[vesinisa]

NoScript is not about disabling JavaScript but allowing only white-listed domains to execute JavaScript. Generally, I trust the domains I visit frequently, and have them white-listed. I explicitly block domains of "analytics" and social networking services, since these do not offer me any value-added content.

However, if I follow a link to a domain I have never visited before, I will first see if the content is viewable without JavaScript. Most of the time, it actually is.

But sometimes the content does not render at all or the page layout is broken beyond recognition. Then I'll try "temporarily allowing" executing JS from the home domain of the site (I've noticed most sites these days bundle JS from 5+ domains, most of which are analytics and social networking services). For maybe 80% of those sites that do not work without JS, this fixes the issue and I am able to read the content. Takes maybe 2 secs to temporarily white-list and reload the page.

The rest are generally pages that make assumptions like that the analytics library is always present in the page JS scope and then crash when it is not, leaving the content unreadable because the JS layout code never runs. A quick peek at the JS console when the page is loading generally reveals what is the issue.

Sometimes I just ignore those pages, but if I really badly want to see the content, I can launch an one-off incognito window for the page and have the page execute with all the JS tracking and social network code allowed. This solves any issues for almost all remaining pages. If problems still persist, these are generally pages that are just simply broken – maybe the page only works with some specific browser, like Google Chrome (I use Firefox), to start with.

[lucideer]

If you're using NoScript in the fine-grained manner you describe, and for privacy reasons (not just security), I wonder have you ever looked at uMatrix[0]. Same deal but a bit more performant, and also covers the whitelisting of other privacy-leaking aspects such as cookies, CSS, tracking pixels, iframes, etc.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/FAQ

[vesinisa]

Thanks, looks very interesting.