Upcoming Feature: Image Blocking

Reliable blocking of Images and other external content is finally coming soon!

I've finally come up with a reliable way to block external content from downloading without having to do the "set internet explorer in offline mode manually" workaround. I'm still working out a few bugs, but it should be coming in the next release.

Why I'm posting about this now though, rather than after it's finished and fully working is there's some choices about which "Ambient Control Flags" should be set for Image Blocking mode and Regular Mode, and I wanted to open up the floor for discussion about this design decision.

Here's a list of the features that can be enabled or disabled, and a preliminary attempt to classify whether they should be enabled or disabled:

	Images Disabled	Images Enabled
Allow Images	No	Yes
Allow Videos	No	Yes
Allow Background Sounds	No	No
Block Scripts (eg: Javascript)	Yes	Yes?
Block Java (eg: embedded applets)	Yes	Yes
Block Active X Controls from Running	Yes	Yes
Block Active X Controls from Downloading	Yes	Yes
Block Frames	Yes	Yes

Feedback is welcomed about whether you think this is the right combination of features to enable/disable, or what changes would give the best compromise between a good user-experience and safety.

Users familiar with internet security may also wish to review the full list of available flags at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741313%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#Download_Control to suggest other flags that should be set on or off (frames? behaviors? client pull operations?)

Also, sort of related, those of you who plan to turn images off, do you like it when image tags are replaced with [img] or would you rather have no visual indicator of the image?