InformAction Forums

Short version:
Please display some kind of description for each domain that is blocked for the current site, so users don't have to keep guessing which one must be enabled for the site to function properly.

Long version:
Some websites, although "safe", load a lot of unnecessary scripts (ads and tracking, mostly). Unfortunately these sites also depend on external scripts to be rendered properly and the users have to guess which script to enable in order to view the site. For some sites this can be kind of cumbersome, because I don't want to allow all scripts, so I have to try each one at a time, waiting for page reload after each selection.

It would be great to have some kind of service where users could submit short descriptions about each domain, and NoScript would display these on the blocked domains list.

For example:

crappyservice.tld
Tracking service

kindofuseful.tld
JavaScript host

whatever.tld
CDN

foobar.tld
Ad nerwork

This would allow users to easily see which scripts might be causing problems when viewing the page, and which ones can stay blocked.

Thanks.

Middle-click (or, if you don't have a middle click, shift-click) the domain in the menu

and you can configure the site that opens by editing
about:config -> noscript.siteInfoProvider

I'm a long-term NoScript user, for which I'm very grateful as I'm sure this is the principal reason that I've never had to deal with malware.

I joined this forum to make a request similar to what trashpack has posted. I think s/he's on the right track. I did try out the suggestion about using shift-click, but honestly, it's far too cumbersome, with it opening new tabs, than this function could/should be to be useful.

Might I propose something along the lines that have been discussed here, but which would be nearly as useful, and far easier to use: Would it be possible to categorize sites (e.g. content, ads, malware, tracking, etc) by a simple color-code scheme IN THE LIST, so a quick look could guide a user as to which might be safe and useful? I think this would be far more useful, and actually USED, when it comes to sites that want to run scripts from, literally, 40 other sites. No sane person is going to want to shift-click on 30 sites and pop up 30 pages for review, to try to find the two or three that are providing actual functionality. Actually no sane person *would* do that, which sort of defeats its whole purpose, doesn't it.

FWIW, I'd be happy with two colors. Red for malware, ads, trackers, etc. and Green for whatever appears to be required to assure functionality. I'd support Yellow for unknown sites. I'm not suggesting that functionality has to be determined for each page, but merely relying on Best Guess from the shift-click-able database would go a long way to making sites work as intended, as quickly as possible.

@Beezil.J: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18065
Also that would have to be optional, because it sounds like it would chew up bandwidth like crazy...

I'd have no problem with the notion of making it optional, but these days, bandwidth is cheap and plentiful. A bunch of lookups like that wouldn't consume much anyway, since it's done only with previously un-visited sites and only on-demand. As I envision it, since the basics of the database already exist, would consist of nothing more than a "category" (e.g.) field which would be returned for each site in a query string. So actually, it wouldn't have to be a lot more than one brief query and one brief answer.

Almost anything along these lines would make the task of authorizing sites a whole lot less onerous. Would help a whole lot with users new to NoScript too.

That sounds a lot like Web of Trust, and with the same strengths and limitations...