JavaScript-only whitelist?
Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2012 12:22 am
This one's mostly for Giorgio, but I'm posting it here so that others can discuss its pros & cons.
NS3 will give comprehensive coverage of site-specific permissions. However, in the meantime, how practical or difficult would it be to add a second, intermediate whitelist, where JavaScript would be allowed, but not any other active content? So, on the menu, you could 'Allow example.com' or 'Script-allow example.com' (or something similar).
Advantages that I can see:
- Covers the majority of requests for site-specific plugin whitelisting.
- Makes plugin-blocking on trusted sites easier to use, since it's still possible to completely whitelist sites.
- Could be added to NS2 with (presumably) much less time & effort than the full NS3 engine.
Disadvantages:
- Redundant once NS3 is complete. If the effort is quite small, this might not matter, but if significant, it wouldn't be worth delaying NS3 to do it.
- Extra menu clutter. Probably the menu options for the intermediate whitelist should be hidden by default.
- Possibly confusing interaction with 'Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too'. Enabling that checkbox would mean that the regular whitelist and the intermediate would be the same.
NS3 will give comprehensive coverage of site-specific permissions. However, in the meantime, how practical or difficult would it be to add a second, intermediate whitelist, where JavaScript would be allowed, but not any other active content? So, on the menu, you could 'Allow example.com' or 'Script-allow example.com' (or something similar).
Advantages that I can see:
- Covers the majority of requests for site-specific plugin whitelisting.
- Makes plugin-blocking on trusted sites easier to use, since it's still possible to completely whitelist sites.
- Could be added to NS2 with (presumably) much less time & effort than the full NS3 engine.
Disadvantages:
- Redundant once NS3 is complete. If the effort is quite small, this might not matter, but if significant, it wouldn't be worth delaying NS3 to do it.
- Extra menu clutter. Probably the menu options for the intermediate whitelist should be hidden by default.
- Possibly confusing interaction with 'Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too'. Enabling that checkbox would mean that the regular whitelist and the intermediate would be the same.
and can't tell how difficult it would be to implement this feature. But considering that FF now offers click-to-play for plugins (which works very well with Noscript), I don't think that such an enhancement is worth the effort if we assume that NS 3 is (hopefully) not far away 