xBA is a fork of uBlock Origin (uBO) for browsers that support XUL add-ons.
I've used xBA on Pale Moon, Basilisk, and Waterfox. It should work on other browsers too.
xBA is only for Advanced user mode
One purpose of xBA is to enhance the Advanced user experience, with a panel designed to quickly assess all domain connectivity.
xBA is not just for current Advanced users, though. It's also a good choice for regular uBO users with a serious desire to learn Advanced mode.
As an Advanced user, you are expected to figure out all website breakage by yourself; don't ask for help here. If the cause is a 3rd-party filter list problem, contact the list maintainer.
Read CONTRIBUTING before filing any issue here.
I mentioned earlier that one purpose of xBA is to enhance the Advanced user experience. Its other purpose is to maintain the high quality that uBO already attained as a XUL add-on.
I first modified uBO in 2016 to improve my own Advanced usage, but I didn't think to make a publicly-available fork until January 2018. By then, I'd accumulated a number of changes and Mozilla had recently removed its support of XUL add-ons in Firefox 57. Starting around mid-2017, gorhill's focus shifted to the new WebExtension version of uBO for Firefox, which is understandable for a number of reasons, including WebExt having much in common with the Chrome version. As a result, the legacy XUL version was effectively mothballed, as shown here, here, and here.
This is why uBO 1.14.16, released in October 2017, was an easy choice as the fork point for xBA.
- It's the last version before major refactoring started to land and cause XUL regressions.
- uBO had already reached a high level of quality with a robust suite of capabilities: dynamic, static, cosmetic, inject, etc.
Prior to releasing xBA, I used my modified 1.14.16 for three months in Pale Moon without any problems. It's a stable, reliable codebase.
This section covers all the ways that xBA differs from uBO.
This is the one feature of uMatrix I wanted that wasn't already in uBO, so I added it. See its wiki page for all info.
xBA's Panel has significant changes, all described in its wiki page. Be sure to read it before starting out on xBA.
Alt+Pfor the Panel, as described hereCtrl+Shift+Lto open the Logger for the current tab
There is no option to change these bindings; for that you need a separate hotkey manager extension, e.g. Menu Wizard.
By default, xBA uses the uBO behavior for popup blocking rules: a newly opened popup window must have a different URL from its opener before uBO will filter it. I added an Advanced setting to allow a second mode of behavior: close the newly opened popup window as soon as possible regardless of its URL. See here for a discussion of this.
mustWaitForPopupURLchange is the setting. It's true by default, so set it to false to get the new behavior.
Important note: Only *$popup,domain= rules benefit from the new mode, whereas no-popups per-domain rules remain stuck on the default mode. (See here for a brief explanation why.) Thus for my own xBA usage, I have a *$popup,domain=a|b|c rule for the sites I want to block them without an initial connection to a 3rd-party server.
CSP Report blocking was refactored for uBO 1.14.18. But xBA doesn't need this, as it already can block any CSP Report with either a type $other rule or a URL pattern-matching rule.
I block all of them with: *$other,domain=~behind-the-scene
I've done this for a long time in Pale Moon without any problems. CSP Reports have been virtually all of the non-bts $other traffic I've seen; the few non-CSPs appear to be stray requests worth blocking anyways. However, behind-the-scene (bts) is a completely different story; I don't whitelist it, so I quickly learned I needed the exception to not block essential requests like file downloads.
xBA enforces a strict word-boundary policy for prefix1 rules, as detailed here.
xBA's SQLite database is located in your profile base directory, not uBO's sub-directory. The filename is the same.
Some minor items are covered in the issue tracker.
If you have uBO installed, either disable or remove it before installing xBA. Don't run uBO and xBA at the same time because strange things may happen. (Likewise, disable AdBlock Plus or any other blocker extension. Only use one blocker at a time.)
Download the xulBlock-Advanced.xpi file from the Releases page. Then drag the xpi file into the browser window. The install dialog should appear. If that's not working, open the about:addons page (Tools->Add-ons) then drag it into that window.
I recommend exiting or rebooting the browser after the install. A fresh browser session is the only true guarantee of a clean start.
It should be as simple as exporting all of your uBO settings in the Settings tab of the Dashboard then importing this text file into xBA.
If you run into problems, though, a second option is to save your filters and rules as text files in the My filters and My rules Dashboard tabs. Then import those to the same tabs in xBA. You'll have to manually set everything else, but that's not a big deal.