Wed, 02 Mar 2005

Tweaking Firefox's Popup Blocker
Recently advertisers have figured out how to get around firefox's popup blocker. Normally, firefox blocks popups except for those that happen within a specified interval of user actions like click, double click, submit, etc. The problem is that some sites like zophar.net are set up so that most links have a javascript onClick handler that displays a popup ad. There's a way around this. Modify the dom.popup_allowed_events property to have the value 'change #click dblclick #mouseup reset submit'. This property specifies which events may create popup windows.

Commenting out 'mouseup' and 'click' allows popups associated with forms to work but stops onClick ads. Unfortunately, it also breaks sites that use onClick to do something useful, like display an image in a new window (which is still evil, but at least it's not an ad). If this breaks a particular site, set firefox to allow popup ads from it.

See this Slashdot thread for more useful stuff.

posted at: 09:04 | path: /computers/linux/apps/firefox | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 07 Jun 2004

Vi Keybindings for Firefox
I have finally figured out how to make firefox recognize vi keybindings. Below are the steps required to make it work on Debian boxes (most of them work for all unix platforms):

1. Copy /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/chrome/browser.jar to your $HOME/.firefox/default/xxxxxx.xxx/chrome directory.
2. Unzip browser.jar and edit the content/browser/browser.xul file, adding the following lines to the end of the section:

<key  key="," command="Browser:Back"/>
<key  key="." command="Browser:Forward"/>
<key  key="a" command="Browser:Home" />
<key  key="r" oncommand="BrowserReload();" />
<key  key="r" oncommand="BrowserReloadSkipCache();" modifiers="shift" />
<key  key="n" command="cmd_findAgain" />
<key  key="n" command="cmd_findPrevious"  modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="o" command="Browser:OpenLocation" />
<key  key="O" oncommand="focusSearchBar();" modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="w" command="cmd_newNavigator" modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="w" command="cmd_newNavigatorTab"/>
<key  key="q" command="cmd_close" />
<key  key="q" command="cmd_closeWindow"  modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="f" command="View:FullScreen" />
<key  key="z" command="cmd_textZoomReduce"  />
<key  key="z" command="cmd_textZoomEnlarge" modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="s" command="View:PageSource" />
<key  key="i" command="View:PageInfo" />
<key  key="b" command="Browser:AddBookmarkAs"  modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="b" command="viewBookmarksSidebar" />
<key  key="h" command="viewHistorySidebar" modifiers="shift"/>
<key  key="d" command="Tools:Downloads" />
<key  key="p" command="cmd_print"  modifiers="shift"/>

tag (below is the example from my chrome.rdf file):

c:baseURL="file:///home/ryan/.firefox/default/m2ukjd2m.slt/chrome/content/browser/"

4. Copy /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml to /etc/mozilla-firefox.
5. Run 'dpkg-divert --rename /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml'.
6. Run 'ln -s /etc/mozilla-firefox/platformHTMLBindings.xml /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/builtin'.
7. Add the following lines to /etc/mozilla-firefox/platformHTMLBindings.xml at the end of the section:

  
<handler event="keypress" key="a" modifiers="alt" command="cmd_selectAll"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="u" command="cmd_scrollPageUp" />
<handler event="keypress" key="k" command="cmd_scrollLineUp"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="j" command="cmd_scrollLineDown"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="h" command="cmd_scrollLeft"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="l" command="cmd_scrollRight"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="g" command="cmd_scrollTop"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="g" command="cmd_scrollBottom" modifiers="shift"/>
<handler event="keypress" key=";" command="cmd_findTypeLinks"/>
  

Steps 4-6 prevent dpkg from replacing the modified file with the one in the package. If you're not running Debian, you can skip them and put the above lines straight into the platformHTMLBindings.xml file. You should be able to put the above lines into userHTMLBindings.xml in your chrome directory, but there is a bug in mozilla and firefox that prevents this from working. For now, doing steps 4-6 basically turns platformHTMLBindings.xml into a system-wide configuration file that will be preserved between upgrades.

posted at: 18:10 | path: /computers/linux/apps/firefox | permanent link to this entry