[rep_lodsb]

Something like uMatrix should be built right into the browser, and the fact that this isn't the case really says it all about how it's not the "user agent" anymore. It's the one extension that's absolutely essential IMO -- no third-party connections at all by default, yes it breaks a lot of sites, but then you should ask yourself if the content was really worth reading in the first place!

Besides the blocking, being able to see at the click of a button what kind of crap most sites want to load is really eye opening. And they would do so completely silently if you're using a "normie" browser created or financially supported by the largest advertising company in the world.

Instead the mainstream gets "security features" like Safe Browsing, where it connects to a Google server every day without most people's consent or even knowledge, downloading a list of hashes of "bad stuff" to block. Like open source software to download videos from YouTube (yt-dlp), which it flags as malware. Of course the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that it's also sending every URL you visit to their server isn't true -- only the ones that match a hash, "to check for false positives". It's easy to see how this mechanism could be abused to log who is visiting particular URLs of interest, without alerting the user to it happening. As far as I see it, you would just have to trust them when they super-double-pinky-swear they would never do this. And of course the TLAs wouldn't allow them to disclose it if something like this happened on their orders.

[tredre3]

> [...] the fact that this isn't the case really says it all about how it's not the "user agent" anymore. [...] yes it breaks a lot of sites, but then you should ask yourself if the content was really worth reading in the first place!

Users want websites to work. The agent excludes a feature that, you admit, break most websites.

Yet you find it puzzling and anti-user behavior? Can you elaborate?

Would you be okay if it was built-in but disabled by default and hidden behind a setting or a flag?

[rep_lodsb]

Maybe websites should work without loading megabytes of scripts from third-party servers? I think that should be disabled unless you opt-in.

Also browsers by default using a blocklist from some company, and showing a giant scary warning and contacting their server when the user deliberately navigates to an URL that is on that list. That should be opt-in as well, rather than something that just happens and is considered acceptable.