I always recommend that people install an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. Personally I prefer Firefox to the other alternatives (Chrome, Opera, Safari) as I find the huge number of addons on offer give it an unassailable advantage. I’ve recently experimented with the NoScript addon, which enhances security by blocking active objects and scripts unless explicitly approved. However I found that I was forever having to grant permission to every site I visited for it to work correctly.
The main reason I wanted NoScript was to prevent XSS exploits, but I didn’t want genuine local scripts blocked. This can be achieved with NoScript by opening its options, ticking “temporarily allow top-level sites by default” and choosing “Base 2nd level Domains (noscript.net)”. This should substantially reduce how frequently you need to grant a site permissions.
I’m sure some people will try to preach that this isn’t ‘properly’ secure, but for most users if they have to choose between removing NoScript, or having it in its default configuration, the majority will choose to go without it. Using it in this configuration will block XSS exploits and offer significantly improved security without much compromise to ease of browsing.
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