Related to the Firefox web browser. NoScript Surrogate Script

This is only for, but as of now, if you have NoScript set to block, you won't be able to view videos on

Thankfully, there is a feature in NoScript called "surrogate scripts" that allows NoScript to substitute a script stub to make things work on websites even if a given domain is blocked. So all I need to do it write a surrogate script to implement the functions it needs.

It turns out doesn't work because a single function is missing: FB.Event.subscribe. So the entire surrogate script is:


HTML5 Video Test

I've been playing around with the HTML5 <video> element. This is a test of a script that should - hopefully - use the <video> element first, and then fallback to a Flash player if that isn't available. You may recognize the video as one of the Omnislash Version 5 videos.

Read More for the video.


This Boolean Never Turns True

So I'm playing around with keyboard event handlers in JavaScript, and I notice that Mozilla has a field called isChar documented. isChar becomes is true when the key is a character.

Simple enough, right?

Well... no. From the linked documentation:

There is currently a known bug affecting the return result, which is always false and never true. Please see the discussion link in the sidebar for more details.


Restore Session?

Firefox has crashed. Would you like to restore session or lose EVERYTHING you were just doing?

You have selected to Restore Session. Firefox is now going to ignore you, and start a new session anyway.

Firefox: working at the speed of Firefox has stopped responding. Would you like to: Close this application? Wait for it to respond?


My Firefox Extensions

Mostly in an effort to ensure that I can find them again later, here is a list of the Firefox Extensions I currently use:

Mouse Gestures
Allows the use of mouse gestures to control your browser
Adblock Plus
Blocks various advertisements. I can't remember what drove me over the edge to finally install this, but something did.
Prevents Flash ads from playing, allowing you to click to activate them.

On Overloading Operators...

I've never really like the concept of operator overloading. I mean, it can make sense in certain cases, but in other cases *cough*iostream*cough* it's just ugly. "<<" should always be "shift left" and shouldn't randomly change to "send to stream."

But, anyway, one of the more annoying instances of "operator overloading" is Mozilla's (or, specifically, Firefox's) use of the middle mouse button. I've previously posted instructions on how to make Firefox under Linux behave more like Firefox under Windows by setting the middle mouse to act the way it does under Windows.

Status on ... Things

Well, I've been busy. Sorta. So, here's some status on what I'm working on.


Still porting it to C++. It loads .torrents successfully, but the majority of the protocol implementation needs to be done differently since C++ XPCOM allows a multithreaded approach.

Vana'diel Clock

I've made some graphical fixes which will be released as 0.7.5 shortly. My planned changes for version 1.0 currently crash Firefox. No, really.

World of Warcraft

I've stopped playing it. My user interface mods are, essentially, dead.

Making Linux Firefox Ignore the Middle Mouse Button

This may sound kinda silly, but it's possible to make it so that the middle mouse doesn't do what it does in X - namely, paste whatever you selected.

The problem with Firefox is that, frequently, this means you'll be going to some random website. When you type random text into the URL bar, Firefox will run a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on it - effectively taking you to whatever the first result is.

This is kinda cool, in that you can actually find the right website you want by doing this occasionally (try "news for nerds" some time), but if you've got something random selected (text you just deleted, some weird command), you'll wind up going someplace completely random.


MozTris 1.2.1

Play Tetris in Mozilla! MozTris is an implementation of Tetris using Javascript, HTML 4.0, CSS, and the Mozilla DOM. It also makes use of the PNG format for various images. If you use Opera, you can also play MozTris!

This will not work in Internet Explorer.

Thoughts on Firefox

Bruce Perens gave a talk where I work today on the topic of Open Source in the business place. One of the topics that came up was Firefox, where he mentioned that the next version of Internet Explorer and that they took that from Firefox. (Some might disagree about where they stole it from...)

Anyway, I got to thinking. As hinted above, tabbed browsing really wasn't an open source innovation. But what really is has to be Firefox's extension mechanism.

I have a love-hate relationship with XUL. There are some things I'd do differently, but ultimately, the ability to add cross-platform features to the browser UI via XUL overlays is an extremely powerful ability.



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