uBlock Origin Suggested Settings

160 thoughts on “uBlock Origin Suggested Settings”

1. May I ask if the version of this guide that still featured uMatrix is available to read somewhere?

   Reply to 'TheThorn'

   1. sorry, it is not – uM isn’t really being worked on anymore

      Reply to '12Bytes'

      1. Yes I know, that’s not why I’m asking, I’m not even asking if you’re maintaining a separate version of this guide. I found it on the Wayback Machine.

         Reply to 'TheThorn'

2. Hi.

   Why do you suggest disabling cosmetic filtering?

   “Parse and enforce cosmetic filters – disabled.
   Ignore generic cosmetic filters – enabled.”

   Reply to 'mihalan'

   1. that’s just a suggestion – from what i understand cosmetic filtering adds substantial overhead to uBO and personally i don’t see any real benefit from it – in my case i block elements using CSS

      Reply to '12Bytes'

      1. “in my case i block elements using CSS”

         Is it described somewhere in your instructions how to do this?

         Reply to 'mihalan'

         1. Firefox Tweaks and Fixes and Styles and Things

            Reply to '12Bytes'

            1. Thanks

               Reply to 'mihalan'

3. Thank you for the awesome guide. I am making the change to enabling the “I am an advanced user” option to leverage uBlock’s dynamic filtering.

   I have set the “Global rules” for “inline scripts”, “1st-party scripts”, “3rd-party scripts”, “3rd-party frames”, but it is unclear to me if JS should still be disabled globally in “Settings” or if these 4 global rules in the dynamic filter does the same thing. In the case of dynamic filtering however, instead of flipping the Java Script switch on a per site basis for example you edit the dynamic rules instead. I hope I am making sense.

   I suspect disabling JS globallly is not required anymore with those 4 dynamic rules set, i just want to do a sanity check.

   Reply to 'Sherlock Holmes'

   1. > …it is unclear to me if JS should still be disabled globally in “Settings”…

      no, the global rules you set will do the job

      > I suspect disabling JS globallly is not required anymore with those 4 dynamic rules set

      correct

      > In the case of dynamic filtering however, instead of flipping the Java Script switch on a per site basis for example you edit the dynamic rules instead.

      if you haven’t read the uBlock wiki, please do so

      i’m a little confused by your question – you need not “edit” anything, you click the appropriate rule scope on the main pop-up

      you’re at 12bytes.org, so if you want to allow scripts to run here, in the right column (local) you would click the gray box – if you wanted to allow other sites to run scripts from here, which there’s no reason to do, then you click the gray box in the left column (global)

      Reply to '12Bytes'

      1. > you need not “edit” anything, you click the appropriate rule scope on the main pop-up

         That is what i meant by editing the dynamic rules yes.

         Thank you for clarifying!

         Reply to 'Sherlock Holmes'

   2. > I have set the “Global rules” for “inline scripts”, “1st-party scripts”, “3rd-party scripts”, “3rd-party frames”,

      by that i assume you mean the corresponding boxes in the left (global) column are all red which is correct for a default-deny scenario

      Reply to '12Bytes'

4. in my experience, the general blocking of third-party fonts works very poorly and causes icons to no longer be displayed on various pages.

   How about just adding this list instead?

   # Third party fonts
   https://fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-antifonts.txt

   Reply to 'Xathros'

   1. are you allowing 1st party fonts via the filter?

      how does the fanboy list differ from blocking 3rd party? i would think that any less breakage with that list would be due to missing rules but i’m not familiar with filter syntax so i’m not really sure what he’s doing there

      blocking 3rd and allowing 1st still breaks some sites (where web developers are too stupid to self-host their fonts), but not a lot for me personally – i tend to just mouse-over the broken characters to discover what they link to if i need to

      Reply to '12Bytes'

      1. Yes, allowing first party, only blocking third party, and as you wrote, it does indeed break some sites.
         Maybe you’re right and it might be only the missing rules.

         Reply to 'Xathros'

         1. it’s an annoyance for sure and it’s the “modern” web dev that’s to blame, at least in part – one thing you can do is complain to the site owner, but i think the mass adoption of ad blockers is also putting a lot of pressure on devs to hopefully clean up their act but it may be too late for that

            i think the web is going to split at some point between the corporate garbage and an “underground” web – of course this has already taken place with Tor, IPFS, etc., but it isn’t widely adopted… yet

            i want to start to get on that bandwagon by converting this site to a static site (pure html and css) and, when it’s time, stick it on IPFS or some other P2P distributed infrastructure

            Reply to '12Bytes'

         2. you should look into this, those aren’t that ‘annoying’ :) https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anything-and-everything/extensions-t127841.0.html;msg914092#msg914092

            Reply to 'EC'

            1. wow, you’ve done some serious filtering there!

               Reply to '12Bytes'

               1. it’s not me…I’m not that good:) but I like how it works.

                  Reply to 'EC'

5. Hallo! What’s the deal with cosmetic filtering? I see that you suggest disabling it, but why? Its description seems quite useful to me.

   Reply to 'theltalpha'

   1. hallo back! if cosmetic filtering is useful to you, by all means, go ahead and enable it, but i prefer to inject CSS where needed to hide crap i don’t want to see

      from the Dashboard: Filter lists page:

      Parse and enforce cosmetic filters

      Uncheck this option if you do not want cosmetic filters from various filter lists to be parsed and enforced. This option is mostly of interest for those who want to further reduce uBO’s memory and CPU footprint. Cosmetic filtering has no value privacy-wise, its only purpose is to hide elements on a web page that can’t be blocked otherwise.

      Ignore generic cosmetic filters

      Generic cosmetic filters are those cosmetic filters that are meant to apply on all websites. Though handled efficiently by uBO, generic cosmetic filters may still end up contributing measurable memory and CPU overhead on some web pages, especially the large and long-lived ones. Enabling this option will eliminate the memory and CPU overhead added to web pages as a result of handling generic cosmetic filters, and also lower the memory footprint of uBO itself. This option can be enabled on very low-end devices, but mind that some filter lists (EasyList Cookie for ex.) rely on generic cosmetic filters a lot, so they may pretty much stop working.

      Reply to '12Bytes'

6. Hallo! In the “Settings” tab, footnote 3, you say “Disable hyperlink auditing” may remain disabled (in other words: hyperlink auditing will be allowed) as long as dom.security.https_only_mode is enabled in the Firefox settings. That means, someone who uses arkenfox’ user.js will be tended to uncheck “Disable hyperlink auditing”. The question is: How is the dom.security.https_only_mode setting linked to hyperlink auditing? If I read the description in uBlock Origin’s wiki, I fail to establish why enabling dom.security.https_only_mode would render “Disable hyperlink auditing” redundant.

   Reply to 'theltalpha'

   1. > How is the dom.security.https_only_mode setting linked to hyperlink auditing?

      it isn’t – over time i added 1 or 2 additional footnotes and added or removed information in the settings table as changes were made to uBO and somewhere in there the footnote numbers in the table fell out of sync with the footnotes

      thanks for pointing this out – it’s been corrected

      Reply to '12Bytes'

7. I’ve noticed that you have the setting ‘Disable Hyperlink auditing’ set to ‘disabled’. Why? Afaik it is enabled by default. If you uncheck it, it will allow ping-tracking afaik.
   “Checking this will prevent hyperlink auditing.” https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#disable-hyperlink-auditing

   Reply to 'Reiokorn'

   1. hyperlink auditing is disabled by default in Firefox (browser.send_pings), however i did change the recommendation to ‘enabled’ in uBO since it doesn’t hurt

      Reply to '12Bytes'

8. ClearURLs for uBo (unofficial) pointing to the wrong footnote – 5 instead of 4.

   3 – Enabling this list will hide a lot of those idiotic cookie notices however this list is already included in the Fanboy’s Annoyance.
   However, Fanboy’s Annoyance isn’t set to enabled, which it should?

   Reply to 'Chris'

   1. thanks Chris – footnote error corrected – as for cookies, i left that list disabled intentionally due to Firefox’s ability to segregate storage, however maybe i should re-evaluate that – also Firefox is supposed to offer an option in the near future to block these retarded cookie notices

      Reply to '12Bytes'

      1. the last part was actually about the fact that you mention the “Fanboy’s Annoyance” under Footnotes No. 3, but this is not enabled at all, according to your list? I think it was in the past.

         Good on mozilla if they block those retarded notices in the future without any extentions.

         Reply to 'Chris'

         1. yeah, i understand how #3 footnote could be a little confusing so i changed the wording – and yes, i probably did have the list enabled before at one point

            these are only suggested settings to use as a starting point though – people can of course do what they want with the these options

            again, thanks for letting me know about this

            Reply to '12Bytes'