Oh no, rotten news... uMatrix project archived!
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This news has genuinely given me a sickened feeling in my stomach.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/iwbnqy/umatrix_matrixbased_firewall_with_many/
uMatrix (matrix-based firewall, with many privacy-enhancing tools for browser) has been archived
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uMatrix-issues/issues/291#issuecomment-694988696
I've archived uMatrix's repo, I can't and won't be spending any more time on this project, and neither on all such issues.
Whoever is free to fork under a new name -- I may re-open and resume development in some future if ever I feel for it.https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uMatrix-issues/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+label%3Ainvalid
This repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read-only.
uBlockOrigin / uMatrix-issues ... ArchivedYou utter bastards, gargle!
mod changed uM to UMatrix to get better search result in forum
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More chat... my feeling of woe is widespread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973
This is just awful.
From which:
Also, however, part of what I wanted to get at in talking about the brilliance of uMatrix was the way the interface made very precise controls easy, just a point and click operation. Maybe it's possible to get a similar amount of power with a tool like NoScript, but as far as I can tell the usability of the interface just doesn't come close.
So bloody true.
4cao 14 hours ago [β]
Last release was in the end of February (beta; non-beta was September last year). Last commit was in April.
Perhaps the activity was slow, I guess you could call it "maintenance mode," but I've been using it all this time and uMatrix works fine in its current state, so all it means is that there were no new features being added.Indeed my uM has been working very nicely for yonks, so maybe despite the project itself being dead, uM will remain pragmatically viable indefinitely... until/unless gargle's manifest v3, &/or a future chromium update fundamentally breaks it in some other way.
For uBO, which seems to intrinsically rely more heavily on external blocking lists than uM, & has a far less powerful quasi-matrix configurability than uM, i sense maybe a greater breakage hazard... but those more familiar with uBO than i am would know better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24536665
uMatrix is one of the first add-ons I've installed on my browsers for many years. It exposes so much crap on the web that browsing the www without uMatrix feels unsafe.
The fine grain controls on uMatrix are so powerful and quite intuitive, especially once you get oriented. You can see (and block) websites trying to load in crap asynchronously, see the problematic iFrame that's loading in a scripts, see all the trackers and even the cloudflare endpoints that may be responsible for bringing in malicious content.
Gorhill's uBo project is nice, but geared towards simplicity and it's too simple, even with the advanced interface, imo.
Although Gorhill never accepted donations, someone forking uMatrix will hopefully use something like github.com/sponsors to ensure it's sustainable.
I'd love to see uMatrix around for the long haul. -
I am confused.
Even ghacks seems to be missing the important point that it's not just uM that's now iced, but also uBO.https://www.ghacks.net/2020/09/20/umatrix-development-has-ended/
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uMatrix-issues/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+label%3Ainvalid
Oh, it seems the ambiguity of the site i quoted & screenshot, fooled me, ie, it is me who has misunderstood. From
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues
there is indeed no mention of being archived, so it seems after all that uBO lives & uM dies. -
Very sad news
I am using uBlock Origin (the most valuable addon for me) -
Attention Mods.
Since realising that my initial interpretation was wrong [ie, whereas initially i wrongly thought it was both projects that were dead, i later realised that uBO (for now?) continues on] i have edited my posts to try to clarify. However my thread subject line is wrong & needs correction. Pls can you edit to remove the uBO part? Ie, make it
Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!
.
Ta. -
I don't think it would matter much when if uBO were archived as well. It's already well past the vast majority of blockers in terms of functionality, and it's not the extension that requires frequent updating, but the third-party filter lists. That's (one reason) why Raymond has never accepted donations and instead told people to go donate to the maintainers of said lists. Pretty much every ad & tracker blocker (except for uMatrix) is dependent upon those third-party lists.
In all my years of using uBlock Origin and uMatrix, I've never run into a bug I've needed to file. I do not foresee the utility of uMatrix diminishing anytime soon, and I have no intention of stopping using, nor stopping recommending it.
If I had the time, I'd fork it myself; but I can't do that without seeing some financial return for the amount of time it would require. I don't think the successor of uMatrix should become donation-ware, and so I will avoid doing so unless it truly needs work and nobody else (who probably would need to spend less time than I) steps up to the plate and maintains a fork. I'm probably going to fork it just to have it in a VCS, I've already got the source lying around in my data storage. But I simply lack the time to maintain it.
I knew this day would come. I'm honestly surprised it took this long and that he hasn't stopped releasing both extensions. People are so demanding, rude, and inconsiderate on GitHub towards Raymond it is disgusting. Some piece of trash tried to get his repos shut down even. I won't name this person here, but that person has had his repos shut down for plagiarism. I wouldn't put up with that and would be heavy-handed on the block button. Ain't nobody got time for negative jerks attacking people giving away free software. I say good riddance to those time thieves spreading misinformation and negativity.
Sad to see the project come to an end. Though not unexpected, still sad. I'm hugely thankful to Raymond for all the hard work and time he put into providing such an immensely useful tool that I anticipate using for the foreseeable future.
Edits to fix a few typos.
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@BoneTone Very nicely said!
Gorhill is a legend IMO -- his projects have been a simply priceless gift to us. And a big fat contemptuously rabid YES to your sentiments about the Bad People out there wrt abusing & disrespecting him... & other Devs by extension [whoops, not trying for that bad pun, it just kinda sorta became an add-on ].
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@Steffie , that's it, I have to clean the coffee off the screen with news like this in the morning.
In 2021 only adblocker from Google.inc? -
@BoneTone said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
it's not the extension that requires frequent updating
I don't know why you have that idea. You might want to check the uBO repo once in a while: the actual code changes and fixes required are very frequent and luckily gorhill is very active.
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@Steffie I edited the title.
This really sucks. uM is usually the first extension I install whenever I set up a new browser/profile. From my security-paranoid stance, it seems like its the only way to browse the web safely.
You don't just download and run every
.exe
you come across, you selectively choose only the ones you trust. I see no reasons for my behaviour to be different if we're talking about.js
. uM affords me that choice, which browsers have largely eschewed.As I grew to learn how to use uM it quickly dawned on me just how many external resources are in fact not required for websites to be functional. And it worries me to not know what exactly those other resources (which i can easily block with uM) were doing - superfluous bandwidth suckers, or something more malign?
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@LonM Ta for the edit, & yes obviously i share all your concerns + disappointment. I was not kidding / exaggerating in my earlier posts when i inferred the degree of my upset over this.
The only area of disagreement is...
@LonM said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
You don't just download and run every .exe you come across
...for which, naturally, i'd swap
any
forevery
. :face_with_stuck-out_tongue_winking_eye: -
Personally i find UBO easier to use and is the better extension in my probably honest opinion.Just hope UBO will not go the same way judging by google's future intentions.
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@Priest72 said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
i find UBO easier to use
Fair enough... but once one learns uM it is quite ridiculously easy to use, with better dynamic filtering granularity to boot.
@Priest72 said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
in my probably honest opinion
Sigh, yes, i really must learn to stop posting my dishonest opinions... & presumably the others here as well.
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Time to give NoScript a more thorough try
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@iAN-CooG I'm on GitHub nearly daily. At least a few times a week. Frequent updates aren't the same thing as required frequent updates. How many of those changes are done to identify & filter new ad & tracker sources? (Basically none.) It's the filter lists that *require* frequent updating.
There are some uBlock optimized filter lists, but any changes to those don't (in normal circumstances) require code changes affecting the extensions operation. The primary exception to this is scriptlet injection changes. There isn't a high churn rate there, and a very large percentage of those changes are minor, and a lot of the functional changes that do affect blocking are corner cases found on some random site I've never heard of, and many of those are minor, such as dealing with small display issues when a specific ad is blocked.
At this point, uBO is fairly free severe bugs, Raymond is just awesome and is constantly improving the tool in various ways. As an example, a recent major change was hiding the ability to create allow rules from "advanced" users -- this actually decreases its usability, but I agree that the change was a smart move. Far too many uBlock Origin users don't understand the difference between allow & noop rules and create allow to rules when they aren't needed, leaving themselves open to unwanted ads & tracking. Hopefully those users read up on the use of dynamic filtering again before just enabling the column (if they do), and audit their rules to remove any unnecessary allows.
Edits to fix typos
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@BoneTone said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
some random site I've never heard of
I have.
Not my fault though! It's my neighbour who told me about it. She's very naughty!
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@npro Last time i tried it [not recent] it did not impress me.
Fyi fwiw:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24534481
derefr 16 hours ago [β]
How do you feel about a model like NoScriptβs, where origins are labelled with tags (trusted/untrusted/default, but in theory you could have arbitrary tags), and then request rules are applied to the tags, rather than to origins directly?
reply
οΏΌ
bscphil 8 hours ago [β]
I have to admit I haven't used NoScript since well before the version 10 UI changes. Prior to that it was definitely "one-dimensional" and didn't really offer the features of uMatrix. Now, I'd say (just judging by screenshots and the user guide) that it's about half way there, allowing you to look at a list of subdomains and set each one to a category. (The guides don't seem to clearly state that this only affects your current site, allowing you to have different source<->host combinations be allowed or disallowed, but I assume this is the case.)
However, the tagging model seems so limited compared to what uMatrix can do. uMatrix has 8 different requests types, so you'd need 2^8=256 different tags to cover every combination of requests to a subdomain. And that's if NoScript can block cookie requests at all: 90% of even the domains I fully trust have cookies blocked in uMatrix, simply because the sites don't actually need cookies to function. Maybe I would need yet another extension for that.
Also, however, part of what I wanted to get at in talking about the brilliance of uMatrix was the way the interface made very precise controls easy, just a point and click operation. Maybe it's possible to get a similar amount of power with a tool like NoScript, but as far as I can tell the usability of the interface just doesn't come close. -
@npro said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
Time to give NoScript a more thorough try
Why? Neither uBlock Origin nor uMatrix are going to stop being able to block scripts. You guys remember when the author of NoScript got into a fight with the author of AdBlock Plus because when you installed updates to NoScript it white-listed the ads on the NoScript site inside ABP, and then automatically loaded that webpage with the hard-coded ads by default? I've got no love for ABP, but you abuse people's trust once, especially as a provider of security software, and it is really difficult to earn that trust back.
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I only stumbled across this serendipitously a few days ago [ie, before i learned this morning of the uM demise], but only had time to watch it tonight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT7PrzOqNps
Most of the time as it played i just kept shaking my head in disbelief. IMO uM would eat this crap for breakfast, yet list-based paradigm users somehow still persist with their headachy inefficient ways.
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@Steffie said in Oh no, rotten news... uM project archived!:
uBO lives & uM dies.
Fortunately, uBlock Origin in advanced mode has most of the same functionality as uMatrix.
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