81–90 of 161 posts
Dangit - I just installed it yesterday to block Twitter's annoying timeline additions ("So-and-so liked such-and-such") which don't honor the account's word filter/blacklist. Any alternatives out there that are better?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other side of the coin, Firefox makes it quite hard to push updates to users that require more permissions, requiring manual intervention to update. It signifies this with a small muted yellow exclamation mark on the hamburger menu, which is really hard to see. I've not received my own updates for weeks a few times because I haven't noticed the warning, and about a third of our users are on ancient versions pr…
Actually, Chrome does this too: > Chrome prompts the user if adding the permissions results in different warning messages than the user has already seen and accepted.[1] [1]: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/permissions
As others have said, immediately switch to Stylus. While we're at it stop using Ghostery as well since they were bought by an ad company. Use Privacy Badger or a decent alternative (noscript + heavy/custom uBlock lists should work just fine)
If you dont want the heavy handed solution that NoScript provides, i would suggest "uBlock Matrix".
uBlock origin is a dedicated, quite-good, low-fuss, ad blocker.
uMatrix is a much more general, very powerful, though somewhat fussy, general Web capabilities manager. If you don't mind fiddling with sites periodically, it's very strongly recommended, but for user populations who don't do this or grasp technology poorly, it will require some fairly close managing, _especially_ if the user base doesn't report problems and just accepts "the site is broken".
I'd highlighted my preset recommended set of browser extensions for 2018 a couple of weeks back. The hero image is uMatrix's control interface.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/WVEM83FY...
As others have said, immediately switch to Stylus. While we're at it stop using Ghostery as well since they were bought by an ad company. Use Privacy Badger or a decent alternative (noscript + heavy/custom uBlock lists should work just fine)
It's on my flagged list, but remains installed.
This reminds of the "WOT, Web of Trust" (haha) privacy issue in 2016: Reporters (disguising as business men) were offered data that includes the surfing habits of three million German citizens. This data was, at least partly, collected by the “Web of trust” (WOT) browser extensions. The reporters were able to use this data to identify the browsing habits of individual persons – including high-ranking German and EU po…
Indeed. I never trusted it. I never trust any feature or add-on that uploads anything. That includes malicious site detectors. I only use stuff that relies on local databases.
I'm still looking to update my router (Turris Omnia) to use DNSMasq rather than Knot Resolver, which may offer an edge on DNSSec capabilities (though I believe this has lapsed), but is far less capable of being locally customised along the lines of DNSMasq.
It took me less than a minute to install Stylus and import all my userstyles from Stylish.
I've got a system where I use a set of standard styles applied broadly against many sites.
E.g.,
Annoyances -- applied globally to all websites by default: https://pastebin.com/raw/GrE9KX6D
Local Gifs: https://pastebin.com/raw/tn7cqGtJ (Exceptions to global gif filtering)
The following break on many sites too much to be applied as default, but can be used fairly generally to selected sites as needed.
Animations blocking: https://pastebin.com/raw/7Gjxj6AT
Headers / Footers: https://pastebin.com/raw/PsXWhUGf
Popups / Overlays blocker: https://pastebin.com/raw/VcgNNwDp
"Unstyled" CSS: what I apply to unstyled / minimally styled pages: https://pastebin.com/raw/rtfev3vj
For development / testing / debug:
Debug CSS: https://pastebin.com/raw/Z3kFrRQy
(Highlights class/id and entities in page.)
Dont google and mozilla review source code of addons?
Back in 2015 when Detectify (me being co-author) looked into this issue [1] many plugins do not actually have this code in the extensions, but rather a feature to download remote code and add it to the extension so to say. As long as that practice is allowed, source review would not help. [1] https://labs.detectify.com/2015/11/19/chrome-extensions-aka-...
This is a huge problem for the extension ecosystem in general. Who originally publishes an extension may not be the same entity that is pushing you updates in two years time, and there's no way as a user to know this. I publish a few extensions [1] [2] [3] and have been contacted multiple times by companies asking to buy them for several thousand dollars. They told me the going rate was 0.20 USD per user. You can ima…
On the other side of the coin, Firefox makes it quite hard to push updates to users that require more permissions, requiring manual intervention to update. It signifies this with a small muted yellow exclamation mark on the hamburger menu, which is really hard to see. I've not received my own updates for weeks a few times because I haven't noticed the warning, and about a third of our users are on ancient versions pr…
If you want more permissions, then ask for more permissions.
And don't be surprised when people say NO.
Not everyone wants to grant the permissions to your update even if the update fixes bugs in older versions. Not everyone will want your new feature in the first place. Denying permissions is an easy way to eliminate the risk of having to go through and figure out whether or not the new feature is trustworthy.
And if you're not adding a new feature, then why do you need more permissions?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you dont want the heavy handed solution that NoScript provides, i would suggest "uBlock Matrix".
There are two, similar, though different, extensions. uBlock origin is a dedicated, quite-good, low-fuss, ad blocker. uMatrix is a much more general, very powerful, though somewhat fussy, general Web capabilities manager. If you don't mind fiddling with sites periodically, it's very strongly recommended, but for user populations who don't do this or grasp technology poorly, it will require some fairly close managing,…