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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

gorhill is a hero and legend to me. One of the most important players in making the modern web.

I'm still holding out hope that either he or someone else picks uMatrix back up. It's such an incredible tool, and I'm worried about the day when it no longer works.

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As far as I've seen, the most recently committed fork of uMatrix is this one:

https://github.com/nicolaasjan/nuTensor

Why not just use the final release of uMatrix? Because it has a bug where it can delete your logon cookies when you navigate to another site. It also has bugs where the wrong rule is applied for a particular request (it picks the action defined for a different site).

Personally i use AdNauseam but if i click on uBlock button and then select "more" twice i get similar interface to uMatrix. Are there any features lacking in there compared to uMatrix?

> Are there any features lacking in there compared to uMatrix?

uMatrix had a much better UI which allowed finer granularity and immediate feedback when blocking this or that for a given site.

Can you actually do anything with that display? As a fellow refuge from umatrix. I would love some of umatrix functionality there.

So to test if I was remembering correctly I just played with the ublock expanded list a bit. You can click on some things(but not everything) and the color changes(sometimes). but I still could not figure if it is just a status display or if it can be used a a tool. As far as I can tell most of ublocks power is hidden inside scripts with no real ui.

With that display you can totally block or allow (sub-)domains on the current website (or all websites) so it does have some power, but it is not as powerful as the the scripts which allow much more granularity

Yes, but it's all "network requests" for each subdomain. You can't for example allow CSS and HTML and scripts, but disallow XHR, which is a common configuration that I use :-(

Wasn't uMatrix dropped because at this point it's just a more powerful UI to do the same things uBlock Origin lets you do?

That was my understanding.

Yes, and that's exactly why other people including myself still use it.

It is objectively not a more powerful UI if you want to allow/disallow different categories of "network request." For example, allow CSS and HTML, but block scripts and XHR. If you want to to do that, you have to write the rules manually. Basically, there's no UI, not a more powerful one.

What does uMatrix have that uBlock Origin doesn't provide?

A better UI for fine-grained control over what kind of requests get blocked.

Exactly. Say I want to block cookies, media, and XHR requests on the current site as well as on a linked 3rd party site (like cloudfront), but allow css, scripts, and frames? In uMatrix such a configuration is trivial. In uBO AFAICT you're probably gonna have to write the rules manually. The grid UI in uBO doesn't get that granular, just "network request" level.

The UI is many orders of magnitude better. uMatrix vs uBlock Origin is a textbook case. UbO's matrix is the masochist's teapot in the cover page of The Design of Everyday Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things uMatrix is a teapot with the handle where it should be.

If uMatrix will stop working I'll install NoScript. I'll keep using UbO for ads and cosmetic filtering.

How so? I think uBO has a pretty nice UX for what I want to do.

Especially like the element picker UI, where you can independantly control what element you want in the hierarchy and also how specific the selector should be.

> How so? I think uBO has a pretty nice UX for what I want to do.

I'm happy for you but I think uBO has a horrible UX for what I want to do.

The element picker is wonderful and I use it a lot especially on my phone but the part that reimplemented uMatrix is a huge and inexplicable regression.

You use both(UbO and uMatrix)? I didn’t realize uMatrix dev had been discontinued until just now, but between Brave shields and uMatrix I do a lot of clicking just to get stuff to work properly when browsing. Do you have to toggle/config uBlock often?

I use Firefox. I don't know what's a Brave shield.

I use uMatrix + uBO on desktop and NoScript + uBO on mobile.

I use uBO's UI mainly for the element picker. The part that reimplemented uMatrix is too hard to understand and to use, hence my comment about the teapot that pours tea from above the handle.

I'm using NoScript on my phone because it has a better UI for that. I use uMatrix on my desktop because it's better than NoScript. I don't use uMatrix on my phone because it's not available on mobile. I would if it was.

Sorry, I could have been more clear. Brave is a browser with a feature called Shield, an anti-tracking feature, a click of the icon disables it/reloads page. So my workflow is up to 3 clicks if I just want to disable everything, which I do when I'm in a hurry sometimes.

I was wondering how often you had to interact with uBO mostly, which was answered in sibling comment.

I'm switching back to an android phone, mostly for a better browsing experience, so I'll try Firefox/NoScript+uBO combo. I'm using uMatrix everywhere else(except on iOS) but no uBO, I thought uMatrix covered everything uBO does but I guess not so I'll try both.

Also, I believe some versions of nightly Firefox (on mobile) can support uMatrix, IIRC.

Thanks for the breakdown!

If you rely on default config uBO just works, but if you go furthur in blocking things (or add third party filters) tinkering may be required for certain webpages (or a lot depending on how hard you go)

Great that's what I was looking for, I'll try combining the two.

>gorhill is a hero and legend to me.

I wish a had an 8x10 I could gold-frame, to hang over my desk.

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