Firefox and No Script

Firefox is my browser of choice, at least for home use. It is not something that our IS division chooses to support in our work environment. I started using it because it was the more secure choice for browsing. It has had its security issues like everything else, but the Mozilla people are quick to fix them and it is still less likely to be the point of attack. In addition, they have these things called Add-ons. The idea of the Add-on is to customize your browser experience so that it works the way you like it. Some of these Add-ons are quite powerful. My favorite is “No Script”. It allows you to choose the scripts that you want to run. It is also an eye opener to see how many scripts are running on these sites, and which ones don’t need to run for the sites to work. I generally allow only the site I go to, if I need it, and none of the “analytics” that are used to track our browsing behavior. Those are not needed for the functionality of the web page. It is still amazing to me how many scripts are being used and how they are becoming critical to our browser experience. By blocking these scripts, we are less likely to click on a random site and become infected with some random malware! It allows us to pick and choose which sites we trust to run these scripts. This is a pretty powerful tool!!