How to disable Service Workers on Chromium based browsers through uBlock

The thought of some website installing a Service Worker(SW) upon visit, without explicit user acceptance or acknowledgement, makes little sense. Specially considering that 99.9% of the web browsing activity consists of information gathering and content consumpion, where a SW has little to no usefullness. This liberal approach poses risks such as opening a new channel of entry for future exploits while contributing to the overall unnecessary arbitrary resource consumption. Disabling them altogether is a sensible approach to undo this. Firefox includes a disable toggle that simply turns off SWs globally. For Chromium based browsers we need to use external tools to achieve the same effect since a native solution is absent. Extensions like uBlock can use Content Security Policy(CSP) fetch directives to filter and block SWs. Just add the following line on uBlock’s “My filters”:

||$csp=worker-src 'none'

If you need to exclude any particular website from the filtering process(i.e. you need background notifications for that domain), you can whitelist it using the following format:

||$csp=worker-src 'none',domain=~whitelistthisdomain.com

Completely close and reopen your browser. The next step is to discard any existing SWs previously installed in your session. You can see the list by typing:

[chrome/edge/vivaldi/...]://serviceworker-internals/

Just remove one by one trough the “Unregister” button. That’s it!

Sidenote: There is the possibility of some requests passing over the uBlock’s flitering process during browser startup, resulting in the unattended installation of some SWs. To overcome this just toggle the “I am an advanced user” option on uBlock’s Settings, click the adjacent spinning gears icon, locate the flag suspendTabsUntilReady and change the boolean to yes.