DuckDuckGo Tracker Blocker (Firefox Extension)

Before installation or development, clone the repo locally.

Then, install the web-ext CLI:

yarn global add web-ext

The extension can then be tested using temporary loading in Firefox.

Development

To transpile the JS in development mode, run this command in another shell:

parcel watch background.js options.html popup.html --public-url '.'

In order to build the scripts, simply run with the build instead of the watch command:

parcel build background.js options.html popup.html --public-url '.'

Then, in the root of the project, run:

web-ext run --verbose --browser-console

To build the extension run:

web-ext build

Usage

By default, this plugin blocks a large list of hosts put together by notracking on github.com: notracking/hosts-blocklists

These can be rebuilt by running the following script in this repo:

./bin/buildlist

Which pulls in the file locally, reformats it so it's not formatted for dnsmasq and it can be parsed into an array in our background script, and replaces the previous ./BLOCKLIST file with the new one.

A user can also upload their own hosts to block, by visiting the preferences page at about:addons and pasting in text with each host on their own line.

Example user blocklist (try on wired.com or arstechnica.com, the latter also includes a tracker on the main BLOCKLIST)

maps.googleapis.com
adservice.google.com
pixel.condenastdigital.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com

While visiting a site, you can control a per-domain setting to disable blocking for that particular site (if experiencing degradation of the webpage).

This is accessible in the popup, which is where you can also see current trackers blocked.

Roadmap

Some immediate improvements that can be made on the current extension.

• Refactor to use async/await everywhere possible
• Build a generalized storage update/access interface
• Normalize DOM rendering (perhaps using a library)
• Include the removing of high entropy properties from requests
• Make BLOCKLIST lookup faster (by using a binary search)
• Improve upon asynchronous communication between popup and other browser environs