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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I'm also using it. It's not maintained. It might stop working with any of the next browser updates and has been like that for years. I've been told that uBO can do the same things and I started looking into it weeks ago, then got stuck. The UI of uMatrix is so much better than the one of uBO at selecting the scripts to run and block that it could become a case study in interaction design.

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uBO can also do things that uMatrix can't (on Firefox at least) - like CNAME uncloaking[1]. This is where a resource is hosted/maintained on third-party servers, but is addressed using a first-party subdomain. As a completely hypothetical example, instead of loading content from homedepot.disqus.com, you load it from disqus.homedepot.com. The relationship between Home Depot and Disqus and the privacy implications are similar in both cases, but uMatrix would consider the former to be third-party content and the later to be first-party. uBO however will treat both as third-party content (when CNAME uncloaking is enabled).

Enabling this in uBO really opened my eyes to how fuzzy the distinction between first-party and third-party is. Sites can have all types of business arrangements with different privacy implications, ranging from relatively harmless (hosting), to moderate (CDN), to invasive (ad tracking). uMatrix and other blockers have used the domain name as a proxy-variable to measure whether something should be trusted or not, but it is increasing becoming a poor metric. With CNAME uncloaking enabled, maintaining default deny, and allow only what is needed approach becomes quite a bit more work, as it ends up blocking a bunch of necessary content. But without you are allowing a fair bit of tracking you shouldn't.

After a few months of trying to use uBO like uMatrix, I found that using the curated deny-lists was a more tractable approach than maintaining my own allow-list, and thus don't miss the uMatrix interface as much as I expected.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#u...

Just to confirm, uBO can do the same things, mostly (and I've switched to it myself), but the UI is not on the same level when trying to block css / images / scripts separately. uMatrix really is an incredible UI achievement.

It's always a little minigame of not activating too much but still getting a working site.

Fishy things get painted red, hopefully good things get painted green - reload and try again, if it didn't work.

I sure hope, some maintainers pop up and keep this thing alive!

Both extensions are FOSS, so anyone with enough time and skills could say extend the uBO engine with the more powerful uMatrix interface, where the latter could be accessed through an "expert" option for more granularity, then submit the result to gorhill for evaluation, so that he would have a single codebase to maintain.

Do you actually know that gorhill would be open to receiving that work, or are you just guessing?

That's an enormous amount of work (for someone totally unfamiliar with the codebase that would have to learn) to undertake on the off chance that it would be accepted.

Just guessing of course; I'm sure the amount of work involved would be significant, but I also wouldn't underestimate the power of teamwork on the Internet, especially when something so important (I''d dare to say vital these days) as a content blocker is involved. As for the implicit "then why don't you do the work yourself?" - Heh, I wish I had both the skills and capacity to focus on a project of such complexity.

> It might stop working with any of the next browser updates

That's the day many of us will stop updating our browsers.

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