Wandering Thoughts archives

2018-02-20

How switching to uMatrix for JavaScript blocking has improved my web experience

I'm a long-term advocate of not running JavaScript. Over the years I've used a number of Firefox (and also Chrome) addons to do this, starting with a relatively simple one and then upgrading to NoScript. Recently I switched over to uMatrix for various reasons, which has generally been going well. When I switched, I didn't expect my experience of the modern web to really change, but to my surprise uMatrix is slowly enticing me into making it a clearly nicer experience. What's going on is that uMatrix's more fine-grained permissions model turns out to be a better fit for how JavaScript exists on the modern web.

NoScript and other similar addons have a simple global site permissions model; either you block JavaScript from site X or you allow JavaScript from site X. There are two problems with this model on the modern web. The first problem is that in practice a great deal of JavaScript is loaded from a few highly used websites, for example Cloudflare's CDN network. If you permit JavaScript from cdnjs.cloudflare.com to run on any site you visit, you could be loading almost anything on any specific site (really).

The second problem is that there are a number of big companies that extend their tendrils all over the web, while at the same time being places that you might want to visit directly (where they may either work better with their own JavaScript or outright require it). Globally permitting JavaScript from Twitter, Google, and so on on all sites opens me up to a lot of things that make me nervous, so in NoScript I never gave them that permission.

uMatrix's scoped permissions defang both versions of this pervasiveness. I can restrict Twitter's JavaScript to only working when I'm visiting Twitter itself, and I can allow JavaScript from Cloudflare's CDN only on sites where I want the effects it creates and I trust the site not to do abusive things (eg, where it's used as part of formatting math equations). Because I can contain the danger it would otherwise represent, uMatrix has been getting me to selectively enable JavaScript in a slowly growing number of places where it does improve my web browsing experience.

(I could more or less do this before in NoScript as a one-off temporary thing, but generally it wasn't quite worth it and I always had lingering concerns. uMatrix lets me set it once and leave it, and then I get to enjoy it afterward.)

PS: I'm not actually allowing JavaScript on Twitter, at least not on a permanent basis, but there are some other places that are both JavaScript-heavy and a little bit too pervasive for my tastes where I'm considering it, especially Medium.

PPS: There are some setting differences that also turn out to matter, to my surprise. If you use NoScript in a default-block setup and almost always use temporary permissions, I suggest that you tell NoScript to only reload the current tab on permission changes so that the effects of temporarily allowing something are much more contained. If I had realized how much of a difference it makes, especially with NoScript's global permissions, I would have done it years ago.

Sidebar: Cookie handling also benefits from scoped permissions

I hate Youtube's behavior of auto-playing the next video when I've watched one, because generally I'm only on YouTube to watch exactly one video. You can turn this off, but to make it stick you need to accept cookies from YouTube, which will then quietly follow you around the web anywhere someone embeds some YouTube content. uMatrix's scoped permissions let me restrict when YouTube can see those cookies to only when I'm actually on YouTube looking at a video. I can (and do) do similar things with cookies from Google Search.

(I also have Self-Destructing Cookies set to throw out YouTube's cookies every time I close down Firefox, somewhat limiting the damage of any tracking cookies. This means I have to reset the 'no auto-play' cookie every time I restart Firefox, but I only do that infrequently.)

UMatrixImprovesWeb written at 22:49:31; Add Comment


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