My config: Brave 1.77.101 with Chrome 135.0.7049.115, Windows 10 Home x64 22H2
Sometimes when visiting a site they blur their web page or change opacity, like using CSS:
$(‘body’).css(“filter”,“blur(2px)”);
$(‘body’).css(“opacity”,“0.1”)
They present a popup dialog where I have to click to then unblur, unmask, or unhide their web page. The prompt might be about regional restriction, cookie notice, age confirmation, logging in, some warning, or whatever. They want to interrupt my visit by presenting a prompt while obfuscating the content of their web page. With Brave’s adblocking, the prompt is absent, so there is nothing on which I can click to see their web page.
In case it was a blocked popup, I clicked on the “View site information” icon at the left side of the address bar (looks like two round-headed pushpins facing opposite directions). Popups are globally blocked, by default. I changed to allow popups at this site. Refreshing the page did not present the popup to let me view their web page.
Note: the popup permission is not always listed. In fact, the “View site information” panel may show only 9 permissions that can be toggled and remembered for a web site, but there are 23 permissions in total listed at brave://settings/content.
When I click on the Shields toolbar icon, and expand the “Advanced controls” section, there is a numeric count of what Brave blocked. I click on the count to get a list of what was blocked. For all the blocked URLs except Google Tag Manager, I added exception filters at brave://settings/shields/filters, like:
@@domain.tld
@@domain2.tld
I’m not intimate with Adblock Plus’ filtering syntax, so also tried with a trailing caret (^) at the end of the filter to add a definite end-string marker. When I refresh the web page, Shields show the resources that had been blocked before are no longer blocked. Yet the prompt dialog still did not appear after hard refreshing the web page (not reusing a locally cached version, but force a redownload of the web page from the server).
Do custom filters added by the user not override filters in the block lists to which Brave’s adblocker subscribes? What is the point of defining custom filters if they are not honored by overriding any other matching filters in the block lists? The block lists might have exception filters that allow some content, but I don’t want it, so I would define a blocking filter. The block lists might block some sources that I want to unblock. I don’t want to discard an entire block list due to a contention over what I want versus what the block list author thought best.
Disabling Shields at the site get the site working again (the popup prompt appears, I click it, the web page becomes accessible), but then I’m relinquishing all protection against tracking along with cosmetic filtering instead of just unblocking the resource used to define a popup prompt. Is there no way to override filters in block lists rather than the brute force method of killing all filtering?
I also changed from Aggressive filtering to Standard filtering. Nope, the popup prompt that granted me access still did not appear.
For all the globally disabled permissions, I went through each one-by-one for the site to see if some other permission prevented showing the popup prompt. Nope, enabling permissions one by one until all were enabled did not help.
When testing with Firefox and uBlock Origin (also subscribed to all block lists most of which are the same ones to which Brave’s adblocker subscribes), the popup prompt appears. uBlock Origin is doing the job of blocking unwanted resources, but it doesn’t block the prompt popup.
Seems Brave is doing more blocking, but I cannot determine how to disable some portion of it to get a web site working. I sure miss Expert Mode in uBlock Origin that let me know what got blocked, what type of content got blocked, and let me customize any unblocking – and all without having to entirely disable uBlock Origin.