I have tried that. Every other time I tried to book a flight, hotel or buy something I enter my credit card info and got a blank page or an endless spinner. Now I don't know if I have been charged and whether the purchase has gone through. I do not have time to deal with that. Also I ended up white-listing so much garbage just to do basic browsing that it defeated to whole purpose.

I use a separate browser for one-off purchases for this exact reason. If I do repeated purchases on a certain site, I go through the steps to set the rules on my main browser. Feels like a good enough balance.

Yes the amount of effort to manually whitelist everything needed to make pages work but still not show ads/trackers is too much.

I use uBlock with stock default settings. I also have set my browser to purge cookies, local storage, and history every time I close the browser. That's low effort and cuts the annoying crap from websites by a large amount.

If you're using Firefox, check out the containers extension as well. You can isolate sessions or specific websites without worrying about clearing cookies and history. It's not perfect in terms of usability but is a great advancement for plugging privacy leaks

Then just whitelist the booking website before making the booking.

Any booking website probably use third party services so that won’t work, for card processing for example.

uBlock allows you to disable it for the opened page anyway.

I've had trouble with that before, and then I just switch uMatrix off for those sites.

How much manual effort is required to whitelist legitimate third party JS?

Far too much for this to ever be a solution for 99.999% of web users, who wouldn't have the slightest idea what that even means.

A web that by default preys maliciously on naïve users, even if the tiny technically-savvy minority can work around it, is not an acceptable outcome.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Users who refuse to think, work, or pay for quality, are not entitled to personally customized services. That would be an act of charity, which is affordable for the few who are far pooorer or sicker then the mainstream, but isn't sustainable for the masses.

i guess this is an unpopular position for some reason, but i'm inclined to agree. in pretty much every part of life you have to choose between effort and price. i can change my own oil or pay someone else to do it. i can cook myself dinner or pay to go out. why do people expect the internet to be different?

> why do people expect the internet to be different?

Wikipedia, Firefox, Linux, and Apache, are all freely available. Each of them is a far more challenging project than a list.

Surely you can see how these are different. The imposition of third party tracking and annoying advertising isn't inherent in the medium of the web; it's been/being altered to be that way.

Now, if in order to change your own vehicle engine-oil third-parties made it impossible without viewing advertising and giving personal information up would that be fine with you because some blind people who could disguise themselves were still able to access the oil without viewing the advertising and getting tracked?

"Well you have to make effort to change your own oil, if you don't want to use a white cane and custom printed dazzle-camouflage prostheses then you should pay for someone else to do it."??

okay you're right, the analogy doesn't fit as well as i thought when i woke up this morning.

at a very high level i do still think there are some similarities. people want to consume a tailored tech experience that costs time and money to put together. they don't want to put in any effort to improve their experience, and they definitely don't want to pay for it. what do we do with/for these people? i say we leave them be and document workarounds for people who are willing to do a little reading.

> people want to consume a tailored tech experience

No, in general I don't "want to consume a tailored tech experience".

When I go to a newspaper or magazine site, for example, I want to read the content I've chosen to look at, just as if I'd picked up the paper in a store. I'll "tailor" my experience by choosing which sites to visit and which links to follow, but I do NOT want the news outlet to "tailor" its content based on having tracked my activity across the web for the past year.

I want to be shown the same content as any other visitor to the site, and to be allowed to explore it on my terms, not have some algorithm looking over my shoulder and deciding what to push at me.

Likewise, when I visit a web store, I want to be offered the same range of products, at the same prices, as any other customer. I don't want the store to analyse my interests, demographic details, past purchasing habits, etc., in order to "tailor" its offerings and prices so as to squeeze the maximum amount of money from me.

If and when a use case arises where I do want a "tailored tech experience", then we can talk about how I might pay for it.