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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Does Brave have anything like uMatrix and uBlock Origin?

That functionality is pretty essential to me, and I can get it on Firefox.

Other nice-to-haves on Firefox are: CanvasBlocker, NoScript, Cookie AutoDelete, Textern, and Stylus.

If Brave has some equivalent functionality, I'm interested.

Qutebrowser was another alternative which looked pretty promising, but last I checked its lead (only?) developer didn't have time to add the uMatrix/NoScript-like functionality he had intended. So it's a no-starter for me.

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Brave is just one of the Chromium clones so yes. Not on mobile though. Firefox on mobile does support extensinos is a bit rocky though in that the current classic version is a bit outdated and is by far the worst browser for battery according to multiple test while the upcoming Firefox Preview rewrite fixes this and updates the interface but doesn't yet support extensions.

Some people disagree with Brave's operating model options around Ads.

I'd recommend checking out Vivaldi as well if you haven't. It's a Chromium clone with a proprietary interface (but written in web technologies so the code is auditable). Outside of the usual Chromium clone story of being exactly like Chrome without Google it has an extremely customizable user interface. The downside is it has a disproportionate number of UI bugs compared to other browsers but that seems to have gotten better since the 2.0 release train.

> Firefox on mobile does support extensinos is a bit rocky though

It supports uBlock, good enough for me.

It is the only thing that makes browsing recipe websites possible on Android!

The built-in ad blocker in Brave I think is missing some blacklists, but it should get 95% of the ads that make websites like that unusable.

Or I can use a browser built by an organization that is dedicated to safeguarding freedoms on the Internet.

Using Brave seems like repeating the deal with the devil that all got us using Firefox in the first place.

Also if Brave is just using Chromium under the engine, won't any shenanigans Google gets up to in the Chromium code base pass on down to Brave? I'm still not clear if Chrome's new anti-ad blocking stuff is going to permeate to other Chromium browsers.

qutebrowser lead developer here :)

Basic per-domain settings (which also allow blocking/allowing Javascript for a page, though not for different origins on that page) have been around since qutebrowser v1.2.0 (March 2018).

For more sophisticated uMatrix-like blocking, work is ongoing on an extension API, but there's jmatrix which already uses that API unofficially. I plan to get back to the extension API soon, but there are some more important things to take care of first - see the current roadmap for details. Also, I expect things to go much faster soon, as I finished my studies and I'll soon be able to start working part-time on qutebrowser funded by donations (via GitHub sponsors).

Some links:

v1.2.0 release: https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/... jmatrix: https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jmatrix roadmap: https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/... GitHub sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/The-Compiler/ related issues: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28

Brave blocks ads, trackers and third-party cookies by default, and has private windows backed by Tor. The renderer is Chromium, FWIW.

I haven't done any exhaustive comparison of Brave against Chrome/Firefox with uBlock Origin, but the media sites I visit in Brave sure do like to remind me about the ad blocker.

It's great that it blocks ads, but I need it to go further and block Javascript by default, with selective unblocking on a site-by-site basis, as uMatrix does.

That feature is built into Chrome/Chromium, really quite well. On Brave unfortunately it is hard to block first-party scripts (from the current origin) by default, which is frustrating.

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