InformAction Forums

I've been staying on FF ESR while things settle, but I went to test 57 recently and I see two things that are puzzling me, both with the default whitelist.
(note: Both cases are in Linux VMs).

On an install that has no previous customisations, the whitelist has "a bunch of stuff" as you'd expect, but no way to remove any of the default items from it. They can be marked as UNTRUSTED, but they stay in the list even after restarting FF. This makes it harder to examine the list since there's a lot of noise in it now. I'm guessing this is so that "Restore Defaults" is easier to implement, but it's pretty undesirable.

The more interesting case is with an install that was customised under pre-FF57 versions of NoScript. On that, any old default sites that have been deleted (e.g. addons.mozilla.org) don't show up in the list at all, but clicking the NS icon when on that page opens the NS Options page rather than producing a dropdown the way it should (and does for a "normal" Unknown site). This means the only way to re-add such sites is by typing them in by hand on the Options page, which is bad in and of itself; but I'm more curious about the apparent "meta-knowledge" that the site IS in the current whitelist but is now completely hidden on the Options page. Things like google-analytics are also not listed in that install, but I can't tell if they're in that "invisible" whitelist and now permanently marked as TRUSTED with no way for me to change that; or not in the whitelist at all (which is what should be the case, since they were deleted from the whitelist prior to FF57). I'll try to check that one in a minute, but the addons page alone is "weird enough" that I thought it was worth bringing up.

Any ideas / suggestions? Thanks.

I realised I could cheat a little and just look at the contents of storage-sync.sqlite. That has the imported whitelist and nothing else. But it doesn't actually help with addons.mozilla.org which still has that strange unique behavior when clicking the NS icon.

On a brighter note though, the default whitelist on the "clean" install is behaving the way I'd expect, and clicking DEFAULT for things like the netflix sites removes them from the list entirely when I refresh it. I expect this was User Error and I explicitly set them to UNTRUSTED last time, because I thought that DEFAULT meant "the defaults that NS had for that site", which wasn't what I wanted.

So, one down, one to go.

AMO is a special case. NoScript 10 is a WebExtension, so it cannot operate on AMO nor on Firefox-internal pages. And where it cannot operate, clicking the icon just opens NoScript Options.

privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager;true

Sorry, but if you want to say this is not a "bug" (which I'll disagree with too), OK, but the behavior is just plain wrong.

You're on a page, you click the NoScript icon & you're whisked away elsewhere, you loose focus from the tab you were on, very possibly from the window that you were on.

How is that different from a "pop" that takes your focus elsewhere.

This is one of the very reasons one uses NoScript, to prevent occurrences like this.
And yet, by using NoScript (10), you're now apt to run into this very situation.