>I really don’t want to give that up – is there a solution?
Use Firefox, uBO works great. While I really enjoy seeing people find creative technical workarounds, the reason for it being needed in the first place is Googles fight against Adblockers with Manifest V3. Firefox allows people to sidestep this artificial downgrade of adblocking capabilities.
For those not aware, the article assumes you are stuck in Google Chrome. Ublock works correctly in Firefox and derivatives, I advise you to use that instead to end the suffering.
If you find yourself in a "only Internet Explorer 5.5 is supported" situation, you could perhaps use Ungoogled Chromium and manually install Ublock Origin to buy yourself time to get out of that dead lock.
Weirdly enough I was wondering what Tavis Ormandy has been up to recently, as I haven't seen his name associated with any global show-stopping vulnerabilities from the Project Zero team for a while.
I miss uMatrix, too. Thank you for working on this!
Nice work! FWIW, you can still use Manifest V2 extensions, like uMatrix, uBlock Origin, or Violentmonkey, in Chrome by passing command line flags. For example, on macOS:
open -b com.google.Chrome --new --args --disable-features=ExtensionManifestV2Unsupported,ExtensionManifestV2Disabled
When Google finally nerfs that, it is past time to move to Firefox or Brave, the latter of which has explicitly announced uMatrix support.
I tried it, sadly it suffers from the same issues as uMatrix: Some things silently fail. I had hoped the fork was updated for modern browsers, but it doesn’t look like it.
An example is fastmail, the service worker gets blocked from some request for images, without any blocking showing up in uMatrix. Unblocking the domain in question makes everything work.
Something like uMatrix should be built right into the browser, and the fact that this isn't the case really says it all about how it's not the "user agent" anymore. It's the one extension that's absolutely essential IMO -- no third-party connections at all by default, yes it breaks a lot of sites, but then you should ask yourself if the content was really worth reading in the first place!
Besides the blocking, being able to see at the click of a button what kind of crap most sites want to load is really eye opening. And they would do so completely silently if you're using a "normie" browser created or financially supported by the largest advertising company in the world.
Instead the mainstream gets "security features" like Safe Browsing, where it connects to a Google server every day without most people's consent or even knowledge, downloading a list of hashes of "bad stuff" to block. Like open source software to download videos from YouTube (yt-dlp), which it flags as malware. Of course the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that it's also sending every URL you visit to their server isn't true -- only the ones that match a hash, "to check for false positives". It's easy to see how this mechanism could be abused to log who is visiting particular URLs of interest, without alerting the user to it happening. As far as I see it, you would just have to trust them when they super-double-pinky-swear they would never do this. And of course the TLAs wouldn't allow them to disclose it if something like this happened on their orders.
I'm still using uMatrix in Firefox. I just find the UI at once both more granular and easier to grok than uB0's Advanced mode. Despite being deprecated, it still works.
Unfortunately, I'll probably have to drop it soon, because there are too many pages going behind Cloudflare's damn "Verify you are human" Challenge page, which seems irrecoverably broken by uMatrix. No amount of whitelisting or logger analysis seems to make it happy, short of full-blown add-on disablement. I've had to keep Falkon handy as a backup for a few mission-critical websites that just absolutely refuse to work under uMatrix.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadUse Firefox, uBO works great. While I really enjoy seeing people find creative technical workarounds, the reason for it being needed in the first place is Googles fight against Adblockers with Manifest V3. Firefox allows people to sidestep this artificial downgrade of adblocking capabilities.
If you find yourself in a "only Internet Explorer 5.5 is supported" situation, you could perhaps use Ungoogled Chromium and manually install Ublock Origin to buy yourself time to get out of that dead lock.
I miss uMatrix, too. Thank you for working on this!
An example is fastmail, the service worker gets blocked from some request for images, without any blocking showing up in uMatrix. Unblocking the domain in question makes everything work.
but cloudflare blocks my "outdated browser" all the time
Firefox hasn't (yet) crippled their add-ons, and says they have no plans to do so (today).
NoScript can do what you want, and more.
Besides the blocking, being able to see at the click of a button what kind of crap most sites want to load is really eye opening. And they would do so completely silently if you're using a "normie" browser created or financially supported by the largest advertising company in the world.
Instead the mainstream gets "security features" like Safe Browsing, where it connects to a Google server every day without most people's consent or even knowledge, downloading a list of hashes of "bad stuff" to block. Like open source software to download videos from YouTube (yt-dlp), which it flags as malware. Of course the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that it's also sending every URL you visit to their server isn't true -- only the ones that match a hash, "to check for false positives". It's easy to see how this mechanism could be abused to log who is visiting particular URLs of interest, without alerting the user to it happening. As far as I see it, you would just have to trust them when they super-double-pinky-swear they would never do this. And of course the TLAs wouldn't allow them to disclose it if something like this happened on their orders.
Unfortunately, I'll probably have to drop it soon, because there are too many pages going behind Cloudflare's damn "Verify you are human" Challenge page, which seems irrecoverably broken by uMatrix. No amount of whitelisting or logger analysis seems to make it happy, short of full-blown add-on disablement. I've had to keep Falkon handy as a backup for a few mission-critical websites that just absolutely refuse to work under uMatrix.