Ghostery 10 on Firefox does not block anything

[philipp-classen]

Help needed Ghostery 10 was released on 19th of August, 2024. Since then, we got reports that Ghostery does not block any ads or tracking requests. From the reports, it looks as if the adblocker was not correctly initialized.

So far, we could not reproduce the behavior. If you are affected, these questions could narrow it down:

• What Firefox version are you using?
• Do you see any error messages in the extension ("about:debugging" look for Ghostery and click on "Inspect")?
• (If nothing help) Does the problem go away if you uninstall Ghostery, restart the browser, and then reinstall Ghostery?

If you have any insights, please feel free to comment on this issue. Thank you!

[nathfy]

I've got this issue on Firefox 130.0 (64-bit) with Ghostery 10.4.3 debugger details:

Removing Ghostery, restarting firefox, re-add Ghostery resolves.

[philipp-classen]

The problem here could be related to #1837 (report about performance problems). Thanks @nathfy, the errors in the logs you shared confirm that the startup times out and the adblocker engine is not initialized.

One class of problems that we identified on Firefox is that IndexedDB, which is used to persist the adblocker engine, is not available to Web Extension if browsing history is disabled in Firefox. This problem has been discussed in the developer community; there is also a bug report for Firefox.

If you are affected by problems after the Ghostery 10 rollout (August 19th), please check if you are running Firefox in "Never remember history" mode:

There could be other issues; however, not being able to use IndexedDB does create problems. We are working on solutions to handle this more gracefully.

In the meantime: if you affected and have "Never remember history" enabled, does it work in a profile that uses the default ("Remember history") setting?

[nathfy]

@philipp-classen I've just checked and my Firefox is set to Remember history - Unfortunately as I have removed and re-added Ghostery I no longer have the issue. But thought I'd add that info in....

[philipp-classen]

@philipp-classen I've just checked and my Firefox is set to Remember history - Unfortunately as I have removed and re-added Ghostery I no longer have the issue. But thought I'd add that info in....

Ah, I missed that you mentioned already that reinstalling fixed it. Sometimes, profiles can get corrupted. It is rare, but perhaps that happened here; restoring it from a backup, or purging it by reinstalling is the only way to recover.

Still, it is possible that there are other problems that we have not found yet. Thanks for checking!

[goodjohnjr]

I have this problem too, I just sent a message through the Contact Page from the Ghostery extension.

On a clean installation of Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS fully updated on the latest Mozilla Firefox.

When it stops working, I either disable and re-enable Ghostery or exit my web browser and open it again, but this is annoying.

My history setting is on Custom and set to clear history on exit.

[chrmod]

This PR should help #2075