John’s Tidbits

Moo - Development, Trouble-shooting and Random thoughts…

Firefox popup blocking

Published June 20th, 2008 in General | 2 Comments »

Wouldn’t it make more sense for firefox to allow popups based on the destination site rather than on the source?

For example most popups I click on are for YouTube. Now some on these are on random blogging sites. Which means that to jump to the YouTube page for that video I have to allow popups for some random blog, which can now popup as many ads as it wants.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to allow YouTube as a popup destination. It really comes down to the fact that I trust YouTube more than some random blog embedding YouTube videos.

I haven’t thought about this very much so maybe there is a good reason why you wouldn’t want this. If a few other people agree with me I’ll go file a bug. Hmm I wonder if you could write an extension to do it.

Update: Peter raises a good point as to why this is a bad idea.

Firefox 3 and howtoforge.com

Published March 19th, 2008 in Hacks | 1 Comment »

There is currently a bug in firefox 3 which causes it to crash with an XError BadAloc when you go to any page hosted on howtoforge.

This seems to be related to the image at http://howtoforge.com/themes/htf_glass/images/bg_header_bottom_left15.png. I suggest you don’t click on that link :)

Apparently this image is 10,000 pixels wide. It looks like this is probably a GTK issue since the same problem happended when I opened the image with evince!

I tried writing a greasemonkey script to get around this problem but it loads too late to avert the crash. So iptables to the rescue.

iptables -I OUTPUT -d howtoforge.com -m string –algo bm –to 70 –string “GET /themes/htf_glass/images/bg_header_bottom_left15.png” -j DROP

iptables  
    -I OUTPUT \ # Match packets levaing my laptop
    -d howtoforge.com  \ # Only packets going to howtoforge
    -m string \ # Invoke the string matcher
    --algo bm \ # Pick a matching algorithm
    --to 70 \ # Only check the first 70 bytes of each packet
    --string "GET /themes/htf_glass/images/bg_header_bottom_left15.png" \
    -j DROP # Drop the sucker