migrate.md

Migrating to uBlock Origin

Due to the many differences, I strongly recommend you to copy the settings over manually instead of using the backup and restore feature. Below are the details about the differences between Nano Adblocker and uBlock Origin which should hopefully assist you with a smooth transition:

• Filter editor/viewer and syntax highlighter
  • uBlock Origin has its own editor/viewer which should be overall an upgrade, but a few minor features are missing:
    • Double-click to select domain is not supported (you can always drag to select)
    • Search and replace is not supported (you can use an external editor)
    • The search widget is simpler and lacked a few features (explicit mode toggles, search in selection, etc.)
      • It supports regular expression, so it is not really less powerful, just that it can be a bit harder to use
• Filter linter
  • uBlock Origin does not have display explicit linting warnings and errors, but its syntax highlighter is a lot better at highlighting invalid filters
• Extra redirect and script snippet (scriptlet) resources
  • The most useful resources became part of uBlock Origin over the years
  • You can load the rest into uBlock Origin with advanced settings, but this is strongly discouraged (since the extra resources are unmaintained), so please only do so if you are absolutely sure that you know what you are doing
• Quick Issue Reporter
  • You can still use the Quick Issue Reporter through Nano Defender
• Force scroll mode
  • Although less convenient, it is possible to emulate force scroll mode with a filter rule, simply replace example.com with the domain you want to force scroll

    example.com##*:style(overflow: auto !important;)
    

• Visualize hidden elements with the DOM inspector
  • It should start to work in uBlock Origin once this Chromium issue is resolved (you can star it to give it more weight):
    • https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1101473
• Short aliases for filter options
  • uBlock Origin now supports most of these aliases, with the exception being the iframe option, if you have custom filters using iframe, be sure to change them to frame
• Settings
  • Settings in the dashboard may have different default values and/or be at different places, when copying settings, be sure to read the description text for each option instead of going by the order in which the options appear
• Advanced settings
  • Nano Adblocker has different default values for some advanced settings, these are mostly subjective, but if you like the tweaked values better, you can copy them over
  • Nano Adblocker also has a few extra advanced settings options, but I question their usefulness since I never found myself using them
    • uBlock Origin does not have the force recompile button in the advanced settings page, but the button is only useful alongside the extra options that uBlock Origin does not currently have
• Other small changes
  • uBlock Origin swallows all script snippet (scriptlet) errors, this should only affect filter list maintainers, if you are affected, you can give the debugScriptletInjector advanced setting a try
  • uBlock Origin will only show the refresh button in the extension popup panel if there were changes, but you can simply use the native refresh button of your browser
  • Nano Adblocker comes with a slightly different set of default filter lists, you can subscribe to the extra filter lists if you want (be sure to check whether the lists are still maintained, remember that Nano Filters are no longer maintained!)
  • To hard purge cached assets in uBlock Origin, you need to click the button (in the filter lists tab of the dashboard) while holding both Ctrl and Shift keys, instead of either Ctrl or Shift
  • When restoring uBlock Origin to default settings, the statistics in the extension popup panel is not cleared, you can clear them by doing a reinstall instead of using the restore to default settings feature
  • Nano Adblocker caps filter lists update interval to 60 days, uBlock Origin does not enforce a cap
  • If configured in the assets manifest (which cannot be modified by users), Nano Adblocker will revert the update interval to a default value when the update interval header is removed, uBlock Origin does not have this feature
    • I do not even remember why I implemented this...