Stanford CIS

Firefox: NoScript + selective image blocking = more secure browsing

By Stanford Center for Internet and Society on

Mozilla's Firefox is a great, multiplatform, open-source web browser. It has fine-grained image control built in; with the open-source extension NoScript added on, the browser has fine-grained javascript control, too.

Many website serve text, images, javascript, etc., from different places: content servers (like blogspot.com or stanford.edu) and advertising servers (like doubleclick.com or 2o7.net).

With Firefox, I can specify that the browser should load all images all the time *except* those from doubleclick.com, 2o7.net., etc. With the NoScript extension installed, I can also specify that those sites can't load javascript, either.

Why is this good? Advertisers serve images and javascript to track users and target ads to them. With the images and javascript blocked, I see fewer ads and am harder to track. Yippee!

Published in: Blog