Hey all, brand new here and really liking Orion. Quite refreshing.
Came in here looking for this issue. Like @jrose and some others I really do like the option to drive around without javascript turned on by default. I also get that as users we are the edge case and there are only so many engineering hours in the day.
I know it's hard to change functionality from the way it is today to maybe the way a lot of other products function. If you look at uBlock, et al, they give you the option to get pretty specific with wild cards, etc. — obviously that kind of fiddling is a power nerd thing and breaks how domain matching is right now. Others match subdomains by default (so politics.slashdot.org is off when slashdot.org is in play). I also get that wildcards can be a slippery UX slope.
I have a UX suggestion that would keep functionality as it is today but also allows some fine tuning.
The use case here goes back to slashdot.org — every time you open something in one of these subcategories it adds a host name to the naked domain.
So Devices = devices.slashdot.org and so on.
With Orion currently, I have javascript turned on for this domain, and zoom set to 115% to 125% depending on how old my eyes are feeling on any given day. Every time I jump to a subdomain I have to turn scripting back on and ⌘+ a couple of times. It's also the same jarring when you move between example.org and www.example.org, my bank (www.bank.example.org and account.bank.example.org), and so on.
If I could, I'd suggest by default you don't wildcard the domain, checkbox off, that's how it works to today, and doesn't break the UX.
For the bit twiddlers you can give us the option to match everything, no more, no less. Anybody who's in at this level making changes isn't your average consumer Safari user anyway.
The words might not be right, nor the visual, but something as simple as this (or simpler) would keep most of the people happy most of the time.
Thanks for listening. For a pre 1.0 product this is a really smooth user experience vs. powerful feature set.