You are overly quick to say “Noscript blocks…” This insinuates to me that the plugin itself blocks ghostery which is according to Giorgio’s description not true.

I think you should correct and reword this.

Any web site has the right to battle browser behaviour or circumvent plugin behaviour. Just a cat-and-mouse game if you ask me. That is a complete different ballgame from on-disk editing the settings of another plug-in.

BTW I have ghostery installed and the window being displayed over the content annoys the hell outta me. I never bothered though to find out if I can disable it.

Don’t worry about the multiple posts.

Agreed on the semantic issue about ‘blocking’ – it’s not blocked, merely obscured (and unfortunately, there’s no other way for me to find this information – the red ghost won’t tell me what tools are being used.)

I do see your point about the CSS obscuring the donation button, and understand that you’d prefer Ghostery notifications to be in the chrome of the browser. And you absolutely do have the right to control your own CSS. That said, Ghostery is an important tool I use every day, and I really dislike your interfering with it – even if it’s an attempt to ensure people see your donation button. You can take up alternate ways to display web bugs with Ghostery’s creators, but I’d prefer you stopped interfering with this extension.

I’ll edit the post to refer people to the comments – and now your motiviations seem somewhat less than ‘vile’ – but I’m not taking it down.

You’ll find that I support your efforts to make a buck more than most people you deal with. Advertising’s not universally evil. I do think you’ll have trouble doing so in your line of work, though.

But the CSS is in the *website*, and it doesn’t prevent Ghostery from working (the status bar info is still there).

Ghostery should use a notification bar like NoScript does: trying to delivery notifications overlaying the content is never a good idea, especially if it’s security or privacy related, because it’s entirely in the site’s rights and powers to tamper with it (hide, relocate, or even worse maliciously modifying its content to mislead users).

BTW, this was done not to hide any info from the user, but because the box covered the donation button.
Any web site can do the same, and will do it if you cover important parts of the page.

Now could we backpedal with the FUD?

Just… argh.

Thank you for the fantastic post! Great stuff on a nasty subject.

Gracias,
David