I haven't used NoScript in awhile, but there's uBlock Origin, or the more likely preference: uMatrix (the advanced version), which I use & enjoy. One of the many benefits is it's availability in both Chrome & FF. It does take a bit of getting used to though!

I run Lightroom and occasionally Photoshop on a 2k3 VM under VMWare without any issues. With a few gigs of ram it runs rather well, my biggest performance hit is that my photograph library & catalog is on an NFS share and not locally. PS/LR should be just fine on a VM.