Support response manipulation (Remove elements from pages?) about zen HOT 7 CLOSED

@anfragment Projects like urlfilter (by AdGuard) and Privaxy have explored and implemented this idea.

The former is also written in Golang and support (part of) ubloack filter syntax. Maybe we can borrow some code from it.

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You've just made me realize that cosmetic rules are essentially CSS selectors. That'll simplify things a lot, thank you.

No problem, it removes the need for mutation observers and such. Also event listeners on ad elements referencing nonexistant elements might break things as well.

Might still want to .remove() iframes, embeds, videos, etc. Maybe remove anything with a .src/.href so performance doesn't clog the page.

I think the ideal process would be:

1. Remove elements server side using DOMParser to select them
2. Generate stylesheets based on targeted elements as well, if no :style(...) rules are present in the blocking rule than just fill in display: none. You can also generate scripts for things like example.com##+js(nano-sib, /mousemove|click|select/). You might be able to set up some sort of CI to pull these from ublock
3. Inject the CSS + JS

Some precautions though: Make sure to only mess with the response if it's for a viewable page, not API requests.

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I've had some ideas on how to implement this, would be totally possible via injecting some browser-side JS, but we need to polish the network filtering and GUI stuff first. I'll make sure to come back to this in the future.

from zen.

So you'd inject JS to remove layout elements and such? Why not just do it via DOM Parsing before response is sent?

from zen.

Quite a lot of HTML gets rendered by client-side JS frameworks these days. DOM Parsing could do the job for static websites, but I'm afraid we would end up needing a client-side solution anyways.

from zen.

Quite a lot of HTML gets rendered by client-side JS frameworks these days. DOM Parsing could do the job for static websites, but I'm afraid we would end up needing a client-side solution anyways.

That's true, a little bit of display: none goes a long way as well.

from zen.

Quite a lot of HTML gets rendered by client-side JS frameworks these days. DOM Parsing could do the job for static websites, but I'm afraid we would end up needing a client-side solution anyways.

That's true, a little bit of display: none goes a long way as well.

You've just made me realize that cosmetic rules are essentially CSS selectors. That'll simplify things a lot, thank you.

from zen.