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I'm pleased to announce the availability of NoScript 3.0a8 for mobile devices. Tested on Firefox for Android, it should work on Maemo too.

This is the first feature-complete mobile version of NoScript. In other words, it provides all the major security features of its desktop counterpart which make sense on a mobile device:

• Easy per-site active content permissions management.
• The first and most powerful anti-XSS (cross-site scripting) filter available in a web browser.
• ClearClick, the one and only effective client-side protection against Clickjacking available on the client side.
• ABE (App Boundaries Enforcer), a true webapp firewall inside your mobile browser to protect your router and web applications against CSRF and DNS rebinding attacks.

Important usability-oriented features -- such as Script Surrogates or the ability to emulate JavaScript-only navigation on sites where scripting is blocked -- have been ported as well, and other have been developed from scratch. For instance, on first run NoScript offers new users the ability to choose its default configuration among 4 presets which may be changed later:

1. Easy Blacklist (you pick untrusted sites where JavaScript and plugins must be blocked)
2. Click To Play (plugin a and audiovisual content is blocked until you click a placeholder)
3. Classic Whitelist (you pick trusted sites where JavaScript and plugins can run, similar to the default NoScript 2.x setup)
4. Full Protection (like "Classic Whitelist", but all the embedded content is blocked until you click, even on trusted sites)

Furthermore, while the in-page permission UI has been greatly simplified and optimized for touchscreen consumption, the underlying engine has been redesigned to allow deep per-site customization at the single permission level (e.g. making Flash permanently work by default on site X but not on site Y, even if JavaScript is allowed on both, or causing restrictions on a certain embedded object to depend on its parent page's address). These fine grained permissions will be configured through a new desktop UI (under development, slated for inclusion in the first cross-device NoScript 3 beta) and synchronized safely via Firefox Sync across all the PCs, tablets and smartphones where NoScript is installed.

Talking about synchronization, you can already share your NoScript settings among your mobile devices (just check the "Enable Remote Sync" option), but you'll need to wait for the aforementioned cross-device beta to include your PC in the synchronization pool.

Last but not least, NoScript 3 doesn't require a browser restart on installation and updates, which means that hot fixes for new security threats can be deployed in a more effective, timely and convenient way.

And here we are: NoScript users can now bring to their smartphones and tablets the same secure browsing experience they enjoy on the desktop.

It's not been easy, and there's still a lot of work ahead to merge into the desktop version the many under the hood enhancements that this full rewrite of NoScript's internals brought us as a welcome side effect, but this is probably the most important milestone in NoScript development since the XSS filter invention. So let's celebrate and thank from the bottom of our heart the people who made it possible: the NLNet foundation which believed in this project since the beginning, and all those individuals, institutions and companies relying on and contributing back to NoScript.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 15th, 2011 at 3:32 pm and is filed under ABE, Mozilla, Security, NoScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.