Building a UMatrix Replacement

Introduction

There used to be a fantastic chrome extension called uMatrix, written by Raymond Hill, the uBlock Origin developer. uMatrix was an intuitive way to control site permissions and subresource requests.

It looked like this:

This isn’t something you’ll care about unless you’re a nerd – but it let you limit what third parties could serve subresource requests, and controlled access to features like frames, scripts, video, fonts and so on. You can do some of that manually with browser settings, but uMatrix made it quick and easy. This meant that what would otherwise be quite a laborious and fiddly way to browse the web became simple. Okay, not simple, but simpler.

Anyway, I enjoyed all the extra knobs to control website permissions.

The features in uMatrix were – more or less – a subset of the features available in uBlock Origin, so rather than maintain both, Hill deprecated uMatrix and users were encouraged to migrate to uBO.

This actually worked okay for me – uBO added some features I quite liked (e.g. cosmetic filters), and if you didn’t mind hand writing the more complex rules and understood selectors, it could do everything uMatrix could do.

The bad news is that uBO is a legacy MV2 extension, and the successor – uBO Lite – removed this feature.

I really don’t want to give that up – is there a solution?