We have amazing projects like Lightbeam, NoScript, ScriptSafe, uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere and many others. All have the proposal to identify and/ or prevent the execution of questionable codes and requests.
These tools are vital, but we inevitably need to make concessions to access many websites as we have a massive use of JavaScript on the web. When you access for example the Google Translate website, with a combo of 3 extensions (HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin and ScriptSafe) and Luminous, we have the following result after a few moments:
- 6 requests influenced by HTTPS Everywhere
- 75 requests blocked by uBlock Origin
- 4 items blocked by ScriptSafe
- 7,6 thousand JavaScript executions detected by Luminous
It’s about this number (7,6 thousand) that we are lost and with hands tied, it’s there that we do not know what happens and we still do not have the freedom to decide what can or can’t be executed. This is the main purpose of the project, filling this gap and being able to see and control what happens. As a side effect we end up also having an interesting tool that helps in JavaScript code developing process by giving us visibility about what is happening.