It's really ridiculous how much faster websites are with those two add-ons installed. Actually, faster isn't the right way to describe it, "how much dead weight the internet has these days" feels much more apt.

Oddly enough, I always ran into performance issues when running uMatrix. I'd turn off JavaScript by default though and only selectively enable it. That seems like it should speed things up, but I'd often experience the opposite, both on Vivaldi and Firefox.

By default, uMatrix blocks Google Analytics, whereas uBlock Origin stubs it. If both are installed (in my case), uMatrix often wins out. If Google Analytics is blocked, many sites will spend 2 seconds on a white screen waiting for Google Analytics to load.

uMatrix is very low overhead so my first suspicion would be artificial delays introduced when some JavaScript resources are blocked; [1] is an example of this. The artificial delay does not occur in uBlock Origin because it uses a replacement script for the blocked one causing the issue.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/

Did you also install the add-on to skip AMP sites?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html

> dead weight

That's a generous way to describe it. I'd describe it as "invaders inside the Trojan horse".

I use NoScript, but yeah, same idea. I absolutely cannot use a browser that doesn't have a good JS blocker. It's crazy how much more usable the web is with a JS blocker. Those fucking "give us your email address!" and "this site uses cookies!" pop-ups? Gone. Ad blocking isn't enough these days.

Please don't kill my JS blocker, Firefox.

uBlock can work that way with medium mode too. Though it's still a bit less specific in it's permission than uMatrix, because you can't choose the type of content.