[TheCapeGreek]

As others have said, immediately switch to Stylus. While we're at it stop using Ghostery as well since they were bought by an ad company. Use Privacy Badger or a decent alternative (noscript + heavy/custom uBlock lists should work just fine)

[Chilinot]

If you dont want the heavy handed solution that NoScript provides, i would suggest "uBlock Matrix".

[dredmorbius]

There are two, similar, though different, extensions.

uBlock origin is a dedicated, quite-good, low-fuss, ad blocker.

uMatrix is a much more general, very powerful, though somewhat fussy, general Web capabilities manager. If you don't mind fiddling with sites periodically, it's very strongly recommended, but for user populations who don't do this or grasp technology poorly, it will require some fairly close managing, _especially_ if the user base doesn't report problems and just accepts "the site is broken".

I'd highlighted my preset recommended set of browser extensions for 2018 a couple of weeks back. The hero image is uMatrix's control interface.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/WVEM83FY...

[forapurpose]

> for user populations who don't do this or grasp technology poorly, it will require some fairly close managing

I would never have imagined installing it for non-technical users, but one was interested in giving it a try and had no problem. They even said they really liked learning how the web worked (uMatrix shows a grid (the matrix) of hosts and functionality, such as CSS, images, scripts, media, etc.). So I gave it to another non-technical user, and they also like it.

Both have been surprised to see the number of domains that contribute to one webpage (most users assume it's all from the domain they typed into the URL field), and how often Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, and other tracking domains show up in that matrix.

[inetknght]

If the site loads tons of crapware then the site is broken regardless of whether or not uMatrix blocked things.

[dredmorbius]

If you've not been paying attention or specifically trying to counter that trend, you'd be amazed at how complex a typical site is. Even those which otherwise appear clean.

[inetknght]

I appreciate the sentiment but indeed I know very well how complex a typical site is. Unfortunately I think a very large portion of most websites are far too complex for what they provide.

[dredmorbius]

Agreed on that last.

[icebraining]

I think it's just "uMatrix".

[Chilinot]

It is, my bad.

[liamfd]

How does that compare to uBlock Origin?

[Silhouette]

While we're at it stop using Ghostery as well since they were bought by an ad company.

Ghostery invites you to submit various data to support it these days, but seems to be transparent about it and to work on an opt-in basis, so quite different to Stylish. Are you aware of other things that Ghostery is doing without the same transparency and consent?

[DCoder]

Ghostery can replace scripts like Google Analytics with stubs that expose the same API but don't do anything. Last time I checked, NoScript/uMatrix can only outright block those scripts from loading, which breaks some poorly-coded sites.

[tripzilch]

Honestly, the only reason I had Stylish installed was because multiple people on HN recommended it. So you'll excuse me if I don't "immediately" switch to the next random recommendation, especially if it comes with the reason that others in this thread are recommending it too!

BTW your characterisation of Ghostery's relation to an "ad company" is incorrect. It's an odd enough situation that I'm not using it any longer but they didn't get "bought by an ad company". Unless something new happened to them, in which case, please provide a link.

[touristtam]

Have you tried Dark Reader? I was using Stylus for dark theme only.

[dredmorbius]

I'm aware of Ghostery's data-scavenging, and not happy that it's opt-out (GDPR noncompliant), but it can be disabled.

It's on my flagged list, but remains installed.

[ynmvlp]

uBlock Origin can also make style changes to webpages with :style(), it might be good enough for you if you don’t need too many changes.