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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

For about a month or so I tried browsing with JavaScript turned off but gave up after having to modify settings for just about every single site I visited to get pages working, often with them silently failing in the background leaving me wondering what was going on. Sometimes I'd get halfway through a payment transaction before realising that the lack of JavaScript was preventing it from going through and then changing settings and reloading the page would break my session. Long story short, I gave up on this and have succumbed to running JavaScript for all sites again.

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I browse with javascript blocked by default and also often need to enable a script for proper functionality. However when I enable that one script, I will almost always see numerous other blocked scripts that can remain suppressed without a problem for me. Most of these are related to tracking/advertising. For me blocking the rest of the scripts is well worth having to play around a bit when I first visit a new website.

I'm on ~5 years of temp-whitelist only for JS domains. I have acquired a third sense for which CDN and assort domains are really required for what.

Sure, it does take some back and forth testing, and some sites like wix.com sites are terrible no matter what, but in general it's a better browsing experience.

My favourite are pages that embed videos using a huge collection of different third party embedding tools. It usually takes 2 or 3 rounds of whitelisting to get the video to even show up, and another to get it to play.

I went through the same pain but took an opposite approach. I've just started using the internet less. I allow us for Amazon and Gmail(which I am moving off of), but for 99% of the rest of my personal use I only read text only sites. I guess I have internet traffic for Spotify too, but that's an app so I've already let them onto my system

I use two profiles of browser. One with uMatrix, which is allowing only first-party js, other without addons for special cases like banking. I do not browse random pages with the second profile, just those which I decided to be trusted ones.

You can add exceptions to websites you visit you know..

try umatrix

Umatrix is build around reactionary settings, and once you're reacting it's usually too late to fix a failed payment attempt.

I've faced the same problem a lot, and what I really need is a way in ublock/umatrix to turn it off for the current tab, even as it jumps across several domains. But this doesn't seem to be an option. Am I missing something?

Same exact journey for me.

You can disable Javascript ... if your time has no value.

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