Tor Browser, Javascript and the element inspector
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First: merry christmas, or gravmass, or happy holiday in general to everyone!
Since Torbrowser improved a lot recently i found that i want to do most of my normal webbrowsing with it. I do just uninteresting stuff nobody cares about, but i consider it to be one of the biggest attacks on my rights as a computer user that every jerk can see what i'm doing online...
anyway, back to topic:
As you know, tor browser comes with noscript but accepts javascript by default.
Back when I used firefox, i normally used noscript and blocked all scripts beside of the top level domain; you can't do that of course with tor browser because it can compromise your anonymity.
You also can't install userscripts like viewtube; so bad luck here.
With javascript enabled, i can watch all the videos on all the websites i normally visit, hence the videos have to be "there" in a non-flash version.
My idea is to use the element inspector in order to -maybe- remove all the elements "in the way" of the video.
But I don't know enough about the technical background in order to judge whether looking at the "inspected" website could leak information about my identity as well.
It's just a local manipulation, right? But maybe the server might notice something like: "He has javascript disabled, but now he's watching the video anyway; he's one of the three guys who did something to achieve this, so i will give him this label"
Does somebody have more insight in this?
Hey there quantumgravity.
Well, being myself a user who uses TBB as the default browser for a long time now, I can totally say that it's a fine browsing experience, and you won't really "miss" anything. Just be careful, it might get addictive ;) Also, it's not just the browser that got better, the Tor Network itself is now stronger, and it allows a fast browsing.
Now, there are some "tradeoffs" to be made. For example, as of now a lot of webpages I visit give me a captcha from CloudFlare. So, you will get quite some "annoyances". However, as far as the browsing goes, everything will work smoothly. You can join the Tor Project initiative and try to convince websites (the people behind them actually) to accept Tor Users.
As for what you asked, the new TBB alpha version has a security slider that has different levels of block. I don't remember the specifics but you just read a little in their blog and you will find the info. Maybe one of the levels does what you want (block most JS and still allow some needed ones inside the webpage).
However, I don't think there is a real need for that. Unless you visit a website that has some "interest" as in enough to FBI/NSA break into it and start deanonymyzing users, you won't have any problem with JS. However, soon that option (security slider) will be in the default TBB and you can use it. As of now, it's alpha and is for testing purposes only.
What addons you need? Because there is a new interesting feature in Firefox that was included in TBB. Not only can you watch youtube using html5 and webm (which means, it will work out of the box), but you can also watch videos on another sites (veoh, vimeo, blip, etc) that have html5 suport as long as you have gstreamer enabled in the TBB (by default it is). I disagree with it, as it might leak something, but so far nothing suggests it. So, give them a try.
Any problem you have with Tor, ask here and I will try to help :)
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