firefox

Official reason for this halting of development is this bug: many JS-enabled sites won't work, even when whitelisted. I have a vague idea of how to fix it, and it ain't pretty: recreate a large amount of Firefox's own JavaScript blocking. It's a show-stopper bug I can't fix, so I'm going to have to admit defeat here. Sorry for all you hangers-on.

Well, it was a fun excuse to learn how to work with GitHub: that site's awesome. Meanwhile, SomeScript's GitHub project will continue to be hosted there until it gets in my way, so if somebody wants to take it up and run with it, they can.

On the side, I never thought I'd meet something I'd hate more than web development. Firefox extension development isn't as bad, but it's awful close.

EDIT: SomeScript development has halted. Heh, didn't even last the week.

SomeScript is a simple JavaScript whitelist add-on for Firefox. You can read all about it on the GitHub site, or install the very very very early version from the downloads page.

SomeScript is just YesScript backwards: instead of allowing JavaScript and blocking it on selected sites, it denies JavaScript by default and only allows it on selected sites.

The question on everyone's lips: why?

I hate to break the nice bout of silence here, but I can't stay silent on this. From the Adblock Plus blog:

For years, NoScript has been using a trick to prevent Adblock Plus from working on its domains.

[...] at some point I suggested that EasyList should be extended by a filter to block ads specifically on NoScript’s domains.

What followed was a small war — the website would add various tricks to prevent Adblock Plus with EasyList from blocking ads, EasyList kept adjusting filters. Then, a week ago a new NoScript version was released. A few days later I noticed first bug reports — apparently, Adblock Plus "glitches" were observed with this NoScript version, especially around NoScript's domains (but not only those). When I investigated this issue I couldn’t believe my eyes. NoScript was extended by a piece of obfuscated (!) code to specifically target Adblock Plus and disable parts of its functionality. The issues caused by this manipulation were declared as "compatibility issues" in the NoScript forum, even now I still didn't see any official admission of crippling Adblock Plus. Clearly, NoScript is moving from the gray area of adware into dark black area of scareware, making money at user's expense at any cost.

I got a netbook, so naturally, I spend a lot of time on the 'net with it, which means Firefox. A lot of Firefox.

The netbook I have is an Asus Eee PC 901, with a resolution of 1024 * 600. The width is perfect for web browsing, but occasionally the 600 vertical pixels puts things under the fold when I don't want it to. To get around this, I use Firefox's fullscreen F11 mode.

Fullscreen mode will occupy the whole screen, GNOME panel be damned. It hides the title bar, window decorations and the browser controls.

It also hides the status bar.

Just yesterday I switched to Firefox Minefield: the cutting edge of Firefox's development. With it came new tab switching behaviour (like Ctrl-Tab).

The new switching irks me.