I recently installed the Noscript plugin for the Firefox Browser.  I use IE7 for general web browsing, but use Firefox for Entrecard dropping, stumbling, and for my Alexa toolbar. For those who drop cards off a list and want to get through their 300 as quickly as possible, read on. For those who like pages to load faster without being annoyed by a sea of ads, you may also be interested. I won’t review my general Entrecard dropping strategy.

What Noscript for Firefox does is block javascript.  These days I regularly see pages having 3-33 javascripts running.  My own homepage has 14 of them.  If you go to Pingdom Tools you will see it’s usually the javascript taking the longest to load in a page.  Now, if you are like me and load 50 tabs at once, a few seconds saved a page could save you minutes in the long run.  As an added benefit, not loading all the javascript means that the Entrecard Widget often appears much higher on the page than normal.

So why not block all javascript and be done with it?  Because there are some good scripts out there.  Entrecard itself uses javascript.  Alexa uses javascript.  For that reason we have to configure Noscript to allow the good javascript in, and everything else out.

How to set up Noscript:

1. Install the plugin.  Restart Firefox.  Make sure it is enabled.  You should see a yellow bar at the bottom of the page with the word “options” on the right.  We will use that options box later.
2. Up top on the Firefox toolbar, click Tools / Add-ons and then click “options” for Noscript.
3. On the “General” tab, check “temporarily allow top level sites by default”.  One the bottom, be sure “automatically reload affected pages when permissions change” is checked.
4. Under the “plugins” tab, be sure “Apply these restrictions to trusted sites too” is not checked.
5. Restart Firefox.  Now load your own homepage.  See the yellow bar at the bottom of your Firefox browser that pops up after the page loads?  Click on the ”options button”.
6. We want to give permission for the following scripts to run.  Click “Allow entrecard.com”, Allow amazonaws.com.  Now some people put their entrecard into a container. So you should also “allow showyouradhere.com”.  I allow alexa.com to run as well.  If you disallow “googlesyndication.com”, then your visit won’t even be tracked, no more whining about bounce rate.  I bet the whiny bastards cry about “no traffic” now.
7. Restart Firefox and load your bookmarked tabs.  You should see the Entrecard widget on every site.  The yellow bar on the bottom should say something like “scripts partially allowed 3/12″ and then list them.  If you have any issues getting this plugin to work, post the problem website below and I’ll try to help you.  Anyone else using this plugin or a similar one to block scripts?