Comment by bonestamp2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonestamp2 | Hacker News Reader

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> and probably won't allow JS anyhow.

You're not going to allow JS? I don't know the answer, but I'm curious what percentage of sites are unusable without JS? It might be fine for basic browsing, but nearly any ecommerce or site with "interactive" content uses JS. Many video players require JS. It seems like a very niche solution that won't have mass appeal if you're not going to allow JS.

To me, the perfect solution would be something similar to uMatrix where power users can choose the settings they think are best. Anyone else can use simplified controls to indicate if they're seeing ads or if site functionality is broken.

Then there's some aggregation software that looks at all of those inputs and determines the best default settings for each site. If ads are seen then the blocking levels are increased toward the fringe of advanced user inputs, if functionality is broken then it walks back the blocking levels until broken functionality reports end.

This would be a never ending eb and flow for each site so it would be important to automate it as much as possible.

I think it should be clear how to use umatrix.

Turn everything OFF for all sites by default. I turn off third party stuff and all scripting.

Then visit a new site. Then opt-in until you either - decide the site sucks and leave, or get something acceptable and read your article. Then press SAVE to save the settings for that site.

It's worth mentioning that many sites do not render well without javascript, but reader mode renders a perfectly readable article.

but also it's much MORE prevalent that you turn on javascript and the site will do much worse things.

This is the point to me, and this is the way I've used it for years. Everything always loads almost instantly, I enjoy not burning my bandwidth for things I don't care about. I regularly have over 150 tabs, and at that point blocking unneeded/unwanted content makes a very noticeable difference, especially on older machines.

I enjoyed the ride.

Most of the web is static, allow "all" (or its columns media, script, XHR), ads still blocked.

uBlock Origin has blocking mode [1], it should be possible to start with hard mode and degrade with shortcut.

Disabling part of the page make it broken for one user and improves for another. No cookies - no previously viewed; no javascript - no interaction; no css - hidden content displayed; no media - faster load. Just like with Stylus a lot of opinions.

I can mark what works with my setup, but it does not necessary matches your accepted level of "brokennes".

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

> You're not going to allow JS?

Well, at least not in the "main app" of the Web Browser. I'd rather integrate an automateable sandboxing concept for webapps, so that users can choose to e.g. use Instagram or Facebook; but without having to worry that the localStorage and cookie quirks in there can be used for any tracking.

In my head it will be probably something along the lines of if "other" is activated, display a little notification under the address bar that asks something like "Do you want to bookmark this as a sandboxed Webapp? [x] Yes [ ] No" which will lead to a new window being opened that is sandboxed with its own WebKit cache and its own WebKit userdata folders etc.

Regarding video players: I'm also thinking about integrating youtube-dl (probably as a JS API/runner(?) as my Browser is implemented in node/ES2018) for video websites, but currently I'm not sure whether this will be an endless task to compete with, as a lot of video streaming sites work with mixed transfer channels such as WebSockets or chunked transfer encodings wherein the video chunks themselves are not transferred via 206 Partial Content.

Ah ok, that explanation makes more sense. Since so many of the sites I use are web apps, I wouldn't be able to use a browser that doesn't support JS. But, having a JS sandbox that is content aware would be great.

I'm hoping that also solves the problem safari has where if I login to a site in one tab (in private mode), I can't open a second tab for that same site without having to login again. Chrome doesn't have that problem with incognito, but of course those cookies and local storage can be used for tracking across other sites then too.

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