User Friendly or Intuitive "Block Element" Replacement or Substitute in Private Windows

According to this, this feature was purposely removed. However as someone who frequently used this feature in Private Windows, easily blocking unwanted ad elements (that still get through) is now no longer possible in Private Windows and has made ad blocking & cosmetic filtering less functional in Private Windows.

I’m not sure if there’s a more privacy friendly way to re-add this to Private Windows or replace/substitute it in a future release with something similar with identical functionality but I request that this gets re-implemented some kind of way or through some sort of new/alternative feature with identical functionality (including or similar to the right click menu workflow) asap as the devtools workaround is not intuitive nor user friendly compared to the use of the “Block Element” picker & slider.

Why is your post labeled as feature request though?

And like I said in my post you linked, Devtools is the best way to do anything, especially cosmetics, even if @Mattches would argue that element picker is good for users, I think that is partiality true, it is good because it COULD be simple, but to me Devtools are not only simple but better, because element pickers are made for simplicity, not to use what you can use as a CSS selector for the element to get hidden.

To explain this better why Devtools would always be better, first, Devtools have an element picker with Ctrl+Shift+C, it either opens Devtools (F12) or goes to the selector and bring Devtools to the forward.

For example if you to hide all my posts, if you use the element picker you will get #post_2 > .row or if you move the slider .row so you can’t really hide only my posts. but if you use Devtools look at all the attributes available you get to see the <article id="post_2" aria-label="post #2 by @Emi" role="region" data-post-id="0000000" data-topic-id="000000" data-user-id="00000" class="boxed onscreen-post">

which means you can use aria-label= for example so you do a community.brave.com##article[aria-label="post #2 by @Emi"] of course that will only hide my posts if they are second in any thread, so you use the selectors for the attributes (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_blocks/Selectors/Attribute_selectors) and you get to use the attribute and =, ~=, |=, ^=, $=, and *=

so you you would use community.brave.com##article[aria-label~="@Emi"] ~ means that it will select a word from the attribute, if you want to use only the username Emi you have to use *= which will match any text in the attribute with it., since @anon57438784 is seen as a single word.

another example is how if you look at the html elements you can see id=example and class=example. well they are attribues, so if you use #example or .example you are doing pretty much the same. But by using id or class you can use the attribute selectors, if many elements match a class “ads-test”, “ads-here” “adsYouWillsee”.
Then you probably would use class^=ads for the way I made the example you could even use class|=ads because |= matches exactly the value or a value followed by by a hyphen, so if there was another class “ads_here” it wouldn’t match, so that’s another alternative if necessary.

So, can you do that with Element picker? no. because element picker will focus in classes and IDs and some attributes like href, but nothing else, plus you can be more specific and do it better, since you are sure what elements are above and below.
Of course, Brave doesn’t support Procedural Cosmetics which in many cases will help, but you should try to always go for native selectors which will be faster (when Brave supports them or when using uBlock)

But, Devtools already can give you the selector like element picker anyway, you right click on an element you can Copy → Selector and you will get easy the selector for that element.
Which seems to be different than what Element Picker does, like I said in the beginning if you select my post, you will get #post_2 > .row or just .row, but Devtools gives you #post_2, which is better for what I am trying to select.

Plus you only do a ctrl+F in the devtools and you can test your cosmetics, so you see if you will select more nodes or not (like what uBlock shows you).

But, if you don’t want to use Devtools, you can always use uBlock, you deselect everything, filter lists and everything and just use it as an element picker, make the extensions available for InPrivate windows and done, if uBlock is not used for blocking and doing cosmetics and other things, then it shouldn’t use resources, plus you can use the Logger if needed but that’s just another topic.

But yes, Devtools is the better way to make cosmetics unless a page is blocking you from using Devtools, but blocking scripts temporarily can be a workaround about that, since this is about cosmetics, so all elements might load to select without the page throwing an error and refreshing and redirecting you for using the devtools.

BTW, here I only explained the advantage of using Devtools compared with Element Picker, but you obviously get to select elements better using other CSS selectors like , + or ~ and :not() :nth-last-child and others you will not get with Element Picker (https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php). So Devtools can be as simple as Element Picker but also go as complex as you want.