I’m frustrated
Walid Damouny April 26, 2011 13:39

unintuitive and cumbersome tracking removal

I had a really hard time making Disqus.com work in Firefox until I discovered that it was not allowed to set a cookie by ghostery. It must be made clearer that ghostery is actually blocking cookies of visited websites. I don't want to dig into the ghostery blocked list every time to know if it will work or not. Both unintuitive and cumbersome.

I still love ghostery and will continue to use it.
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  • I’m thankful
    Walid Damouny April 27, 2011 08:47
    Hi Adam,

    Thanks for your reply. Yes you are right about your presumption of expecting cookies to be blocked. My point wasn't probably explained to the fullest so here goes:

    I turned on "Enable cookie protection [experimental]" option and blocked the whole list of web bugs and cookies. So I expected that Ghostery will be showing me all that it is blocking when I click on the toolbar icon and I can selectively allow the sites that I use. Disqus.com seemed to be blocked so I allowed it. It wasn't visually obvious that Ghostery was only allowing Disqus to use a web bug while at the same time blocking it from placing a cookie in my browser. The cookie is more important for Disqus since it is a commenting system that I use across sites and it had to identify me. I use NoScript in Firefox which is an extension that blocks JavaScript and it does show me all sources of scripts that run in a webpage even if I had already allowed them and expected Ghostery to be showing me everything at once too. This is the reason for my confusion and I wish that blocked cookies were shown as well as web bugs to selectively choose to block/unblock either or both. I care more about cookies because there are sites that I use and require them to be allowed.

    One more thing:
    The list box that contain the blocked cookies and web bugs is relatively small when compared with the amount of data it contains. I suggest that the list be placed in a separate sub-tab inside the "Ghostery Options" tab. This also can be applied to the "Do not perform blocking on these sites" list.

    Thanks again for your reply and for Ghostery.
    Comment
    good solution! good solution! (undo)
    • Felix Shnir April 27, 2011 16:30
      Hi Walid, thanks for expressing your concerns. We're working on improving the interface all the time, which includes cookie notifications. Originally, we planned to reuse purple box and page menu, but later we've removed it since there is no good way to associate a blocked cookie to the actual parent page that originated in the call for this cookie. That said, there is a complete log of all Ghostery actions: its the Block Log available in Firefox Menu -> Tools -> Ghostery -> Block Log. Block Log exposes everything that Ghostery was able to intercept including redirects, cookies, scripts, and so on. It greatly helps with discovery of the problematic items such as the issue you've encountered.
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  • This reply was removed on 2014-09-05.
    see the change log