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Quick guide: popup user interface

Raymond Hill edited this page Jan 10, 2016 · 99 revisions

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This is uBlock's popup UI when you click on uBlock's icon in the toolbar:

Popup UI


The title bar

Popup UI

Click the title bar of the popup to go to uBlock's dashboard.


The large power button

Popup UI

Click the large power button to turn off uBlock for the current site (a.k.a. whitelist the current site). This will be remembered the next time you visit the site.

Alternatively, you can also Ctrl-click to turn off uBlock only for the current page (command ⌘-click on Mac).

For more advanced whitelisting control, see "How to whitelist a web site".


The number of requests blocked

Popup UI

This shows the number of network requests uBlock blocked on the current page. Also, less useful (but people like this kind of thing), the number of network requests uBlock blocked since you installed it. The percentage figure tells you how many requests were blocked out of all the requests made.

Click the eye-dropper icon to enter element picker mode, which allows you to create a filter by interactively picking an element on a page, thus permanently removing it from the page.

Click the list icon to open the network request logger in a separate tab. This allows you to inspect real-time network traffic within the browser.


The number of domains connected

Popup UI

The number of distinct domains with which a network connection was established, out of all connections (established + blocked). The domains are derived using the official Public Suffix List.

In general, it must be assumed that each distinct domain is managed by a distinct administrative authority. In practice, it is not uncommon to have a multiple distinct domains which are under the same administrative authority (example 1: google.com, ajax.googleapis.com and gstatic.com, example 2: wikipedia.org and wikimedia.org).

That said, this statistic may be seen this way: the more distinct domains your browser connects to, the greater the privacy exposure.

In a best-case scenario, the number of distinct domains to which a web page connects should be only one: that of the remote server from which the web page was fetched.

The higher the number, the higher you are exposing yourself privacy-wise.

There is a good correlation between the domains connected count and: unneeded page bloat, high privacy exposure, increased likelihood of being the target of data mining.

Example: the web page on http://www.ibtimes.com/ (which can be read fine in all cases, by the way):

uBlock's mode turned off default settings default-deny
domains connected
privacy exposure very high medium very low
bloat ridiculously high medium very low

And I had click-to-play enabled in all cases, so it could have been worse (except for default-deny)...


The site-based switches

Popup UI

The per-site switches allow you to control some settings on a per-site basis. See detailed documentation about per-site switches.

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