When we browse the Web these days, there's a lot of JavaScript going on all the time. That's what Google uses to track us via Analytics and what sites use to show animations, etc. But sometimes you might want to disable all, or some, of that JavaScript - either on a single site, or in general. Not just because you don't like Analytics (which you can opt out of anyway), but because JavaScript is sometimes used maliciously.

Firefox users can do this easily using NoScript, but Chrome users don't have it so easy. Since Chrome architecture is significantly different, creating an add-on that would block JavaScript from executing is pretty tricky.

NotScripts is one effort to create such an add-on, and it seems to be fairly well advanced.

The whole thing feels like a giant workaround. It works "by cleverly using HTML5 storage caching to overcome the timing issues," and it requires you to set a manual password by editing an external file so that sites cannot view the extension's white list of "allowed sites."

It also doesn't provide advanced protection against clickjacking and other malicious JavaScript practices, which NoScript (for Firefox) does provide. But the general feeling I get is that the developer is doing all he can to provide a similar level of protection -- it's just far from trivial, given Chrome's architecture.

NotScripts for Chrome disables JavaScript, iframes, and plug-ins originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:30:00 EST.