yesscript is much better than noscript, this is a simple clean javascript blacklisting tool. noscript is a white list, which is the exact opposite of what I want when using a lot of tabs with the same sites open all the time, but also opening huge amounts of different sites and tabs constantly while researching issues and following threads online.

Get it here: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4922

The problem with using noscript on the modern internet (Web 2.0)
The modern internet is run via ajax/javascript, so to block javascript by default means every new site you hit that might rely on ajax for its core functionality will have its features hidden by default, which means you wouldn't even know to look for them, which is just a silly idea.

The whole noscript thing always struck me as totally unusable, it was updating itself constantly, restarting firefox on every update, and it did the exact opposite of what I wanted. And yes I did try running it, but it was, as noted, the exact opposite of what I wanted and needed, and was invasive and annoying as well.

I liked yesscript so much I donated to the author a few minutes after I installed it, which I rarely do, but javascript running out of control on my tabs ( I use a lot of tabs, 50-100 often) but on sites I don't need javascript running on, tends to spike the firefox cpu usage unacceptably.

Using yesscript
yesscript is very easy to use, install it, restart firefox, then you will see a small icon, that looks like a white page, lower right bar of firefox. To blacklist a domain, click on it, then refresh the page, and the javascript is off for all pages of that domain.

To remove the blacklist, click on the icon, which is now black, then refresh the page again and it will load its javascript.

Obviously this could be a bit more fine grained, but it's really great to have this easy to use option. Technically, this works very much the same way as adblock does, ie, it simply blocks data types from the domain you specify, the only difference is that adblock allows for more granular type controls, wildcards, different paths, and so on, but the idea is largely the same, user generared blacklist of undesired sites, default is safe.

From the yesscript page:

I agree with this completely. I am very grateful to this author, sites running ajax/dhtml that I don't want to see or need but which i always have open were a real pain and were causing too much system cpu use, I tried noscript and found it totally useless, bloated, and just not the right method, this yesscript is the right idea, and it's clean and simple.

General information about how to handle un-blacklisting a page
A lot of sites now, especially blog sites, blogspot.com I think uses this method, now require javascript to be on when the page loads to make a comment response.

So before you type in any response or comment to a site, if you have a page blacklisted, de-blacklist the page, then refresh the page, using F5 or your browser's refresh button, or just clicking in the address field of the browser and hitting enter (that method, by the way, actually reloads the page, it doesn't just refresh it. There is a slight subtle difference between these two, especially with pages containing forms).

I recommend the actual reload by clicking in the address field to be the most reliable with complex form containing pages.

A lot of sites also use pop up windows to login or out or do other actions, these windows are also javascript generated. Same for any actively refreshing content on the page (this is AJAX: javascript advanced live data loading on a static page), just follow these steps to start the actual data loading again.

I hope this helps you, it did me, a lot.

Sites that have really major dhtml/ajax abuse are bloomberg.com theoilddrum.com (on their comments threads, which use it to autorefresh some feature there). And many others.

Facebook, by the way, runs purely off javascript, so don't blacklist it if you use it.
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Nice find! I didn't like noscript either, but this allows one to block javascript only on pages where it's annoying! Easy to use.

Thanks for sharing.
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