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Comment by t23414321 | Hacker News Reader

The web was usable without JavaScript once.

(JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)

Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)

That would be (progressive??) XBL. (!)

(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)

- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??

NoScript, but you can only control it per domain.

+1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.

Thats my problem though, I don't want to have to allow the minimum for each site. I wish there was a noscript-like extension that used a public database of sorts to allow what's needed and block everything else, including things that are "needed" but suck so bad you shouldn't use the site

uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.

Didn't one of those extensions had an option to regexp replace content of JS files ? (Now how to do that: with parsing - or with magical chains ??:)

Right, that could be nice use of AI to extract only the good parts - or, at least, to adjust the rules for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/requestcontro... by function.

It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests)

There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.

Thanks, I'll check nuTensor. I'm using uMatrix with Firefox on both Linux and Android and I didn't notice anything strange but maybe some of those bugs were hidden under the normal hiccups of finding the right combination of rows with trial and errors.

> It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox.

Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great.

I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.

They do different things. I'm using both: uBO for ads and hiding UI elements, uMatrix for JS. I wish that the author could support both but time is limited and I'm OK with that.

By the way, I realized that most of the tabs where I'm logged into something run inside their own tab container, so that limits the damage that any bug on handling cookies can do.

Is there a different repo for nuTensor than here: https://github.com/geekprojects/nuTensor? That one says it was archived in 2021. Or are you just saying that nuTensor is less buggy than uMatrix?

It probably won't work in new Chrome versions. I'm pretty sure it's a Manifest V2 extension (it would have to be in order to dynamically block requests in the way it does), and Chrome stopped supporting MV2 extensions this year[0].

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

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