I’m not only into optimizing the speed of sites with for the benefit of their visitors, but also into speeding up all sites in my browser, to satisfy my own impatience. I already blocked Facebook, Twitter and Google+ widgets using NoScript’s ABE and now added this little snippet in ABE’s user ruleset to stop Google Fonts from being loaded;
# no google fonts
Sites fonts.googleapis.com
Deny INCLUSION(CSS,SCRIPT)
Result: less requests, less to download and faster rendering without that ugly FOUT. Because let’s face it, your fancy fonts slow down the web and they are of no interest to me.
abe ruleset
Hey! Widgets! Leave our privacy alone!
After having NoScript disable the Facebook Like widget a couple of weeks ago, I felt really bad for Mark Zuckerberg who must have been feeling singled out by my actions. If only to make all widgets equal and as I don’t use them anyway, I’ve now told NoScript (only available in Firefox) to also block the Google+ and Twitter widgets with the following ABE User ruleset (under NoScript Advanced options):
# also stop google+ widget
Site plus.google.com
Accept from plus.google.com
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)
# and twitter
Site platform.twitter.com
Accept from twitter.com
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)
Remove Facebook like buttons with NoScript
If you don’t like Facebook’s omnipresent Like widgets (there were already plenty of reasons why not to like them and last week’s cookie-debacle only added to that conclusion) and if you already use NoScript so you don’t want to install another plugin (like Ghostery, which reports any tracking activity and allows you to block it), you can put this in NoScript’s ABE user ruleset (NoScript Options -> advanced -> ABE);
# Allow Facebook scripts and objects to be included only
# from Facebook pages
Site .facebook.com .fbcdn.net .facebook.net
Accept from .facebook.com .fbcdn.net .facebook.net
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)
This tells NoScript to allow Facebook scripts (you know, to visit facebook.com), but to stop them from being included in other sites. I guess with NoScript’s surrogate scripts one might even be able to replace Facebook’s Like-widget with one that just shows the old-fashioned (and harmless) share-button. Now wouldn’t that be fun?