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Comment by nigma | Hacker News Reader

I turned off JavaScript and Cookies for all sites a few months ago and only whitelist (or open in another Chrome profile) when they refuse to display or need an authenticated session.

There are some sites that require JS to render, but the great thing is that majority of pages I visit work just fine as plain html/css. In general I feel less distraction from popups, overlays, ads, etc.

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I use uMatrix as a substitute for NoScript + uBlock, and while it's a pain to get some sites working manually without bulk-enabling everything on them, I'm mostly happy about it, and the web looks better for me.

I use Noscript and uBlock Matrix together. It's a little annoying to have to double-whitelist pages, but they offer some non-overlapping functionality. uBM has finer whitelisting control, while NS has finer control (and better visibility) over specific kinds of objects on the page.

However, neither offers a UI for whitelisting specific scripts, which I see as an important feature in the Year of the CDN. I think NS has that feature but it's hidden away in the preferences.

I tried using uBlock (EDIT: uMatrix) for a while, but I felt like it was a lot of hassle, and most of the time it still wasn't granular enough to actually block the things I wanted to without breaking sites. It seemed like usually all of the bullshit javascript making sites sluggish came from the same domain as the few bits I might actually want. (Or at least needed to make the site useful.)

> wasn't granular enough to actually block the things I wanted to without breaking sites

I don't understand the criticism: it's no less granular than NoScript. If considering only the dynamic filtering panel[1], it can be argued it's more granular given that one can block inline-script tags only, and also one can block/allow on a per-site basis.

Static and dynamic URL filtering of course allows you to filter on a per-URL basis.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

> it's no less granular than NoScript.

Sorry, to clarify, I wasn't comparing uMatrix to NoScript, merely commenting that it didn't seem particularly useful to me when I tried it.

I was considering trying NoScript at some point, but from what you've said, it doesn't sound like it would be much better for my purposes?

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