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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Quote: "You’re going to be browsing the web anyway; you’re going to be inundated with ads anyway;"

Naaaah, Firefox with uBlock Origins and Privacy Badger makes sure I don't see ads, but thank you for trying.

Exactly - add uMatrix to the picture and it decreases page load time and gives you even more control over what can load in a website. I am tired of this constant social media promotion of this clone of a browser that is built to support the online advertising industry (an industry that constantly "innovates" to violate our privacy while irritating us in the process).

As a casual uBlock user, what does uMatrix give you that uBlock Origin doesn’t?

uMatrix gives you a drop down that shows a grid showing css, scripts, media, cookies, images,frames, XHR, other. Blocked by default you allow what you want.

I'm still figuring it out but it's more granular than merely off or on.

Isn't that uBlock's advanced mode? (Settings->'I am an advanced user')?

The developer himself states it's better to use that than in combo with umatrix.

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

Doesn't uBlock's filter-picker-eyedrop-thing do more or less the same thing?

That's just a visual filter (DOM level). uMatrix and uBlock lists block network requests.

uMatrix is quite labor intensive.

I was surprised how many websites actually work without changing anything... (and loading a lot faster without all the javascript bloat.) Once you understand how uMatrix works, it's 1 click to temporarily whitelist a site, which i hardly ever use while browsing the web/reading articles.

Note that I do 'online shopping/purchases' in another browser, though.

Only in the beginning. After a week or two, you'd probably visit every site you visit regularly anyway and you'd have set all you need in uMatrix. Additional bonus is that all cookies, scripts, ajax requests etc. from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Disqus and God knows what else are blocked for good on all sites I ever visit!

UMatrix will block everything by default(more or less). Ublock will use pre defined lists that block known advertisement networks and similar.

This means umatrix will break most websites by default and require you to check what elements are required and allow them manual but offers higher security because you essentially audit every website you visit.

It also allows you to add certain common sites, that you may consider ok, to its white-list. That means over a period of time, the amount of auditing required generally goes down.

> Ublock will use pre defined lists that block known advertisement networks and similar

uBlock Origin can also be used in default-deny mode, see [1]

* * *

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

uMatrix is a bit more harder to use than uBlock Origin.

Basically, when a website loads, it can access resources from various sources. For example, if you access www.example.com, it may also load Analytics from google.com, it may use sharing icon and javascript from twitter and Facebook, it may load some video file from Akamai content delivery network etc. etc.

With uMatrix you can control what resources load from where.

In the default mode, uMatrix will load the resources only from the domain you are accessing, i.e. if you are accessing example.com, it will allow images, javascript, videos etc. to only load from example.com and block from all other sites. This can break some websites - for example, youtube.com which loads videos and javascript from other servers in different domain. In such cases uMatrix allows you to allow resources from the other domains / servers to load and save this settings (or you can just switch off uMatrix temporarily for that site).

Since many resources aren't loaded by default (and a lot of websites include such crap resources from other sites like Google, Facebook etc), it saves bandwidth and the web page often loads faster. But it comes with added complexity when a website breaks.

If one of the selling points of Brave is that it saves my time, then spending hours trying to set the right extensions and updating rules doesn't sound that appetizing.

this. so much this. the web is so clean with firefox, everytime I read these kind of articles or people complaining I'm like "what are you talking about?"

To the credit of the author they did mention "I personally use an aggressive battery of ad blocking techniques to eliminate them from my browser too"

The author isn't selling Brave. They mention themselves that they use FF with ad blockers.

I understood that. In that particular quote, author was playing Devil's advocate, except it's not working.

Plus, on Mac OS I run Little Snitch with a set of custom blocking rules that's updated on a regular basis.

Also, at this point, I don't trust anything based on Chromium...even if it's all open-source etc. The last time I checked, it still phoned home to Google some telemetry data. Granted, I haven't looked into it for a while as I've turned my back on all things Google a while ago.

You can swith to edgium to equilibrate

The best thing about Brave is that all of the ad / tracker blocking is built into the browser itself - it's noticeably faster than any extension. The blog posts about the implementation make an interesting read:

https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

I never notice performance problems with my Firefox, except for Gmail (which sucks in Chrome too). And uBlock Origin is pretty well optimized already, I'm actually skeptical that Brave can be much better.

Is this an actual thing that's noticeable by people?

What is more noticeable to me is that projects like uBlock Origin are entirely community driven and thus less likely to succumb to monetization schemes like "acceptable ads".

Plus I trust Firefox itself more than I trust Brave, because Firefox has been with me ever since 2005 when I started my career.

Ditto.

I use Brave everywhere, from desktop to iOS. I do not use their BAT thing at all, so my praise is not incentivized.

I love the page that shows me time saved/ads blocked/redirects/etc. I'm sure the time saved stat is highly questionable, it's only as good as heuristics in it, but it's fun.

Anecdotally, last summer, we were vacationing on the Oregon coast, where the service was really poor. I experienced multiple cases where safari (on iOS) just was not going to load any time soon if ever, but brave did and handily. IIUC, Brave is using the same low level rendering engine that safari is, but the top part (UI and request handling) is different.

I think it's cool that Firefox users have lots of knobs and buttons they can turn and push, but for right now I value that the Brave experience is an ad-less experience that Just Works out of the box.

Can a similar level of privacy be reached through extensions with Safari on iOS or Chrome on Mac?

Yes. I use safari on both, never see any ads and often get disappointed that I can’t be outraged when a post pops up about how we can see how FB/Google tracks us.

On mac I use adGuard, in iOS I use Refine content blocker.

With Safari, no, iOS/macOS content blockers are significantly less powerful than uBlock Origin.

With Chrome, yes, as long as it continues to support uBlock Origin and you don't count its built-in communication with Google.

i use nextdns.io to block at os level vpn. its free and they are partners of mozilla, so good enought for me. When I asked why should i trust them with my dns request they told me that i should not do it lightly.

I would say no, more information here:

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

For casual users, out of the box experience - the default - is way more important. I can not recommend Firefox for my relatives. Brave I can and I do.

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