May 15, 2026
Blocked, bothered, and browser-mad
Building a UMatrix Replacement
A beloved web-control tool may be back, but the crowd is yelling “just ditch Chrome”
TLDR: Tavis Ormandy built an early replacement for the old uMatrix browser tool after newer Chrome rules made similar add-ons harder to keep alive. Commenters were impressed—but many turned the whole story into a loud anti-Chrome pile-on, saying the obvious answer is simply switching to Firefox.
A niche browser drama just turned into a full-on comment-section revolt. Security researcher Tavis Ormandy announced he’s building matrix³, a rough replacement for the long-mourned uMatrix, the beloved power-user tool that let people decide what parts of a website were allowed to load. In plain English: it was a control panel for the internet’s chaos, and fans have been grieving ever since it faded away.
But the real fireworks came from the crowd, who treated the project less like a clever rebuild and more like evidence in the case of “Why are you still using Chrome?” Multiple commenters basically staged an intervention, arguing that Google’s newer extension rules are the whole reason users lost these powerful blockers in the first place. Their solution was blunt, repetitive, and impossible to miss: use Firefox. One commenter practically framed it as escaping “suffering,” while another said if Google finally slams every loophole shut, it’s “past time” to move on.
There was still admiration amid the browser-war yelling. Several people were thrilled just to see Ormandy posting again, joking that they’d missed seeing his name attached to internet-shaking chaos. And the article itself had a wink too: Ormandy cheerfully described offloading browser policy work with a laughing emoji, which fit the mood perfectly. So yes, there’s exciting nerdy ingenuity here—but in the comments, the hottest take was simple: the replacement is cool, but the real fix is leaving Chrome behind.
Key Points
- •The article reviews how uMatrix provided granular control over site permissions and subresource requests before being deprecated in favor of uBlock Origin.
- •Tavis Ormandy says uBlock Origin covered most uMatrix functionality under Manifest V2, but uBlock Origin Lite removed the feature he relied on.
- •Manifest V3 no longer permits blocking web requests via runtime callbacks and instead requires declarative handling through declarativeNetRequest.
- •Ormandy proposes recreating uMatrix-like controls by injecting Content Security Policy rules and using CSP violation reporting via the `report-to` directive.
- •The article links to an early prototype called matrix³, which Ormandy describes as a first attempt that basically works but remains in a prototype state.