InformAction Forums

Would you please consider removing all non-essential entries from the default whitelist, or at least displaying the list during installation?

The reason for having them, quoted in http://noscript.net/faq#qa1_5 , is bogus IMHO. If someone is competent enough to install an add-on for Firefox, they are able to understand why their favourite webmail service suddenly stopped working. On the other hand, they may not be inclined to go into the options and look at the whitelist, and thus don't know that five large companies are not blocked (including Ebay ?!). It's unlikely that either of these would get hacked and serve up bad javascript, but they have lots of ads and user-submitted content, so it's not impossible. Some NoScript users may disagree with their policies as well, and would for example not like to be tracked.

You could just remove them upon install, that's what I and many others do. We install, then tweak, and THEN use. Not a biggie to go through a few extra steps for people such as yourselves and me who want them gone, while keeping the tool as userfriendly as possible for those who want the protection but may not be savvy enough to deal with the finer points of things. For someone like us, its a quick tweak to get rid of it, but for the novice, it could be more complicated to understand and add them. I think Giorgio is simply trying to create a middle ground between functionality and usability, its not such a horrible thing is it?

Although I understand what you are saying and it would be nice to decide that during install, such as what RequestPolicy does by prompting you to add the known whitelists, international even, or not, and I always choose not, but that might just be an unnecessary overhead to put into NoScript. Ultimately though I am sure Giorgio appreciates the feedback and will do what he feels serves the tool and the public the best.