Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

Long time NoScript user here, and I had to remove it today as it is completely broken and unusable. I cannot even get the preferences to open so I can export my whitelisted domains to uMatrix, which I'm testing as a replacement.

I would like to combine uBlock and uMatrix, but I'm not sure I can replicate the functionality I want. Your mention of dynamic filtering is interesting and I wonder if others are using it and can make a recommendation?

I need all JavaScript off by default (including first-party) and the ability to block both ad-serving domains and filters such as /ads/ that work across all domains. Is this possible to do entirely within uBlock Origin?

View on HN

I used to use NoScript and am now more than happy with uBlock Origin in medium mode. The developer of uBlock Origin and uMatrix actually recommends against using them together now (for most people).

See https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/706xrr/umatrix_vs_...

It depends on how much work you want to do... I change umatrix defaults to not allow any javascript, which breaks a lot of things (usually images :/). I also don't load anything from third party sites by default, which also breaks images and often css (many sites I usually just read the text with broken css). For this uMatrix is great and I wouldn't use uBlock Origin at all except that uMatrix has no option to not load fonts and I also have Firefox configured to just use DejaVu 16pt on all sites (which makes the web so much nicer, although also breaks a few things), but this doesn't prevent it from loading fonts for some reason (at least last I checked). I guess because some sites use icon fonts and maybe Firefox can't tell the difference until it gets the file.

So which part of this isn't possibly with only uBlock Origin?

Blocking font loading. I'm not sure where fonts show up in uMatrix and there is at least not a specific fonts category, which is what I want.

I block all fonts by default ("no-remote-fonts: * true" in "My Rules"), and selectively re-enable them on sites that I trust to use fonts responsibly.

This will block all externally loaded fonts, only system fonts will be used.

I looked an only saw references to that in uBlock Origin, then realized I read the question wrong :/. As far as I know it is possible to do everything I want in uBlock Origin (I do the same with fonts), however the interface is less convenient than uMatrix, even with the advanced extra panel. It would work if uMatrix ever goes away, but I'd rather use uMatrix while I can. I tend to leave changes as temporary only when I can unless I am visiting a site frequently, so I end up having to redo many permissions and even a small increase in convenience is nice.

Gotcha, that's fair enough!

Looking at the uBlock dynamic filtering, it looks very similar to uMatrix. To block all scripts in uBlock, you'd probably want to block inline scripts, 1st party scripts, and 3rd party scripts with global rules which is possible with dynamic filtering.

However, if you're using chrome, you should have the ability to disable it from the browser altogether.

I'm using Firefox and I need an easy way to toggle JS on for specific domains, which NoScript used to allow and uMatrix does, but I think I'll have to do some further experimentation and get used to the new add-on.

You can set global rules and individual exceptions based on domain.

It's kind of hidden, but if you select the wildcard in the top-left domain list of uMatrix, you can disable classes of requests by default. eg Cookies, XHRs, iframes, then whitelist them per-site.

Did you change browsers or something? Noscript seems to still work fine for me. Linux Firefox 56.0 (64-bit)

Firefox 57 was release a couple weeks ago and breaks most extension by dropping the legacy add-on system.

I was hoping that was not case. I was hoping something like Safari on a Mac Pro.

For the avoidance of doubt, NoScript version 10 shipped a few days after FF57 was released, and it is an update to that combination which is not working for me. I uninstalled & reinstalled the extension, and clicking on the settings icon instantly crashes the browser. It is totally unusable for me.

There was a huge change with Firefox 57.

It is getting back to usable but it still lacks ABE and some other tools.

No, I'm using Firefox 57 (sure you are still on 56? 57 should be in the repos) and after a shaky start with NoScript 10, whatever the latest update did has badly broken the extension for many users. I am hopeful it will be as good as it used to be some day but today it really is badly broken and unusable. See the reviews from the last 24 hours, it's a mess: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/revi...

yeah- 56. double-checked. But linux mint- they try to not break things :)

uBlock and uMatrix are designed to work together :)

and yes you can disable ALL javascript with uBlock :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com