Comment by pktgen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pktgen | Hacker News Reader

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Here's my ideal security policy:

- Cross-site requests not allowed without whitelisting. This means some setup will be required at first (for example, for separate image domains used by Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc.), but after a bit it shouldn't be a problem. This also serves as a "better adblock" in some ways, as it blocks ad networks without relying on a database that needs to be updated.

- All cookies blocked by default; whitelist as necessary

- JavaScript disabled by default; whitelist-enable as necessary

- No Flash or Java, period. If I need Flash for something, I'll launch a VM.

Sadly, Safari doesn't support whitelisting for any of this. Chrome supports whitelisting of cookies and JS by default, but the Chrome UX is worse than Safari's IMO (for a few reasons, but that's another topic entirely).

RequestPolicy handles the first one quite well, but is unfortunately Firefox-only.

Safari is effectively ungovernable, and Chrome is part of the problem.

Firefox is the answer. No other option makes any sense, if you're serious about this stuff. I understand that some people like the UI or process model of other browsers better, and that's where the evaluation of priorities comes in.

The good news is that the days of Chrome's technical superiority are truly over.. Speed, memory consumption, rendering engine...Firefox is all there and sometimes better.

Firefox is also the only browser with an ability to sanely handle tabs on the side, which is the only sane place to put tabs on modern screens. If I had to choose between sane tabs and sane privacy policies, I might have some soul-searching to do. I understand that everyone has their own equivalent, but be sure not to dismiss Firefox based on historical issues.

>but be sure not to dismiss Firefox based on historical issues.

It's incredible how much inertia there is with that. The majority of the people I know that switched to chrome did it back when firefox was blatantly slower and that's the image that's stuck in their head. It's incredibly hard to remove and to get someone to try it long enough to change their mind again.

Firefox has a tough issue with marketing right now. They need to start a nice "firefox is faster" campaign.

Doesn't that fulfill all your points: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard

Posted on HackerNews two days ago.

Since browsers have varying support for even creating plugins for this, maybe it would be possible to create a proxy server that could handle this stuff?

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