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Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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