblada has the Barrier's defaults, its privacy settings (languages sites see, WebRTC's IP addresses, social media embeds, Do Not Track…), its filter lists, your own filters and lists from an address, and the sites with settings of their own.
  • A DANGEROUS switch in Settings > Oblada turns all of the Barrier off.

Changed

  • Web APIs that mostly serve to recognize you are off, as in Brave: Web Bluetooth, Web Serial, opening local files and folders from pages, FedCM, the Reporting API and others. Referrers never say more than the site across sites, and cookies last 6 months at most.

Fixed

  • Tabs restored at startup no longer load in the background before you open them, except those of sites known to work in the background.

Installing

If you have Oblada 0.1.2 or later, it updates itself: it looks for new versions once a day, or right away when you open About Oblada, and installs this one when you quit or from About Oblada's Relaunch button.

Otherwise:

  1. Open Oblada-silicon.dmg and drag Oblada to Applications. If you have an earlier Oblada, replace it: your tabs, workspaces, containers and extensions stay.
  2. Oblada isn't signed by a registered Apple developer or notarized yet, so macOS stops it the first time you open it. Go to System Settings › Privacy & Security and click "Open Anyway". If macOS says the app is damaged, run this in Terminal instead: 
    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Oblada.app

Known limitations

  • After each update, macOS asks once for your Mac's password before Oblada can read its saved passwords and cookies: choose "Always Allow".
  • The Barrier downloads its filter lists the first time this version starts: until they're in, a few seconds on a good connection, it blocks nothing.
  • Passkeys work from a phone (QR code) or a security key. Passkeys kept in iCloud Keychain, or on the Mac with Touch ID, need a build signed by a registered Apple developer.
  • No Google sign-in or sync.
  • In full screen, the layouts with the address bar at the top lay the tabs and the toolbar out as Chromium does.

Source

Oblada's edits to Chromium are in chromium/patches/, one patch per file: PATCHES.md says what each one does and what it depends on. What changed in this version, in detail, is in its devlog. The README and CONTRIBUTING.md explain how to build Oblada. The Barrier is built on Brave's work: adblock-rust, brave-core's protections, which it follows, and Brave's lists, with uBlock Origin's scriptlets and the EasyList authors' lists. Updates are made with Sparkle. Releases are official builds, with Google's profile-guided optimization profiles, as Chrome's, Brave's and Helium's are.

Built on Chromium 156.0.8078.48.

SHA-256 of Oblada-silicon.dmg: 76a93e02aefeebcec896978866213bbca09462d093c99c59ca74da212c6f3938

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