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I’m pleased to announce that, some hours ago, the first public beta of cross-browser NoScript (10.6.1) passed Google’s review process and has been published on the chrome web store.
This is a major milestone in NoScript history, started on May the 13th 2005 (next year we will celenbrate our 15th birthday!). 
Over all these years NoScript has undergone many transformations, porting and migrations:
- three distinct Android portings (one for Fennec “classic”, one for Firefox Mobile, the last as a WebExtension);
- one partial rewrite, to make it multi-process compatible;
- one full, long and quite dramatic rewrite, to migrate it to the WebExtensions API (in whose design and implementation Mozilla involved me as a contributor, in order to make this possible).
And finally today we’ve got an unified code-base compatible both with Firefox and Chromium, and in possibly in future with other browsers supporting the WebExtensions API to a sufficient extent.
One difference Chromium users need to be aware of: on their browser NoScript’s XSS filter is currently disabled: at least for the time being they’ll have to rely on the browser’s built-in “XSS Auditor”, which unfortunately over time proved not to be as effective as NoScript’s “Injection Checker”. The latter could not be ported yet, though, because it requires asynchronous processing of web requests: one of the several capabilities provided to extensions by Firefox only. To be honest, during the “big switch” to the WebExtensions API, which was largely inspired by Chrome, Mozilla involved me in its design and implementation with the explicit goal to ensure that it supported NoScript’s use cases as much as possible. Regrettably, the additions and enhancements which resulted from this work have not picked up by Google.
Let me repeat: this is a beta, and I urge early adopters to report issues in the “Support” section of the NoScript Forum, and more development-oriented ones to file technical bug reports and/or contribute patches at the official source code repository. With your help as beta testers, I plan to bless NoScript 11 as a “stable Chromium-compatible release” by the end of June.
I couldn’t thank enough the awesome Open Technology Fund folks or the huge support they gave to this project, and to NoScript in general. I’m really excited at the idea that, under the same umbrella, next week Simply Secure will start working on improving NoScript’s usability and accessibility. At the same time, integration with the Tor Browser is getting smoother and smoother.
The future of NoScript has never been brigther 🙂
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