0NoScript logoImprove your browsing security without crippling lots of sites

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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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