Gawker told me to disable NoScript

I quit reading all the Gakwer blogs except Lifehacker after they recently butchered their comments system. But I just can't give up Lifehacker. And I thought it might be nice to read the comments without disabling the most important piece of security software on my system. In any event, will check out Ghostery.

Heck no, but NoScript allows you to permanently white list domains and there is a pareto like distribution of domain usage.... white list for a few days and most of the internet works. By then you've gotten in the habit of twiddling with the NoScript menu wen it doesn't. And you start noticing how many domains that are just designed to serve you ads, spy on you, and God knows what (like unregistered IP addresses) you are avoiding granting access to.

There are only a few situations where it's a challenge. First, when there are just so many third party domains that is is pragmatically difficult to quickly weed out the ones that are making your experience better vs. worse. Second, when the third party domains dynamically load 4th party domains NoScript seems to puke, although it's getting better. If you visit some of the 3rd party domains though, you can sometimes figure out what the 4th party domains are and enable them.

Once in a blue moon, I do just have to view a site in Internet Explorer lol.

A surprising amount of stuff does still work with JS "effectively disabled" though. And even if you don't whitelist domains, NoScript will still turn of flash and let you "click through" to enable individual videos and stuff. It's a refreshing (and speedy) experience not to have to much "flashing" at one.

I agree, accessibility issues aside, the web is a language, and like every other language it evolves in order to be able to express more and more complicated ideas. Design is a language which changes too. Gawker and you may not be on the same page, but asking them to deviate from the state of the art, asking people to do things like support older versions of IE, in the end just stifles progress. Going forward is one of the main principles of technological development, and sometimes we just have to leave things behind. That said, everyone is entitled to be any kind of user they want to be - and I totally respect your position, just don't think Gawker should be compelled to comply.

yes i appreciate the POV, in that JavaScript is widely accepted now and it's curmudgeonly to assume otherwise. NoScript's design takes this into account, for those who are willing to white list domains.

That said, the idea that just because x% of people are happy to run arbitrary code from an arbitrary number of 3rd and 4th party domains, and that this is an acceptable or sustainable situation, I question.

It is ridiculous for a mainstream publisher like Gawker to run code from a laundry list of 3rd party domains, which are probably dynamically loading even more (that's what's usually going on when fiddling with individual domains still doesn't work). If all this code is trustworthy, they really can't download it and serve it to us directly? Of course, they have no ability to verify that it is safe when pointing to so many code bases.

It is also ridiculous that they cannot answer the question of which third party domains are needed to support comments on their system. This is how you take your more security conscious users and say "we don't care about you." With all the things that people will seemingly do to bump usage of their site a few percent, a sane JavaScript policy seemingly isn't always one of them.

Gawker can do what ever they want of course. And I can do what ever I want, which includes pointing out how silly it is!