InformAction Forums

What does the noscript.ajaxFallback.enabled option in about:config do?

Basically, I have all google related scripts, including ajax related things, blocked. Surrogate support handles most issues related to that.

My main concern is that this option will somehow be bypassing the blocks.

In any case, what does noscript.ajaxFallback.enabled do?

Thanks!

Only thing I saw & maybe you can make sense of it?

"+ AJAX fallback support via Google's _escaped_fragment_ recommendation,
can be disabled by toggling the noscript.ajaxFallback.enabled preference
(see https://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/, thanks alexbobp for RFE)"

therube wrote:Only thing I saw & maybe you can make sense of it?

"+ AJAX fallback support via Google's _escaped_fragment_ recommendation,
can be disabled by toggling the noscript.ajaxFallback.enabled preference
(see https://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/, thanks alexbobp for RFE)"

I did see that link referenced in noscript change logs before I made my original post, but I am not sure what it means. The linked page appears to be talking about how to make ajax sites/applications crawlable by search engines. Not sure what that would have to do with a setting in a browser.

Thanks for trying to help!

Hopefully someone will have a better explanation of what the noscript.ajaxFallback.enabled preference does.

This option just helps navigating some sites which strictly require JavaScript even without enabling it, by replacing the empty pages with their content-inclusive version designed for search engine indexing.

If your concern is security, this is innocuous.

After a quick read, I'm going to make an educated guess on this:
Some AJAX-based sites use a special query string syntax to advertise to crawlers that there is a way to retrieve a HTML snapshot of how the page would look after the AJAX executes.
NoScript is able to act like a crawler and use this to assemble the whole page without enabling JavaScript.

Giorgio and Thrawn,

Security was my concern, so thanks for the update about that.

I think I now understand what is going on, but I am curious about if it ever happens while I am browsing, and how often.

Not asking for a feature, but if there is an existing way to tell when the fallback happens in some kind of log, let me know. Or even an example of a site you know of where it would happen.

Thanks!