I've been using the eye dropper a lot lately. It's great for making websites usable. It even works on mobile for disabling hostile ux elements such as "xyz is better with the app" nags.
I must’ve purged over 50% of visual elements from Fandom wikis with my uBlock filters. It’s outrageous how much garbage is served. I wonder what their UX design meetings look like.
A site:reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/ search with a plugin to redirect www. to old. if you're not logged in can replicate a lot of what Memory Alpha has from all the discussion. At least until Reddit finishes alienating everyone interested in weird niche discussion in favor of clickbait.
Even for areas where there is a community wiki (e.g. uesp, combineoverwiki), Google seems to prefer the Wikia/Fandom version with all the crap on the pages.
And a lot of those community wikis that originally set up not on Wikia intentionally, like minecraft, terraria and wowpedia wikis, ended up on Gamepedia which Wikia took over and reeled them back in.
Similarly, disabling the social features on SO was very useful. The "Hot network questions" block to the side is needlessly distracting and adds 0 value.
Well, the icons are just terrible, utterly insipid and lacking in power. It needs labels rather than icons, and better names for “zapper” and “picker” too (something like “remove elements from this page” versus “block elements from this site”).
I’m not sure if browsers apply height limits to these popups, but if not, almost every time there will be oodles of space for full labels and replacing the two single rows of buttons with columns. And even if scrolling is introduced, that’d still be better.
At least they now have tooltips - I remember when choosing "Advanced mode" (which you need for a lot of features) just disabled tooltips in the UI, on the theory that advanced users shouldn't need them! I (and likely many others) argued how crazy an assumption that was, that just because we understood how HTML and JS worked, we should remember a bunch of icons and what the dev decided they meant. Thankfully they were willing to listen and change the decision, and the UI is a lot better for it.
If you have some pull here, it would be really nice to have popups added to the grid in the middle of the dropdown where the colored boxes are. I use these very rarely and can never remember which column of colored boxes do what.
This is one of the best hidden features of uBlock. While we're on the topic, how does one effectively block facebook ads?
I've got simple rules to chop the ads from LinkedIn, but if you do an inspect on FB, they've been very sneaky about how the elements are set up, eg it doesn't just say "Sponsored" in a string, it's a weird mash that ends up looking like that when rendered but hard to nail down.
Then again I'm more of a backend dev, so maybe that's why I don't know what to do.
> weird mash that ends up looking like that when rendered but hard to nail down.
It is designed to be very hard to select automatically. It is also why I don't use Facebook more than 5 minutes a week - it is among the only services where ads annoy me.
> *Important News*: 4th September 2021: Sponsored Posts Issue: It seems Facebook have just changed their code for Sponsored Posts, so some people have started seeing Sponsored Posts in their Newsfeed again, I am working on fixing this, please be patient, thanks! *UPDATE* It seems for some people the sponsored posts are only getting through if your Newsfeed is set to "Top Posts", if you switch to "Most Recent", the Sponsored Posts should in theory disappear. The good news is that FBP has an option to keep you permanently on the "Most Recent" feed when you visit the Newsfeed, so that could possibly solve the issue for now, give it a try and let me know if that solves it for you. In the meantime, I will continue working on a more robust fix.
Open the FBP options screem by clicking the "FBP" button in the navigation bar at the top of the page.
Under the "Further options" heading there is a setting titled "News Sort: Most Recent". Tick that option, then click the "Save and Close" button.
As mentioned above this is not guaranteed to fix hiding the sponsored posts, but a lot of people are reporting success with it, as Facebook seem to pepper the "Top Posts" version of the Newsfeed with more ads than the "Most Recent" version, and "Top Posts" is Facebook's default setting for the Newsfeed.
This has the strange effect of removing every item in the feed, causing it to flash while waiting for a refresh, forever. Skeleton -> flash of new item -> skeleton -> etc
The eye dropper is also quite useful for writing userscripts and userstyles directly on Android; I tap the element, hit preview to see what happens (margins, padding, border collapse, etc), type a note at the end of the element name and sirens it to the clipboard, then move on. Back in the editor, I just paste my notes from the clipboard, and I can quickly write up a stylesheet override for a dynamic webpage without resorting to debugging on my desktop.
I don't understand why Firefox mobile can't be used to debug another Firefox mobile, I I'd love it if I could open devtools off to the side and see a live tree view instead of manually prefixing the URL with `view-source:` only to find out the html doesn't actually include any content.
This feature is so good but so confusing to use, really the best thing about ublock beyond the ad-blocking. I use very extensively, I almost wish it was a standalone tool, so that the filtering aspects could be shared more easily.
For some reason, Content Blockers on iOS only work on Safari. Other browsers on iOS are not allowed or able to implement them.
uBlock Origin is also more fully featured than Content Blockers, which don't have the on-demand whitelisting features and toggles. However, since uBlock Origin is only available as a browser extension, it can only be used with a browser that supports extensions. No browser on iOS is able to support uBlock Origin.
Firefox Focus on iOS blocks 78% with all tracker blocks are enabled, and 62% with the last “Block other content trackers” option disabled. Percentage figures are from test on https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html.
Firefox Focus is a nice browser for certain use cases, but it can't compare to uBlock Origin, which scores 100% on that test for me on a fresh install with default settings (using Firefox on Android and desktop).
It's interesting how Firefox Focus on iOS also acts as a Content Blocker for Safari, but I find AdGuard to be more comprehensive on iOS.
One rather effective way to get much higher (approx 99%) on iOS is to use a DNS over HTTPS provisioning profile (or app), and use a DNS server that blocks ads.
If you run your own server, you can get to 100% by turning on blocking for a couple of hosts not in standard blocklists that this test has highlighted.
The DNS setting applies to most or all apps, as far as I can see, as it's applied as a system level provisioning setting. iOS 15 gives more visibility of this in the UI, but it works in iOS 14.
Yandex Browser on Android [which is based on Chrome] supports Chrome extensions. I'm running it with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and a few others. If an extension won't load directly from the Chrome Webstore you can toggle 'Developer Mode' under 'chrome://extensions' and load the downloaded and unpacked CRX directly.
I had high hopes for Kiwi Browser but, unfortunately its text-reflow feature has been broken since forever. Yandex Browser is the only one available on Android that ticks both those 'must have' boxes for me: full support for extensions and a functional text-reflow feature --without which a huge swathe of the web is unreadable for me, due to microscopic text sizes.
I know other browsers have their own built-in ad-blockers, but I prefer to use uBlock Origin across all my devices so, when I setup a new one, I can just import my existing rules & settings, built up and tweaked over many years, rather than start from scratch.
It also blocks the paywall in some webs that aren't too well designed (the content is loaded under a frame that hide it). It's great to have such a good tool.