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Comment by elvis635 | Hacker News Reader

Together with umatrix (https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/) are the best chrome extensions

Since I went back to firefox those are the only extensions I really miss, there is policeman (https://github.com/futpib/policeman/) but it's not as good as them yet

To whoever develop extensions, please don't focus only on chrome, firefox during the last months has become must better that it was before, if developers only consider chrome, people will eventually migrate to it and firefox will die. Even though chromium is open it won't be good for the ecosystem

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I do want uMatrix ported to Firefox. The developer who ported uBlock[1] has now made it more easy for me to work on a port of uMatrix, as I have now a model on how to proceed + a lot of code which can readily be shared with uMatrix. Once it is ported, in all likelihood I will myself go back to use Firefox as my main browser.

[1] https://github.com/Deathamns/uBlock/tree/ports/xpi

Is there anything we can do to help? I'm not sure I personally can help - I've never looked into extensions, but there may be others who can?

As my paranoia ramps up year on year, I now use Opera with µBlock. For me, it has the polish of Chrome with some nice extras, but without the increasingly creepy Googality. It works fine, although I've not tried µMatrix. (I have my defaults changed to DuckDuckGo. Usually connecting via a VPN.)

I've whitelisted a few sites I like to support (a couple of webcomics, HaD etc).

I have a lot of filters: "62,501 network filters ＋ 40,728 cosmetic filters".

Opera's task manager says the extension is taking up a mere 32MB. Probably not accurate, but a lot better AdBlock (my previous favourite).

Off-topic but I wish people would stop using Mu for project names. Where is the Mu key on the keyboard? I have to copy and paste or alt-code it. Call the project microBlock or something! They use "u" instead of "µ" on Github, so why not just use something else entirely?

µTorrent was the one that really irritated me because I couldn't type "utorr" to search for it on my start menu.

I'd say something to gorhill (albeit far more politely), but it seems childish and ungrateful. He's clearly poured so much time and effort into making such useful software. "Great software but the name is fucking annoying, mate!"

I myself most often write "uBlock" and pronounce "you-block", as in "users decide".

I originally used the mu character in place of the u to emphasize smaller resource footprint relative to similar solutions out there.

I've never been good with picking name etc., unfortunately now we are stuck with it.

Don't sweat it. It's actually quite a good name. It works both as "you block" and "micro block" depending on reading the first character as "u" or "mu".

http://www.howtotype.net/symbol/Micro/

Sadly, the US-International keyboard on Windows does not implement a shortcut for the "micro" character (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560).

There's always character map which has this and like all others you can ever think of. A bit cumbersome, but at least one doesn't have to remember character codes and can search for characters by name.

"Let me google that" pulls out character map pretty poor UX if you ask me. Almost as bad for search ability as calling your product "go" or "cloud" or "driver" or any other one-word generic, hard to find even with contextual terms around it.

pretty poor UX if you ask me

yup. Has been around since NT or maybe even longer..

the poor UX is not the Character Map

It is having to open it every time you want to type the name of µSomething

The poor UX is the keyboard layout throwing away altgr.

In addition, I pretty sure many European keywords can type µ by alt-gr+m, at least in Windows on my Danish keyword. Only know that because once I had a keyword were they actually had printed it on the key, just like they always do with € on E.

If this is motivated by your paranoia, why are you switching to a closed-source browser?

There is a μ on the German QWERTZ keyboards.

On Apple keyboards Alt+m prints µ.

Use a compose key system, native on Unix (Linux, Mac, etc) and available on Windows. It's very intuitive and will open up your character vocabulary considerably. I use the caps-lock key for compose.

http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/

> Where is the Mu key on the keyboard?

At least for me, option-m is the µ key.

DDG lies about not tracking you. Startpage appears not to.

N00b here - why would someone use both?

I've tried a couple of times to work with uBlock and uMatrix. I ended up going back to ABP each time. The 'block an ad on this page' feature is one of its best and most useful. That, and it doesn't go too far in blocking useful item on-page.

As I said in a similar thread on Reddit a few weeks ago, uBlock has some way to go before it can be considered user-friendly (at least, for the user who isn't familiar with the intricacies of how browsers work). I would love to be able to use it, though. ABP is an enormous resource hog on my system, but more to the point, pages render so slowly when it's switched on.

I use NoScript and RequestPolicy for full white listing functionality in Firefox.

I went back to Firefox in the last couple of months and I wholeheartedly agree. I used to use HTTPSwitchboard in Chromium (which divided into uMatrix and uBlock) and I miss it in Firefox.

How does uMatrix compare to something like Ghostery? Would it be redundant to have both?

Isn't ghostery owned by an ad company?

Yes, however the GhostRank feature that people don't like is opt-in not opt-out.

What was wrong with Firefox?

I've used it every day since starting a new job seven months ago and I've not noticed any issues with it.

Firefox has improved a lot and it has been good for more than I year (I switched back in the middle of last year). Before that it was slower than Chrome, and it crashed when trying to read very large pages (eg a tumblr page of gifs).

Google helped to close the gap by making Chrome more bloated and much more unstable.

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