InformAction Forums

Hello, first of all: thank you for all your work, this extension is and has been amazing!

I've been using the new version, that is based on the WebExtension format, for a while now and am mostly quite happy with it; however, there do seem to be three things that happen to me fairly regularly and are somewhat suboptimal, with all of them involving the Custom Permissions function, so that I'd like to highlight these and suggest improvements:

1. Sometimes I want to check, for various reasons, what kind of elements a site wants to run; to do this I click on the Custom Permissions button of that website in the NoScript UI.
When I am satisfied, I click on my previous setting and dismiss the UI and NoScript will reload the page; the reloading seems unnecessary unless I actually changed something in the permissions, which I often don't.
So my suggestions is: when the user opens the NoScript UI, store the current selections; once the UI is closed, check the current selections again and only reload the page if they have changed. That way, if the user plays around with the UI but ends up putting everything back to the original permissions, NoScript won't unnecessarily reload the page.

2. Another minor inconvenience is that when setting a domain's permission status to "Custom" and leaving it that way, the Custom permission is automatically set as permanent; luckily NoScript has the option of changing that to temporary by clicking on the little clock, but I would personally prefer if the temporary status was the default, as I sometimes get paranoid about forgetting to set these things to temporary, thus leaving them permanently enabled for the next session. To accommodate users who feel differently, I'd like to suggest a simple option in the NoScript Settings, which allows users to toggle this to their preference.

3. I like looking at the requested elements a lot. I also dislike giving sites the ability to display Frame elements, even if they are "trusted", which is why I removed the Frame permission from the Trusted profile. This means, however, that sometimes a site will not work properly and may also have a large number of scripts. In that case I currently have to go through most elements of that long list in the UI and check for every item, by clicking on the Custom button, if there is something the site needs that is not allowed yet. This is quite tedious, needless to say. So I have a feature request, I suppose:
Include an option for the NoScript Addon Settings to automatically display the additional information that is currently shown when a user clicks on the Custom button, but do so when the user moves his mouse over that site's line in the NoScript UI, so that the user can quickly check the permissions of sites by moving the mouse through the UI instead of having to click on the Custom button for each one. If the user then interacts with this custom permissions row by allowing or disallowing a specific permission, the overall permission status for this site will then be automatically set to "Custom" (preferably with the "temporary" flag enabled by default or according to the user setting if my second suggestion was implemented).
Ideally there would also be some sort of indicator in the UI to show where there are disallowed elements that are requested by the site (for example by tingeing the relevant site's line in a light red or something like that). This way the process of identifying sites with lacking permissions and handling them to quickly enable the necessary functionality becomes much easier and faster for the user.
Edit: I just noticed that if this is implemented, it would also pretty much obviate the need for implementing my first suggestion, at least for the users who enable this functionality, and of course under the assumption that NoScript won't reload the page if the user didn't change anything.
Edit2: Ideally, this "custom permissions row" would also update if the user clicks on the Trusted button or other buttons to reflect what is permitted now, just like it does already but in real time instead of requiring a click on the custom button.
Edit3: In case this is too much to ask for, maybe this could be reduced to always showing the custom permissions for all sites (i.e. not tie it to mouse over events) if the user selects this in the settings, but doing it with mouse over would be nicer, of course.

That's it; with these enhancements I would have no more suggestions for improving the addon further! I hope some or all of these make it to the next versions and would like to thank the people involved in this project once more, you are doing great work!

BloodyCharacter wrote:1. Sometimes I want to check, for various reasons, what kind of elements a site wants to run; to do this I click on the Custom Permissions button of that website in the NoScript UI.
When I am satisfied, I click on my previous setting and dismiss the UI and NoScript will reload the page; the reloading seems unnecessary unless I actually changed something in the permissions, which I often don't.
So my suggestions is: when the user opens the NoScript UI, store the current selections; once the UI is closed, check the current selections again and only reload the page if they have changed. That way, if the user plays around with the UI but ends up putting everything back to the original permissions, NoScript won't unnecessarily reload the page.

+1. Similar report here: https://forums.informaction.com/viewtop ... 10&t=24681

BloodyCharacter wrote:2. Another minor inconvenience is that when setting a domain's permission status to "Custom" and leaving it that way, the Custom permission is automatically set as permanent; luckily NoScript has the option of changing that to temporary by clicking on the little clock, but I would personally prefer if the temporary status was the default, as I sometimes get paranoid about forgetting to set these things to temporary, thus leaving them permanently enabled for the next session. To accommodate users who feel differently, I'd like to suggest a simple option in the NoScript Settings, which allows users to toggle this to their preference.

If this option is added, I would suggest keeping the current way default. Typically if user takes the time to make a custom permission, they will want it to stay that way.

BloodyCharacter wrote:3. [...]
Include an option for the NoScript Addon Settings to automatically display the additional information that is currently shown when a user clicks on the Custom button, but do so when the user moves his mouse over that site's line in the NoScript UI, so that the user can quickly check the permissions of sites by moving the mouse through the UI instead of having to click on the Custom button for each one. If the user then interacts with this custom permissions row by allowing or disallowing a specific permission, the overall permission status for this site will then be automatically set to "Custom"

+1, although I'm not sure if mouseover is the best way to do it.

BloodyCharacter wrote:Ideally there would also be some sort of indicator in the UI to show where there are disallowed elements that are requested by the site (for example by tingeing the relevant site's line in a light red or something like that). This way the process of identifying sites with lacking permissions and handling them to quickly enable the necessary functionality becomes much easier and faster for the user.

This already exists, doesn't it?

BloodyCharacter wrote:Edit: I just noticed that if this is implemented, it would also pretty much obviate the need for implementing my first suggestion, at least for the users who enable this functionality, and of course under the assumption that NoScript won't reload the page if the user didn't change anything.

I don't follow this?

barbaz wrote:

BloodyCharacter wrote:3. [...]
Include an option for the NoScript Addon Settings to automatically display the additional information that is currently shown when a user clicks on the Custom button, but do so when the user moves his mouse over that site's line in the NoScript UI, so that the user can quickly check the permissions of sites by moving the mouse through the UI instead of having to click on the Custom button for each one. If the user then interacts with this custom permissions row by allowing or disallowing a specific permission, the overall permission status for this site will then be automatically set to "Custom"

+1, although I'm not sure if mouseover is the best way to do it.

Yeah, it would need to be tested...the problem of always displaying it for all items is that the list grows to enormous proportions; the mouseover may not be smooth enough, although this wouldn't really bother me. Another problem may be that, since the "pop-in" row with the custom permissions is another item in the list that is also quite large, when the user moves the mouse through the list and wants to check a certain line, it will "jump away" from the user; one possible solution here would be to make the custom permissions row a lot slimmer than it currently is (I think this is possible since it currently has a lot of wasted space) and to first open the next custom row before collapsing the current one, so that when it collapses, the user mouse is on the next item and not several items down the line.
Perhaps the most elegant solution would be to only trigger this when the user hovers the mouse over the Custom button and then the UI would turn this line into the slimmed down custom permissions line so that the overall length of the list is not changed at all; when the user moves his mouse away from the line it would automatically change back into the regular line. Don't know if this is doable though, sounds like a lot of magic would be needed here, but this would be really awesome, I think, from both a design and functionality standpoint.

barbaz wrote:

BloodyCharacter wrote:Ideally there would also be some sort of indicator in the UI to show where there are disallowed elements that are requested by the site (for example by tingeing the relevant site's line in a light red or something like that). This way the process of identifying sites with lacking permissions and handling them to quickly enable the necessary functionality becomes much easier and faster for the user.

This already exists, doesn't it?

For the custom permissions it exists, yes, but what I mean is an indicator in the normal item list of the UI that lets me know which item has unmet permission requests, so that I don't have to go through the list and check manually, especially since the custom permissions will highlight the requests in red, regardless if they are met or not, which is fine, since this is a drill down thing anyway; what I want is to more easily see which items in the list still have unmet permission requests, regardless of what their status is (although maybe sites with untrusted status could be exempt here).

barbaz wrote:

BloodyCharacter wrote:Edit: I just noticed that if this is implemented, it would also pretty much obviate the need for implementing my first suggestion, at least for the users who enable this functionality, and of course under the assumption that NoScript won't reload the page if the user didn't change anything.

I don't follow this?

Well the mechanism of showing the custom permissions will be different if this is implemented, so it would necessarily include fixing suggestion 1, since it is certainly not desirable to have the Addon reload the site every time the UI is opened.