InformAction Forums

Hi,

My name is Alexander Sidorov, I am Head of Safe Search Service in Yandex, leading Russian search engine, http://company.yandex.com/ , NASDAQ:YNDX, 95m users.

NoScript by default blocks scripts on our domains, yandex.ru, yandex.ua, yandex.by, yandex.kz, so users can’t search and log in at all. ya.ru, yandex.com and yandex.com.tr users suffer from scripts blocking and partial incompatibility.

Could you please fix this problem? For example, you can add yandex.ru, yandex.ua, yandex.by, yandex.kz, yandex.st, yandex.net, ya.ru, yandex.com and yandex.com.tr to NoScript default whitelist.

We have strong security policies and specialists, as well as our own malicious and fraud URLs detection technologies, http://company.yandex.com/technologies/ ... nology.xml , http://company.yandex.com/press_center/ ... xml?pid=16 ,http://company.yandex.com/press_center/ ... xml?pid=11 . So scripts from Yandex domains cannot harm users computers.

Yours faithfully,
Alexander Sidorov
Head of Yandex.Safe Search Service.

Hello, Alexander. Thank you for posting.

Giorgio is the sole owner of NoScript, so it's ultimately his decision. However, the default whitelist does not generally include search engines, but rather webmail services, so that someone can contact Giorgio for support via email if they have installed NoScript without understanding how it works. Google is whitelisted because of Gmail, not because of Google Search.

I personally have no objection to whitelisting a search engine with a strong security and privacy policy, but the NoScript approach is generally to leave such decisions to each individual user. The default whitelist is very short, and the sites on it generally have compelling reasons to be there, not just "probably trustworthy" - eg addons.mozilla.org is whitelisted because otherwise the installation of NoScript itself would be compromised.

May I recommend designing your services to gracefully degrade, so that they are usable (if perhaps limited) without JavaScript? You could also provide a note to non-JavaScript users on the page, suggesting to them that their experience would be improved by enabling it.

Regards

Thrawn

Thank you, Thrawn. I have sent email to Giorgio. By the way, we have mail service, https://mail.yandex.ru and https://mail.yandex.com, with nearly 29m users monthly.