Hackademix

I use NoScript and Policeman on Firefox, with conservative settings (disallow all active content (scripts, fonts, WebGL), whitelist-only cross-site requests). I've also configured Firefox to block cookies by default; only permitted sites can store cookies for the session, and just a handful I allow permanent cookies.

Web pages load much quicker, Firefox uses less resources, my browsing is significantly more secure (see [1] for risk of loading arbitrary fonts), and I can browse the web without Google/Facebook/AdvertizingCorp (and thus the Five Eyes) building a profile of everything I do. It's a nice feeling.

This set up also blocks ads served from third parties, which I feel is an agreeable compromise on web advertising. If I send a request to your website, and you send me a document with embedded images stored on your website, I'll download them and view them alongside the page. However, if you try to tell me "go send 5 unsecure requests to each of these three companies you've never heard of, and execute their 20KB of code, to get flashing ads alongside this page" - I'll ignore you.

Sites loading resources from external domains (usually Google) is nothing new. I've been browsing this way for two years now, and I've developed a healthy level of contempt for 95% of web developers. The vast majority of them just don't care for their users; campaigning to get the developers to change their habits is a broken model. Ultimately, you have to take control, and decide for yourself…

That site turned me off. I am using DDG as my primary search engine for many months now.

I really dislike the style and "atmosphere" of that site. The images are seemingly unordered and could use some borders. The images of the dog biting the women or the predator disgust me. Then some "motivationals" and memes that do not help the case.

This site gave me mental stress (the left-alignment of varied sized text and images maybe, maybe the white, maybe the images) and overall broke a chunk off the good impression the DDG creator gave me so far. I'd suggest either not making such weird site or at least make it properly designed.

(When I clicked the link I expected it to be related to the http://hackademix.net/2010/12/28/x-do-not-track-support-in-noscript/ disaster which dramatically "uniquifies" your browser fingerprint so I started with a bad feeling. Thanks for adding ad-blocking recommendations though! And even more so: Tor!)

Interesting, in the Messages and Proxies[1] page, Apple has ad-blocking as an example which actually blocks the ads from being loaded using the `beforeload` event (as oppose to hide them after they're loaded):

> Safari 5.0 and later (and other Webkit-based browsers) generates a “beforeload” event before loading each sub-resource belonging to a webpage. The “beforeload” event is generated before loading every script, iframe, image, or stylesheet specified in the webpage, for example.

Isn't this exactly what the NoScript's author says Chrome extension was lacking[2]?

[1]: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/MessagesandProxies/MessagesandProxies.html

[2]: http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript/

Google developer Peter Kasting's comment on this is here:

http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript/#comment-17007

That comment points to a Chromium tracking bug, here:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16932

It looks like while a developer at Google was working on this project, that developer left Google in October and there's been no replacement.

While this doesn't suggest the feature is the highest priority for Google, it also doesn't suggest Google is deliberately intending to prevent JavaScript or advertising blocking. Sometimes things that didn't get done just didn't get done.

Agreed (at least to the first part). The same argument has been made about the new web font technologies.

http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/

"It really worries me that the FreeType font library is now being made to accept untrusted content from the web. The library probably wasn’t written under the assumption that it would be fed much more than local fonts from trusted vendors who are already installing arbitrary executable on a computer, and it’s already had a handful of vulnerabilities found in it shortly after it first saw use in Firefox."

NoScript implemented this over a decade ago, as part of its surrogate scripts feature: https://hackademix.net/2009/01/25/surrogate-scripts-vs-google-analytics/

This was one of my favorite examples of how there was much more to NoScript than most people assumed, and it had a depth of features that could not be matched by "alternatives" like uMatrix. But that feature was killed by the mass extension breakage in Firefox 57: https://github.com/hackademix/noscript/issues/133#issuecomment-593150495

So in a way, this feature can be seen as more than three years overdue.