Good call to start this thread, Artie. It could be interesting and helpful to many of us. To that end I’d like to add a few notes to your post as discussion items. As a LS user myself, I can see why your default position would be to forever deny ‘all’ outgoing connections. But I’m sure you also realized that the more you ‘do’ on the internet, the more likely it is that you break something by blocking connections. You may not even notice missing elements on a web page due to a denied connection request, even though they may be functionality-critical. As there are web sites that literally throw tens of connection requests at you, figuring which one(s) denied is blocking the content you want/need can quickly become quite a chore (see below). Perhaps the easy way out of that quagmire would be to avoid such web sites, but that may not always be so simple.
As an aside, I vaguely remember you mentioning elsewhere in these forums that you didn’t see the need for LS v3. Here’s one: LS throws its connection requests at you very specifically, by listing the exact URL for the page you’re on. Frequently, requests made are for various pages in the same domain ( e.g., iTunes etc.), and handling those barrages can quickly become annoying. LS v3 allows you to click on the URL in the alert window and select various options to broaden the request from the specific URL to the entire domain. That cuts back on those same-domain requests quite effectively. Unfortunately, certain sites (e.g. Spotify) are so prolific with different domain requests, it’s tempting to disable LS there altogether.
Another LS v3 feature is the much improved contextual Help within the LS Configuration utility, nicely complemented with tie-ins to Notifications. This is one place where contextuality is not only appropriate, but extremely helpful. The various suggestions LS v3 makes here and there are a third major improvement over v2. But that’s just my opinion.
