How To

uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is my #1 recommended web browser plugin. uBlock Origin drastically reduces the amount of tracking and data gathering a website can obtain from you and blocks most ads! uBlock Origin is FREE, won’t slow down your web browsing experience, and outperforms any of the market’s paid blockers today.

Although uBlock Origin is primarily an adblocker, its script-blocking features improve your security by preventing malicious and insecure scripts from running. With its default blocklists, many tracking and ad services greatly improve your privacy as you browse the web.

Install uBlock Origin on Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera browsers

uBlock Origin Features

100% free and open-source (won’t even take donations!)
Uses community-developed blocklists and can custom lists
Cross-platform
Lightweight
No “acceptable ads”
Dynamic filtering
Element zapper
Element inspector
One-click element filtering
Site-specific pop-up blocking
WebRTC blocking (uBO-Extra is required to block WebRTC connections in Chromium).
Link prefetching blocking

Open Source Block Lists

Over the years, uBlock Origin’s list of features has grown. But at heart is not a complex program. It simply blocks domains known to belong to advertising and malware sources based on community-developed blocklists. Here are a few of the top lists:

How To Use uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is a very sophisticated and customizable web browser extension. You have an amazing amount of control over what web pages can and cannot load. Blocking ads, trackers and other potentially malicious things. This control level may seem overwhelming and possibly makes you pause adding uBlock Origin to your web browser.

The majority of users need to install the add-on and then forget about it. With the default settings, you will notice webpages load faster, ads will be blocked, and annoying things like pop-ups will be a thing of the past. You may even not notice a difference and wonder if it is even working. I suggest occasionally glancing up to notice (and be shocked at) how many unnecessary web page requests are being blocked.

59 items blocked just opening cnn.com!

In my years of using uBlock Origin, I have found that it does not break many websites when using its default settings, but it does happen occasionally.

The easiest solution is to disable the uBlock Origin blocking for that website by simply clicking the big blue Off button.

uBlock Origin will still be functional for any other website you browse to, just disabled for the current site. You can easily turn blocking back on for the site by clicking the big blue Off button again to resume blocking.

If the website you visit regularly happens to break or not load properly, it may be worth playing around with the element pickers to eliminate the problem while allowing uBO to run.

The more advanced uBlock Origins plugin functions are very powerful and give you almost total control of your web browser. This might sound scary to some people (others exciting), but I believe you will find them very easy to master with a little trial and error.