Hey, thanks for this info! This is the first time I'm hearing details about these trackers and the tech required to stop them. It must be a huge undertaking, but if you ever also develop a blocker for mobile apps (or heck, an email app of your own) I will 10000% be on board!!
Sad to hear that Substack doesn't allow you to disable trackers. If you're looking for an alternative there's buttondown.email. I've never used it but heard good things and they are privacy focused. (oh, and congrats on Simplify v2, it's looking good)
I use Shift and installed Simplify and truly love it so I purchased. I don't see the crossed-out eye when viewing emails in Shift. Does that mean the tracking isn't blocked?
Unfortunately, no, I don't think it works on Shift or any wrapper that isn't a full browser with full support for all the extensions APIs. Blocking trackers relies on background APIs in the browser to block the requests.
Wrappers like Shift are essentially faking it and injecting the extension code into Gmail manually. They also update the version of the extension manually (I have a recurring reminder to check that they aren't too far behind -- sometimes I have to nag them).
Hey, thanks for this info! This is the first time I'm hearing details about these trackers and the tech required to stop them. It must be a huge undertaking, but if you ever also develop a blocker for mobile apps (or heck, an email app of your own) I will 10000% be on board!!
Sad to hear that Substack doesn't allow you to disable trackers. If you're looking for an alternative there's buttondown.email. I've never used it but heard good things and they are privacy focused. (oh, and congrats on Simplify v2, it's looking good)
Small update on this. I spent all of today blocking even more trackers. I now block over 170 trackers.
I published my list here: https://gist.github.com/leggett/8c2ab9735037cb66c218fdbe898ddf68
And I reached out to the major blockers out there to point them to this list in case they want to improve their own blockers.
I was worried simplify didn't block trackers, now I know where to see it, appreciate this.
I use Shift and installed Simplify and truly love it so I purchased. I don't see the crossed-out eye when viewing emails in Shift. Does that mean the tracking isn't blocked?
Unfortunately, no, I don't think it works on Shift or any wrapper that isn't a full browser with full support for all the extensions APIs. Blocking trackers relies on background APIs in the browser to block the requests.
Wrappers like Shift are essentially faking it and injecting the extension code into Gmail manually. They also update the version of the extension manually (I have a recurring reminder to check that they aren't too far behind -- sometimes I have to nag them).
Thanks! I switched to Wavebox and that seems to utilize the Chrome extension, so it works there. Love Simplify!
This is great! I turned off auto-image loading, but it's a pain, so I turned it back on eventually...
Another great feature, thank you!
Is simplify v2 available now?
Not just yet... in the next 10 days though.
Is the launch still planned for this month?
Yes!