chewearn’s blog

Retarded web developers

Once in a while, I still encountered websites which wanted to control my browser window. These retarded web developers seemed to think they should not only control how their websites look, but also how my browser window should appear.

You know, you clicked on a link in a website, and a new window appeared instead of a new tab. Not only that, the new window is either resized to some ungodly dimension which did not fit into your desktop (too large), or didn’t not show the full contents (too small). And on top of which, the main menu, toolbar and resize borders were removed.

This was a bigger problem not so long ago (especially with misbehaving Internet Explorer), but has since been somewhat minimised by Firefox. There were some settings in “Preferences” to tell Firefox to ignore the websites wanting to make these changes.

Still, these web developers were sneaky and they got around some of the blocks that Firefox provided by default. Somehow, they managed to code Javascript to circumvent the Firefox pop-up blocker, settings to prevent Javascript window resizing, etc.

NoScript add-on

Usually, I surfed with NoScript add-on. By blocking Javascript to all but nice and trustworthy websites, I avoided most of these problems.

However, just this week, I visited an e-commerce site of a reputable company. I have to put the site into the NoScript white list, else it wouldn’t allow me to log-in. Unfortunately, the site then proceed to create a pop-up window with no main menu and toolbar. Further, it continue to create such new windows for almost every link that I clicked on.

After recovering from a bout of cursing, I decided to get even. Somewhere, somehow, there must be a way to tell Firefox to ignore all such retarded requests from the website. After an extended search, I finally found the hack I was looking for.

References

First, I should qualify that I am using Firefox 3.0.4 in Ubuntu 8.10. I hoped this hack will also worked for you even with other versions of Firefox or operating systems.

Here were the reference links where this hack came from:
Browser.link.open newwindow - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
Browser.link.open newwindow.restriction - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
Prevent websites from disabling new window features - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Please read the information from the links above if you would like to understand the details.

Where to apply the hack

Open a new Firefox window or tab. In the url bar, type in:

about:config

You might be shown a warning message, if this is your first time accessing this page; confirm you know what you are doing and proceed.

Links to always open a new tab instead

This will force links that wanted to open a new window, to open a new tab instead.

In the “Filter” textbox, type in:

browser.link.open_newwindow

1. The “browser.link.open_newwindow” key is set to 3 by default. This is the desired value and no change is required.
2. The “browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction” key is set to 2 by default. Change this value to 0 (double-click on the key to edit).

Prevent websites from disabling new window features

In the “Filter” textbox, type in:

dom.disable_window_open_feature

Double-click on every key that has a value of “false”. This will toggle the values to “true”.

Long live Firefox

I am glad Firefox has such great hidden features, but I hoped they could be made more accessible in the future. At the very least, the defaults should be the most restrictive instead of what they are currently.

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