alt Hacker NewsuBlock Origin filter to block autoplay videos in TechCrunch
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Firefox's built-in "Block Audio and Video" in Settings -> Autoplay seems to do a good enough job for most sites (with exceptions whenever it breaks something).
The first thing I do when I get access to any computer is install uBlock. A friend comes for tech support, first install then anything else.
Disabling JavaScript by default makes this a non-issue on most sites. Just checked TechCrunch and it’s great without it. Likely like the designer intended.
On iOS, Brave browser makes toggling JS particularly easy.
90% of my mobile web browsing is without JavaScript. It’s much faster, cleaner, safer. And for the occasional website that needs JS, I can toggle it.
Similar to many here in the thread, I then tend to not visit sites anymore that require JS/are too bloated.
The solution for shitty web design is not to come up with clever workarounds.
The solution is to stop visiting these sites entirely, as traffic emboldens them further.
In uBlock Origin, I allow everything except 3rd party frames, then I use uMatrix to whitelist acceptable domains and requests. These are the only privacy add-ons I use and they are amazing.
Any solutions for eBay? The super hostile "eBay Live" videos intertwined everywhere on the main page are awful.
Either it's bad AI coverart (bonus points for 'glamming it up' with a 'sexy lady' as your stream photo to lure desperate men in), or it loads into a stream with some random middle-aged chud trying to hawk bad baseball cards for "$2 starts!" as you're trying to scroll through the listings.
If you just want to read the text body of an article, there's plenty third party scripts you can block on Techcrunch through the advanced settings in uBlock Origin:
cloudflare.com
connatix.com
d34azmi6bxg5fz.cloudfront.net
videos-cloudfront-usp.jwpsrv.com
facebook.net
google.com
googletagmanager.com
gstatic.com
jwpcdn.com
jwplatform.com
jwplayer-dualstack.map.fastly.net
assets-jpcust.jwpsrv.com
jwplayer.com
jwpltx.com
jwpsrv.com
parsely.com
sail-horizon.com
servenobid.com
wp.com
I've just stopped visiting websites that make it impossible to read their articles. It has gotten completely ridiculous.
I know I didn't wake up in 2011 because uBlock Origin exists. Yet someone is talking about TechCrunch, so the most likely conclusion is that uBlock Origin existed long before I thought it did, like 2011.
Last time I tried to manually block some autoplay video with ublock I ended up with invisible video, that still started to play sound, sometime after page loaded. Maintaining filter lists is thankless job, at least looking at ublock github issues tab, where people complain about broken filters few minutes after target page made some changes.