[WorkLifeBalance]

Someone on here recently recommended uMatrix for this purpose and I find that a nice trade-off between usability and request blocking.

It's an extension but given it's less opaque than a generic ad-blocker I feel more in control and that it's less likely to go 'rogue' like adblockers do.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Longtime uMatrix user here.

The most frustrating thing about UM (which is the same problem I had with NoScript back in the day) is that some scripts call other scripts. So, particularly when I'm trying to play an embedded video served by another site served through a CDN, the process for getting the damn video to play is something like:

Click video -> Open uMatrix -> whitelist some scripts -> reload -> whitelist more scripts being loaded by the first batch of scripts -> reload -> whitelist some XHR references called by new scripts -> reload -> finally whitelist the actual media being served.

[egeozcan]

90% of the time, I just don't do that dance and not watch the video.

[krageon]

If you do it five times with some intelligence, you have rules that you can apply and have most things work most of the time from then on. It's really not a huge hassle and generally the malware-containing networks aren't the ones you are greylisting.

[JetSpiegel]

I copy the URL(CTRL-l CTRL-c), open a new terminal and try youtube-dl $URL

[pdimitar]

Yep, I do that often. It's apparently a very underrated tool because it can pretty much download most of the video content out there on the internet at large. But many people have no idea about it, even technical people.

[wp381640]

I dumped that routine and just started pointing those video URLs at youtube-dl

vlc is a better video viewing experience (and better on battery) than a browser and you can usually start playing a partially downloaded file

[interfixus]

Yes, a bit bothersome at times. But if I take the trouble to finetune worthwhile sites I run into, and make the settings permanent, life does get markedly easier after a while.

I rarely see an ad. I didn't see Troy's responsible sponsor message either. I should have and would have if he had chosen to display the thing without the need for scripting. So I don't feel hugely guilty.

[egeozcan]

I have uMatrix and uBlock. In my case it was uBlock blocking the ad, not uMatrix... or maybe I had whitelisted it before? Not sure.

edit: Okay, it's not blocked by default with uMatrix: https://i.imgur.com/B97lf35.png

[gorhill]

uBO can block with pattern-matching URLs of network requests and additionally cosmetic filtering (hide DOM elements), while uMatrix works strictly with hostname of network requests and types of resources.

[paulryanrogers]

Keeping those whitelists synced or at least copied across devices can be a challenge. IIRC Noscript could save data to a bookmarklet for that purpose.

[a1369209993]

Use youtube-dl instead? It's win-win: you don't have to compromise your browser's security, and you get a permanent copy of the video that you can watch whenever you like and that the CDN can't comply with takedown requests on or otherwise maliciously bitrot.

[0xCMP]

For popular stuff switching to "global" and marking them as enabled helps reduce the song-and-dance for things like YouTube videos or common CDNs (e.g. Bootstrap)

[fibers]

Here's the thing, gorhill maintains uM and uBlock Origin and he is one of the most trusted names in several sec circles to the degree that ubo has been deployed in many enterprise settings. Is the elephant in the room by Troy 'well do you think gorhill will sell out for a measly 10k?' Or is the market for 'adblocking extensions' that inundated with shoddy extensions that simply serve as data mining tools and Troy wants to make us all aware?

[krylon]

I am happy with uMatrix, too, but FWIW, I could not recommend it to non-technical or impatient people. For many pages, I require multiple iterations of stepwise refining of what is and is not allowed before a site works for me.

I do not mind, but I can imagine it easily gets annoying for many people rather quickly. (OTOH, those people would not care to set up Pi-hole, either.)

[moftz]

I would rather spend some time setting up a solution with minimal maintenance than constantly be adjusting and tweaking my solution to get things to work just to browse the web. I use uBo because I rarely have to go in an tweak something and it's mostly just a temporary pause on blocking. A pi-hole might be nice but I like how plugins actually remove the spot where the ad once was so the site looks less like swiss cheese.

[simias]

I consider myself a pretty savvy user, I'm not a web dev but I understand web technologies, javascript and all that and I simply can't use uMatrix decently. Am I supposed to audit every single external resource to whitelist it? For every website I may want to visit? I don't get it.

Ublock seems to do an okay job of blocking most ads and tracking stuff so I'll stick to that in the meantime but I would be really interested to see a uMatrix tutorial or something like that.

[chrisdhoover]

uMatrix takes time to grok. It made no sense to me at first. Overtime I understood it and see it as a beautiful method of presenting data and using controls.

There is very good youtube tutorial of about 7 minutes that explains it use.

[move-on-by]

I also love uMatrix. Unfortunately its not an option on mobile. You could theoretically install it in Firefox mobile for Android, but it would be so difficult to use. I also use a Pi-Hole. I see my Pi-Hole as the solution for mobile browsing and apps, where uMatrix is the better option for desktop browsing since it can differentiate between image requests vs. scripts, iFrames, cookies, etc

[aembleton]

It isn't any harder to use than on the desktop!

Instead of clicking on the uMatrix icon, you click on three dots and then on uMatrix

Rather than bringing up a small window, with all your settings, it brings up a new tab with your settings.

Other than that it is the same! And it will work when you are away from home without needing a VPN to a Pi-Hole.

[slantyyz]

uMatrix, while having a bit of a dense UI, is what I prefer as well.

I installed a pi-hole in my home network about a week ago, and it survived less than a week.

My wife likes using sites like eBates when she shops online, and it redirects her through a random sequence of tracking sites before landing on a site like the Gap. It caused all sorts of problems for her, as those sites were being blocked.

If I was going to keep the pi-hole running, I would have had to constantly be adding white list entries. Or, I could have manually created a black list from scratch. I was not interested in doing either.

I found that dropping a handful of domains in uMatrix got rid of most ads (but not tracking), and that was good enough for my uses.