Everyone hates splash screen advertisements that take up your entire browser window, so why do site owners still employ them?
Tuesday 13th July 2010
Tuesday 23rd March 2010
If you’re a Windows user, it’s safe to start using Firefox again. Firefox has been updated to 3.6.2 which fixes that nasty exploit CERN discussed and recommended people switch browsers for on the Windows platform.
Friday 19th March 2010
More than ever before I’m asked why I haven’t moved to Chrome, as if it’s just the default option and anything else requires an immediate justification. Hey, it’s religion and atheism all over again! Anyway here’s a pretty table thingy showing why I still use The Firefox.
Thursday 18th March 2010
Macslocum over at O’Reilly Answers is asking people to submit their favourite browser plugins and extensions. No prizes for guessing which one I chose!
Friday 13th November 2009
Hehe Safari 4.0.4… I suppose if it doesn’t download properly you get a 404 error? HA!
Moving on, I just finished downloading the new Safari 4.0.4 release. Reviewed in one sentence: its one slick, fast browser. As I said on MacRumors though (and was promptly ignored) there’s still one huge reason why I can’t use it.
Monday 02nd November 2009
As I said with the Ghostery Firefox extension back in May (Ghostery Mozilla Firefox extension review), it bowls me over when I go to some sites to see just how much sneaky crap is going on behind the scenes, and how most people simply have no idea. With NoScript, I’m starting to see the same thing, and it’s rapidly getting much worse.
Thursday 13th August 2009
Another great reason for using NoScript in Firefox if you didn’t think it was useful before is that it blocks embedded media such as Flash unless you specifically choose to unblock it on individual pages (which for me is almost never!). With HTML5 elements like <video> and <audio> now being supported in Firefox 3.5 I was worried I’d be losing this control and that there would be an unguarded vector for attack… not to mention being annoyed and irritated by pages that start playing jingles and animated advertisements!
Suppose Firefox employed an external library to play media which turned out to be vulnerable; it’s happened in the past. Any malicious hacker could embed a specially crafted video or audio file into a page and your browser would start playing it automatically when you visited the page. By the time you realised what was going on, it’d be too late.
Well it’s time to breath easier again (that sounded like an introduction to a cheap infomercial). I just noticed this evening after updating to version 1.9.8.1 that NoScript now blocks HTML5 media elements on pages that aren’t on your NoScript whitelist just like JavaScript, Flash and the like which is fantastic news. I understand selectively enabling JavaScript may be a bit troublesome for some people to cope with, but HTML5 media filtering should be a mandatory part of Firefox in my opinion.
In any event, it’s one less thing to make me nervous and to worry about, which for someone always buzzing with social anxiety and caffeine is a good thing :).
Monday 13th July 2009
I noticed this afternoon while going through my comment moderation queue that Rubenerd.com was running a bit sluggishly. Like I would if I ever ran anywhere presumably.
The culprit? A line of JavaScript designed to download and display my latest photos from Flickr. Seems it was hanging on that particular part of the page and deciding not to go any further. So I got rid of it, and now my site is running faster than it ever has! Not sure whether I’ll do something server-side to replace it’s function, or whether my link to my Flickr page in the header along with linked images in posts here like I’ve done above will suffice.
Aside from some Ajax websites that behave more like applications than web pages such as Google Docs, I dislike JavaScript on pages. It’s cool now I can say I don’t have any on my own site. Have NoScript in Firefox or CamiNoScript in Camino? My site will work exactly the same!
Tuesday 07th April 2009
I’ve had to temporarily disable the BetterPrivacy extension because since I upgraded to Firefox 3.0.8 I get the above error message every single time I close the browser. Upon clicking it, all the browser windows disappear but Firefox stays active for anywhere between 5 to 30 seconds in the dock before finally quitting. It’s quite irritating!
Given it’s a JavaScript error I suspect perhaps it’s having a conflict with NoScript but disabling that extension still renders the above error. I’m running Firefox 3.0.8, BetterPrivacy 1.25, NoScript 1.9.1.6, Cookie Monster 0.97.0 and SSL Blacklist 4.0.30: as far as I know all the latest versions.
The error mentions NS_* (stands for NeXTSTEP, what Mac OS X was built from) which leads me to believe it may be a local problem. Anyone else having this issue?
Friday 13th March 2009
Given I’ve been obsessively talking about NoScript over the last few weeks, I thought I’d share something fun about their logo. According to their FAQ, the NoScript logo has a name and some history!
What is that strange, evil blue being in the NoScript logo?
It is Jesse the JavaScript Worm, an extra-dimensional menace trapped by NoScript. He’s said to be the evil cousin of Trogdor, but I swear by the Flying Spaghetti Monster I did not know anything about StrongBad and his dragon when I designed NoScript logo
I love these guys, they clearly know what they’re doing, they’re Pastafarians like me and they have a sense of humour to boot!
