I'm fairly neurotic when it comes to removing clutter in my life. This is not limited to physical clutter, but virtual clutter as well. If you've used the internet in the last 20 years you know that many modern webpages are cluttered. I've always liked having full control of my computer and when something is running on the frontend, it belongs to me. I have a whole setup in firefox for using the internet in a way I feel is healthy for me. For my first blog post I'm just going to talk about NoScript.

NoScript is an extension for firefox, chrome, and probably some other browsers that lets you fine tune what javascript is running in your browser. When I visit a webpage, I only want javascript relevant to the page to be running. NoScript lets me prevent javascript from specified domains from ever working in my browser. For example, I've marked facebook .com and related domains as untrusted. If you don't let code from facebook run, then there is quite literally no way for them to track you from a 3rd party site.

Any analytics and advertising domains can be completely blocked from operating using NoScript. This means less tracking, less advertising, and fewer unnecessary network operations. I would frankly feel less secure on the internet without it. It gives me the ability to easily choose whose code runs on my computer, which I value above all else in computing.

The only downside is it can make web browsing inconvenient at times. Every time you visit a new website you invariably need to enable javascript for it before you get to really use it. It's not that bad since NoScript saves your settings. I will always put up with inconvenience if I believe it makes my life better than the alternative.