NoScript extension officially released for Google Chrome | Hacker News Reader

NoScript extension officially released for Google Chrome

zdnet.com

43 pointsel_duderino27 comments

I wouldn't get too excited. The way the Chromium project responded to concerns over the API change leads me to believe that Chromium has a lot more restricting... I mean "redesigning" of extension APIs in the pipeline regardless of what users want. Think about it.

1) Propose API changes with blatantly obvious impacts on some of the most popular extensions. Include no explanation of how these extensions can rationally adapt to these new APIs and provide the same or adequately similar functionality.

2) Don't bring any timing data to justify the performance claim that ad blockers are taking an irrational amount of time implementing their content filtering. When others run these same tests they find no performance issues.

3) Characterize any strong reactions to such a suggested change as inappropriate. Feign surprise and dismay at the fact that such reckless API changes, which would drastically change the status quo on the web, are invoking.

4) Condemn those who didn't react the way you expected when you threatened to vastly change their web browsing experience for the worse. This helps diminish user input in the future, by tying everyone with honest opinions to those who express their opinions in an inappropriate or unprofessional way.

5) Act insulted when people point out that your employer, who is in control of the situation, happens to financially benefit from the changes.

The above experience was so distastefully handled across the board, I really think it justifies a unified and community supported "ungoogled-chromium" project without any of their trademarks in the name. That way we the users of the web can determine our relationship with the browser. It's the user's agent, not the browser vendor's agent.

But most importantly, use Firefox with containers and uBlock Origin.

PS. Despite the above, kudos on the port of NoScript. Never give up, never surrender.

I've seen this pattern of behavior as well. It makes me seriously wonder if the Google engineers working on Chromium/Chrome are being corrupted by the advertising desires of Google's management.

Their behavior is much of a politician trying to do something while trying to hide their end-goal.

I prefer to direct my thoughts towards the project as a whole and not fixed on any particular person or persons within the project. I have a very limited view of the project, certainly not enough to question anyone's motives specifically.

Probably the middle: management makes the executive call and deliberately leaves the explaining to the bottom of the pyramid who themselves are largely trained in providing technical responses, not intricate PR spin

I personally find umatrix far superior to noscript. I also dislike the fact that noscript keeps forcing "update" popup tabs about their latest updates, which have zero utility except to serve obfuscated ads on the author's domain that bypass your adblocker and noscript. That has always rubbed me the wrong way, and a couple of years back I switched away from no-script entirely and haven't really looked back.

Edit - This is a good example of what I'm talking about: https://i.imgur.com/Lwr3xhY.png

How can I use umatrix to enable some of JS? So like browsing the web with JS off by default and enable it for selected websites.

There are a couple of options. You can either click the big power button style icon in umatrix on any website that allows all js on that website. This will also allow all trackers, etc, but is handy in a pinch when doing something like making a purchase on a new website where you don't want to have something go wrong mid-way because some js was blocked from a critical domain.

You also have more fine-grained control where the matrix interface allows you to white-list specific domains (and you can select whether you want JS/Frame/cookies, etc per domain). If you save your white-listing, that will always be remembered even across other websites. So for example, if I were to white-list twitter.com for js/frame and save that, then if I visit another site that embeds links to twitter widgets, those will work because you've already white-listed twitter.

Umatrix does take a bit of effort initially when you start with a blank slate, but over time, it works fairly well and I feel a lot more comfortable browsing the web with it.

Thanks. I would rather break those twitter scripts as I'm completely not interested with that kind of functionality :) I hope, web today is not very broken without JS, I used to use noscript with Firefox years ago and it worked good enough for me.

It's easy: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/How-to-block-1st-par...

Disable JS globally and whitelist specific pages.

I agree, umatrix is so superior, the only justification I can see for using noscript is comfortability in convention or not wanting to rebuild your current exceptions list.

No Chrome extensions on mobile still.

I hope it'll remain like this for a while. Adblocker on mobile was the only reason I was able to convince people to switch from Chrome to Firefox on Android. If Chrome adds extensions, their dominance on mobile will only increase.

Maybe Microsoft could add support for chrome extensions in mobile edge like they have done on edge desktop

I haven't tried it myself, but I recall reading that Yandex Browser is a Blink based browser which supports extensions on mobile.

Last I tried it, firefox on android with ublock origin was just painfully slow... I wound up switching to brave because of it. (Pixel 2 XL)

Still pisses me off the integrated browsing tab behavior in apps. I REALLY want links in firefox and twitter, etc to open in MY browser of choice.

Firefox for Android lets you install extensions. I can't imagine using a mobile browser without an ad-blocker anymore. Saves so much battery life and stops your phone from getting hot from all the cpu usage in ads.

As someone from the EU: Also a blocker for all these Cookie notices (and I guess also Cookies).

I've been test-driving Mozilla's experimental Fenix browser. It already supports Tracking Protection (which happens to block most ads as well) and it's in general a really nice browser, but I can't stand using it for anything that isn't basically Wikipedia, because of those annoying Cookie notices.

The main reason I moved to FF for mobile. uMatrix and uBlock Origin have made web browsing possible, albeit slower, on my phone.

Previously, I had used dns66 and other similar VPN-based solutions (since I'm not rooted), but they all had various problems, that over time became really annoying to me.

FF is a breath of fresh air on mobile. Google take note.

Use kiwi

~~There seems to be no source or github for kiwi browser.~~

Actually he is dumping source in the releases but no history or link to where he forked chromium (there may be an artifact in the source tree that would help however) -

https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android/releases.

https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android Literally the first link on DDG

True but it appears to be a single dump over the wall from three months ago and nothing else...

Can't even directly diff against chromium.

https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android/issues/30#issuecommen...

I guess thats true

XDA indicates "progressively open source" whatever that means https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-kiwi...

A noob question: is NoScript needed when running Brave?

Brave has an Block Scripts option in its shields settings, if you have it on, then no.

Thanks!

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