Aaargh, I’m confused – I thought by using firefox with noscript I was being “extra safe”, but this has made me wonder:

accessing the “login” page for Sainsbury’s Bank and only allowing “sainsburysbank.co.uk” in noscript, I’m getting that warning box about “this page contains unencrypted information… anything you enter could easily be read by a third party”.

However, if I allow all the sites that noscript has blocked, the “unencrypted warning” box does not come up.

Why does that happen? Is noscript really protecting me or stopping the site working “securely”?

It’ll just make browsing the web a pain in the a***.

I’ve never used NoScript, but by nature it blocks web components so you’re sometimes going to get unpredictable behaviour. Chances are that your banking uses more sites than just the obvious one behind the scenes.

NoScript is well regarded, but if you’re concerned about security and hostile web pages I’d wager a better use of your time would be to make sure you’re running the latest versions of Flash and Java, uninstalling all the old ones, and disabling Java in the browser.

Yes it protects you on unknown sites, but you have to set it up for all the sites you use eg allow bbc.co.uk to run scripts otherwise pretty much all embedded contents won’t work.