Unblocking at element-level in uBlock Origin

Question

There's one crucial feature from ABP that I haven't found in my (one week of) uBlock0 usage - the “Open blockable items” feature that allows me to allow and disallow at the level of page elements.

uBlock0, even after checking the “I’m an advanced user” checkbox, seems to have only a granularity of subdomain-level unblocking, so I have to allow all elements from that subdomain if I wish to allow something that's being blocked.

The "Element Picker" provides one half of the functionality of "Open blockable items", but the other half is the much more common usecase to me: to unblock an element that has been blocked. Is there a way to do that at the element level rather than subdomain level? Also, just the ability to see what elements exactly are being blocked is a big usability gain to me, and I don’t know if there’s a way to do that in uBlock0.

Note: I'm on Firefox.

Solution 1

You can use the uBlock Origin's own logger for logging the network requests that got blocked or allowed in addition to the CSS rules that were affected by your filters.

Please assist this official overview of the logger from the official uBlock Origin own Wiki page: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger

Good luck.

Solution 2

For folks looking how to unblock elements they manually added themselves, you can click the uBlock icon, click the gear icon in the top left corner to go into the 'dashboard'. From there, go to the 'My Filters' tab and it will show you a list of all elements you've blocked manually.

Manually blocking elements is pretty handy for all those annoying social widgets that scroll with you as you read a page or little boxes that pop up in the corner these days referring you to read some other article on the same site.

But the site I was reading, I accidentally blocked the whole main content frame!! Thankfully with a bit of searching was able to get it unblocked....

Comments

[Admin]

Does this help: How to find out which exactly got blocked on the current website?

[Sundar R]

Hmm. So it looks like it begins logging only after it's opened: so I either have to keep the logger open at all times to use this feature, or have to open it and then reload the page (which might not always be feasible). I keep running into these UI issues with uBlock, so with the ABP performance patch coming in this month, I might just go back to the more usable ABP.

[Sundar R]

And for anyone else wondering if this helps with the unblocking of elements too: github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-filters takes you to a UI where you can adjust the dynamic filters at various levels, or create a static filter if you want patterns and suchlike.

[Mike]

The wiki is a bit outdated, so as of today, you also have a DOM inspector for a given page (the </> icon next to the reload icon in the logger), where you can hide/unhide (effectively enable or disable CSS changes that are affected by uBlock Origin)

[rhill]

"begins logging only after it's opened": This is the efficient way to log. Logging events in the background unconditionally incurs a non-trivial CPU and memory cost to everybody, including those who will never use such feature. Efficiency is a primary feature of uBlock Origin, and everything is designed according to this. Hence the CPU and memory overhead of logging will be incurred only to those actually using the logger.

[Sundar R]

@rhill I understand, but the usability hit still exists and I'm just trying to decide whether this tradeoff between usabilty and performance is worth it to me. Btw, does ABP then automatically log every network request that happens, to be able to present that UI? (Of course, that inefficiency might be lost among the many other major inefficiencies in the case of ABP, but I still would like to understand this.)

[skan]

How do you do the opposite, block everything except an element?

[keen]

thanks - that finally got me to the right place. to actually unblock, you need to edit that section and remove the entire line (or many) associated to the filter you created.