iGoogle Security Problems

For a company that stresses security...

I’ve recently been having problems using the Google Reader widget in iGoogle. Normally, when I clicked on an RSS Title, a “bubble” popped up with the post’s content. However recently when clicking on the titles, the original post’s source opened up in a new tab. I confirmed the settings for the widget were correct, so I tried to remember the last change I made in Firefox that could have triggered this problem, as it seems the problem was not widespread, and only occurred to a few other people with no solution found. I realized a little bit back that I had installed the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox plugin. As described on the EFF’s site “HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension ... [that] encrypts your communications with a number of major websites”.

Once I disabled the plugin and found the problem went away, I started digging through Google’s JavaScript code with FireBug. It turns out the start of the problem was that the widgets in iGoogle are run in their own IFrames (which is a very secure way of doing a widget system like this). However, the Google Reader contents was being pulled in through HTTPS secure channels (as it should thanks to HTTPS Everywhere), while the iGoogle page itself was pulled in through a normal HTTP channel! Separate windows/frames/tabs cannot interact with each other through JavaScript if they are not part of the same domain and protocol (HTTP/HTTPS) to prevent Cross-site scripting hacks.

I was wondering why HTTPS Everywhere was not running iGoogle through an HTTPS channel, so I tried it myself and found out Google automatically redirects HTTPS iGoogle requests to non secure HTTP channels! So much for having a proper security model in place...

So I did a lot more digging and modifying of Google’s code to see if I couldn’t find out exactly where the problem was occurring and if it couldn’t be fixed with a hack. It seems the code to handle the RSS Title clicking is injected during the “onload” event of the widget’s IFrame. I believe this was the code that was hitting the security privilege error to make things not work. I attempted to hijack the Google Reader widget’s onload function and add special privileges using “netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege”, but it didn’t seem to help the problem. I think with some more prodding I could have gotten it working, but I didn’t want to waste any more time than I already had on the problem.

The code that would normally be loaded into the widget’s IFrame window hooks the “onclick” event of all RSS Title links to both perform the bubble action and cancel the normal “click” action. Since the normal click action for the anchor links was not being canceled, the browser action of following the link occurred. In this case, the links also had a “target” set to open a new window/tab.

There is however a “fix” for this problem, though I don’t find it ideal. If you edit the “extensions\https-everywhere@eff.org\chrome\content\rules\GoogleServices.xml” file in your Firefox profile directory (most likely at “C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILENAME\” if running Windows 7), you can comment out or delete the following rule so Google Reader is no longer run through secure HTTPS channels:

<rule from="^http://(www\.)?google\.com/reader/" 
to="https://www.google.com/reader/"/>

That being said, I’ve been having a plethora of problems with Facebook and HTTPS Everywhere too :-\ (which it actually mentions might happen in its options dialog). You’d think the largest sites on the Internet could figure out how to get their security right, but either they don’t care (the more likely option), or they don’t want the encryption overhead. Alas.

Cross Domain AJAX Requests

Bypassing the pesky browser security model

Since I just released my AJAX Library, I thought I’d post a useful script that uses it. The function CrossDomainGetURL below uses the AJAX Library to make requests across domains in Firefox. It takes one more parameter (not in order) than the AJAX Library's GetURL function, which is an array of domains to pull cookies from for the AJAX request.

function GetCookiesFromURL(Domains) //Return all the cookies for Domains specified in the Domains array
{
	var cookieManager = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/cookiemanager;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsICookieManager); //Requires privileges, which is granted in CrossDomainGetURL
	var iter=cookieManager.enumerator, CookieList=[], cookie; //The object used to find all cookies, the final list of cookies, and a temporary object
	while(iter.hasMoreElements()) //Loop through all cookies
		if(((cookie=iter.getNext()) instanceof Components.interfaces.nsICookie) && Domains.indexOf(cookie.host)!=-1) //If a cookie whose host matches one of our domains
			CookieList.push(cookie.name+'='+cookie.value); //Add it to our final list
	return CookieList.join("; "); //Return the cookie list for the specified domains
}

function CrossDomainGetURL(URL, Data, CookieDomains, ExtraOptions) //See AJAX Library GetURL function. CookieDomains is an array specifying what domains cookies are pulled from for the AJAX call. 
{
	//Access universal privileges in Firefox (Required to get cookies for other domains, and to use AJAX with other domains). This functionality is lost as soon as this function loses scope.
	try { netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalXPConnect"); }
	catch(e) { return alert('Cannot access browser privileges'); }

	if(CookieDomains instanceof Array) //If an array of domains is passed to get cookies from...
	{	
		ExtraOptions=((ExtraOptions instanceof Object) ? ExtraOptions : {}); //Make sure extra options is an object
		ExtraOptions.AdditionalHeaders=((ExtraOptions.AdditionalHeaders instanceof Object) ? ExtraOptions.AdditionalHeaders : {}); //Make sure extra options has an additional headers object
		ExtraOptions.AdditionalHeaders.Cookie=GetCookiesFromURL(CookieDomains); //Get cookies for the domains
	}
	
	return GetURL(URL, Data, ExtraOptions); //Do the AJAX Call
}

More Browser Bugs

I really hate web browser scripting due to the multitude of interoperability problems

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, especially with work, but I finally have some time for personal stuff like posting again, yay. I’m currently stuck at the airport, and am leaving at 7AM this morning on vacation for 10 days on a tour of the west coast (Los Angeles, Disney World, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, etc). The main reason for this get away is I’ll be meeting up with a good friend and his fiancée for their vacation and will be attending his wedding in Las Vegas ^_^.

I am currently on one of those open network connections at the airport that you have to pay to use, tunneled through one of my SSH servers, so I can bypassing their pay service and get online for free to post this :-). Hey, it’s their own fault for not securing it properly lol. I periodically kept getting dropped connections due to a weak signal, so I had to get back up after finding the connection and walk around, using my iPod to detect signal strengths until I found a better area with a stronger signal because. The thing is proving to be very useful ^_^. Anywho, on to the content of the post.

I’ve recently run into a number of new bugs [new to me at least] in both IE (version 7) and Firefox (version 3) that I have not encountered before and, as usual, have to program around to accomplish my tasks. I thought I’d discuss 3 of these bugs.

• Relative (non absolute) base URL paths do not work in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
  

  Setting a base path for a website is often a necessity for websites that have web pages that are in subdirectories beyond the websites’s root directory. The reason for this is that the page-common layout of a web page usually refers to all images and content in a relative path. This is done for multiple reasons including:

  • Ease of moving the site between addresses like for test stages, or if the site is served from multiple domain names.
  • It’s easier to read source code URLs this way
  • It makes the HTML files smaller; though this isn’t a problem for most users these days because internet connection speeds are much faster.
  
  An example of W3C valid code that produces this error is as follows:

  <head><base href="/MySite/">
  

  The code, unfortunately, has to be an absolute URL like the following for current versions of IE and Firefox.

  <head><base href="http://domain.com/MySite/">
  

  
  

  One simple method to solve this problem is to use JavaScript to set an absolute base URL. Unfortunately, this then requires web browsers to have JavaScript enabled to work :-\. For this reason, this is really a quick fix for internal use that shouldn’t be put into production use unless JavaScript is required anyways.

  The following code will set a base of “http://domain.com/MySite/” for “http://domain.com/MySite/Posts/Post1.html”.

  <head>
  	<script type="text/javascript">
  		function GetBase() //Get the directory above the current path’s URL
  		{
  			return document.location.protocol+	//The protocol ("http:" or "https:")
  				'//'+				//End the protocol section with a //
  				document.location.hostname+	//The host (domain)
  				document.location.pathname.replace(/(\/[^/]*){2}$/,'')+ //This moves up 1 directory from the current path. To move up more directories, set the "2" in this line to NumberOfDirectoriesToMoveUp+1
  				'/';				//Add a '/' to set the end of the path as a directory
  		}
  		document.write('<base href="'+GetBase()+'">'); //Write a BASE object to set the current web page’s base URL to GetBase()
  	</script>
  </head>
  

  
  

  A simpler solution is to just have your parsing language (PHP for example) detect the server you are running on and set the proper base URL accordingly. This method assumes you know all the possible places/addresses your website will run on.

  <head><base href="<?=($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']=='domain.com' ? 'http://domain.com/MySite/' : 'http://domain2.com/')?>"></head>
  

• Reserved keywords in IE cannot be used as object members
  Example (JavaScript):

  var MyObject={};
  MyObject.return=function() { return true; }
  

  Solution: Instances of this must be encoded in strings

  var MyObject={};
  MyObject['return']=function() { return true; }
  

  This also occurs for other reserved keywords like “debugger” and “for”.
• IE’s window does not have the “hasOwnProperty” member function like ALL OTHER OBJECTS
  

  This is a major nuisance because trying to find out if a variable exists and is not a prototype in the global scope is an important function. *sighs*

  The fix for this is using “window.VARIABLE!==undefined”, though this won’t tell you if the variable is actually instanced or [again] if it is part of the prototype; only if it is defined.

One more JavaScript engine difference between IE and Firefox is that in IE you can’t end a hash with an empty member. For example, the following works in Firefox, but not IE:

var b={a:1, b:2, c:3, d:4, };

This shouldn’t really be done anyways, so it’s not really a problem IMO. I ran across this when converting some bad Perl code (generated by YACC) which coincidentally allows this.

It’s really hard making everything compatible across all web browser platforms when they all contain so many nuances and bugs :-\.

Managing Firefox History

Software likes hiding sensitive information and keeping it persistent :-(

Since version 3 of Firefox, the browser has moved over from using flat files for keeping track of browsing history (history.dat) and bookmarks (bookmarks.html) to using SQLite databases (places.sqlite). This change over was required because the old flat file formats were badly implemented, clunky, and not able to handle the new demands of the location bar and browser history. Using a SQL database was the perfect solution for the complexity brought in with the new location bar and its dynamic searching of previous URLS, as SQL is easy to implement, is mostly compatible against multiple SQL application implementations (removing dependency on a single product), and powerful for cross referencing lookups. As a matter of fact, most of the data Firefox keeps now is stored in SQLite databases.

SQLite was also a good choice for the SQL solution because it can be implemented minimally straight into a product without needing a large install and a lot of bloat. While I like SQLite for this purpose and its ease of implementation, it lacks a lot of base SQL functionality that would be nice, like TABLE JOINS inside of DELETE statements, among many other language abilities. I wouldn’t suggest using it for large database driven products that require high optimization, which I believe it can’t handle. It’s meant as a simpler SQL implementation.

Anyways, I was very happy to see that when you delete URLs from the history in the newest version of Firefox that it actually deletes them out of the database as opposed to just hiding them, like it used to. The history manager actual seems to do its job quite well now, but I noticed one big problem. After attempting to delete all the URLs from a specific site out of the Firefox history manager, I noticed there were still some entries from that site in the SQLite database, which is a privacy problem.

After some digging, I realized that there are “hidden” entries inside of the history manager. A hidden entry is created when a URL is loaded in a frame or IFrame that you do not directly navigate too. These entries cannot be viewed through the history manager, and because of this, cannot be easily deleted outside of the history database without wiping the whole history.

At this point, I decided to go ahead and look at all the table structures for the history manager and figure out how they interact. Hidden entries are marked in places.sqlite::moz_places.history with the value “1”. According to a Firefox wiki “A hidden URL is one that the user did not specifically navigate to. These are commonly embedded pages, i-frames, RSS bookmarks and javascript calls.” So after figuring all of this out, I came up with some SQL commands to delete all hidden entries, which don’t really do anything anyways inside the database. Do note that Firefox has to be closed to work on the database so it is not locked.

sqlite3 places.sqlite
DELETE FROM moz_annos WHERE place_id IN (SELECT ID FROM moz_places WHERE hidden=1);
DELETE FROM moz_inputhistory WHERE place_id IN (SELECT ID FROM moz_places WHERE hidden=1);
DELETE FROM moz_historyvisits WHERE place_id IN (SELECT ID FROM moz_places WHERE hidden=1);
DELETE FROM moz_places WHERE hidden=1;
.exit

This could all be done in 1 SQL statement in MySQL, but again, SQLite is not as robust :-\. There is also a “Favorite’s Icon” table in the database that might keep an icon stored as long as a hidden entry for the domain still exists, but I didn’t really look into it.

Chrome no longer doing separate processes

Google broke Chrome :-(

There were at least 3 really neat things about Google Chrome when it made its spectacular entrance onto the web browser market a few months ago that made it a really viable option compared to its competitors. These features were [“are”, going to write it in present tense as they are still true]:

1. It is fast, especially with JavaScript.
   • I have done speed tests on the JavaScript engines between browsers (which unfortunately I can’t post), and function calls, especially recursion, in the JavaScript engine in Chrome are incredibly faster when compared to the other Web Browsers.
   • However, SpiderMonkey, the new JavaScript engine being used in Firefox, seriously kicks all the other browsers in the butt in speed optimizations when it comes to loop iterations and some other areas. SpiderMonkey is available in the newest non-stable builds of Firefox (v3.1), but is not turned on by default.
2. Different tabs run in different processes; which was very heavily advertised during Chrome’s launch. This carries with it two great advantages.
   1. A locked or crashed tab/window (usually through JavaScript) won’t affect the other tabs/windows.
   2. Since each tab is in a separate OS process, meaning they are also being run on separate OS threads, they can be run on separate logical operating cores (CPUs). This means that browser tabs can be run in parallel and not slow each other down (depending on the number of logical CPUs you have).

   Unfortunately, this is not as completely true as is widely advertised. New processes are only opened when the user manually opens a new window or tab. If a new window or tab is opened by JavaScript or by clicking a link, it still runs in the same process!

   Google has a FAQ Entry on this as follows:

   16. How can my web page open a new tab in a separate process?

   Google Chrome has a multi-process architecture, meaning tabs can run in separate processes from each other, and from the main browser process. New tabs spawned from a web page, however, are usually opened in the same process, so that the original page can access the new tab using JavaScript.

   If you’d like a new tab to open in a separate process:

   • Open the new tab with about:blank as its target.
   • Set the newly opened tab’s opener variable to null, so that it can’t access the original page.
   • Redirect from about:blank to any URL on a different domain, port, or protocol than that of the page spawning the pop-up. For example, if the page spawning the pop-up is on http://www.example.com/:
     • a different domain would be http://www.example.org
     • a different port would be http://www.example.com:8080
     • a different protocol would be https://www.example.com

   Google Chrome will recognize these actions as a hint that the new and old pages should be isolated from each other, and will attempt to load the new page in a separate process.

   The following code snippet can be used to accomplish all of these steps:

   var w = window.open();
   w.opener = null;
   w.document.location = "http://different.example.com/index.html";
   			

   
   

   The only problem is... THIS NO LONGER WORKS! Google recently (within the last 7 days) broke this FAQ recommendation with an automatic update to Chrome, so new tabs that are not manually opened by the user cannot be forced to new processes even with their little code snippet. Personally, I think this behavior is really lame and every tab should be able to open in separate processes every time no matter what, and still be able to talk to each other through process message passing. It may slow things down a little, but it’s a much more powerful model, IMO. An option for this in the window.open’s options parameter would be really nice...

3. And of course, it’s Google, who, in general, “does no evil”. :-)
   • I can’t find the original article I was looking for on this “don’t do evil” topic :’( ... it basically said something to the extent that the “don’t be evil” motto only applies to business inside the USA, or something like that.
   • I have been a long time fan of Google though, and I still think that pretty much everything they’ve done, in general, has been for the good of everyone. There are always going to be blemishes on a company that size, and for how big they are and all they do, they’ve done a pretty damn good job, IMO. Just my two cents.

Google Chrome - Bug?

And other browser layout bugs

To start off, sorry I haven’t been posting much the last couple of months. First, I got kind of burnt out from all the posting in August. More recently however, I’ve been looking for a J-O-B which has been taking a lot of my time. Now that I’ve found some work, I’m more in the mood to post again, yay. Hopefully, this coming month will be a bit more productive in the web site :-). Now on to the content.

Browser rendering [and other] bugs have been a bane of the web industry for years, particularly in the old days when IE was especially non-standards-compliant, so people had to add hacks to their pages to make them display properly. IE has gotten much better since then, but there are still lots of bugs in it, especially because Microsoft wants to not break old web sites that had to add hacks to make them work in the outdated versions of IE. Other modern browsers still have rendering problems too [see the acid tests], but again, these days it’s not so bad.

I just ran into one of these problems in a very unexpected place: Google Chrome. I kind of ignored the browser’s launch, as I’m mostly happy with Firefox (there’s a few major bugs that have popped up in Firefox 3.0 that are a super annoyance, but I try to ignore them), but needed to install Chrome recently. When I went to my web page in it, I noticed a major glitch in the primary layout, so I immediately researched it.

What it currently looks like Rendered in Firefox v3.0.3

What it looks like in Chrome v0.2.149.30 Which is apparently correct according to the CSS guidelines

So I researched what was causing the layout glitch, assuming it was my code, and discovered it is actually a rendering bug in Firefox and IE, not Chrome (I think)! Basically, DIV’s with top margins transfer their margins to their parent DIVs, as is explained here:

Note that adjoining vertical margins are collapsed to use the maximum of the margin values. Horizontal margins are not collapsed.

The text there isn’t exactly clear cut, but it seems to support my suggestion that Chrome has it right. Here is an example, which renders properly in Chrome, but not IE and Firefox.

<div style="background-color:blue;width:100px;height:100px;">     <div style="margin-top:25px;width:25px;height:25px;background-color:green;"> </div>

In the above example, the green box’s top should be directly against the blue box, and the blue box inherits the margin and is pushed away from the top of the red box.

Honestly, I think this little margin-top caveat is quite silly and doesn’t make sense. Why collapse the margins when it would make more sense to just use the box model so the child has a margin against its parent. Go figure.

So to fix the problem, I ended up using “padding-top” on the parent instead of “margin-top” on the child. Blargh.

This isn’t the first bug I’ve discovered in Firefox either (which I usually submit to Firefox’s bugzilla).

At least one of the worst ones bugs I’ve submitted (which had already been submitted in the past, I found out) has been fixed. “Address bar should show path/query %-unescaped so non-ASCII URLs are readable” was a major internationalization problem, which I believe was a deal breaker for Firefox for anyone using any language that isn’t English. Basically any non-ASCII character in the address bar was escaped with %HEXVALUE instead of showing the actual character. Before Firefox got out an official bug fix, I had been fixing this with a nifty Firefox add-on, Locationbar², which I still use as it has a lot of other nifty options.

One bug that has not yet been fixed that I submitted almost 2 years ago (it has been around for almost 4 years) is “overflow:auto gets scrollbar on focused link outline ”. I wrote up the following document on this when I submitted it to Mozilla:

I put this in an IFRAME because for some reason the bug didn’t show up when I inlined this HTML, go figure. The font size on the anchor link also seems to matter now... I do not recall it mattering before.

At least Firefox (and Chrome) are still way WAY more on the ball than IE.

Edit on 2009-7-26: The margin-top bug has been fixed on Firefox (not sure which version it happened on, but I’m running version 3.0.12 currently).

Firefox Extensions

Creating this list took way too long x.x;

So I jumped on the bandwagon and switched over to Firefox 3.0 when it came out a week or two ago, and was pleasantly surprised after some forced addon (used to be called extension) updates that everything worked brilliantly, including my favorite plugin, Firebug. I meant to write this post containing the addons I use and recommend a long time ago (once again, jumping on the bandwagon as everyone else and their dog that has a blog has done this topic too...), but now is as good as ever, especially since there are some updates for Firefox’s new version.

• Adblock plus:
  • Block unwanted ads, images, and other multimedia.
  • Notes: Had to upgrade to this from just “Adblock”.
• Adblock Filterset.G Updater:
  • A good set of ads to block for Adblock.
  • Notes: This doesn’t seem to be updated much anymore, and never checked to see if it worked with Adblock plus.
• AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox:
  • This is a software suite that always you to store passwords and personal information in encrypted (against AES) container files against a master password, so it’s pretty darn secure. It interfaces well with both IE and Firefox, and really helps with the filling out of personal info on those long tedious credit card forms and such.
  • Notes: I just wish it worked better outside of web browsers in the Windows environment... maybe one day I’ll make something for that, it would be fun.
• BugMeNot:
  • Bypass web registration by checking the bugmenot.com database for free user-provided accounts.
• Cache View:
  • Allows you to go to a cache for the page you are currently on from one of the many caching services like Google Cache, Coral Cache, and archive.org’s Wayback Machine.
  • Notes: I modified this to allow you to open all cache sites at once and to work for Firefox 3... maybe one of these days I’ll release the additions.
• Download Statusbar:
  • “View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar”
• Firebug:
  • Required for [web] programmers, and still very useful for [web] developers. Some main features include:
    • JavaScript console for debug output and real-time JavaScript injection
    • JavaScript debugging
    • Realtime HTML DOM view
    • Realtime editing of DOM object information and positioning
    • DOM object CSS styles and where they came from
    • Downloaded files with their acquisition time
  • Notes: This is by far my favorite Firefox extension.
• FireFTP:
  • Fully featured FTP manager.
  • Notes: You’ll never need to find a component FTP manager again once you’ve got this great Firefox integrated one.
• Greasemonkey:
  • Insertion of JavaScript scripts on specified web pages.
• Html Validator:
  • Realtime HTML validation of viewed web pages without having to go through w3c.org (web standards committee).
• IE Tab:
  • “Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox”
  • Notes: Since IE is sometimes a necessity when people refuse to conform to standards; and for developers to make sure things look right in the (unfortunately) most used web browser.
• keyconfig [functions for] [Original?]:
  • (Re)bind keyboard shortcuts in Firefox.
  • Notes: I heavily rely on this since I’m a bit of a shortcut nut.
• Locationbar²:
  • Adds options to the location bar like:
    • Highlighting the domain
    • Go to parent directories of your current URL by clicking
    • Hide the protocol (ex: “http://”).
  • Notes: I originally used this because it fixed a major problem that plagued Firefox and still plagues IE in which the address bars show escaped URLs (like “Firefox%20Extensions” instead of “Firefox Extensions”), so foreign URLs, which used lots of non-ASCII characters were next to impossible to read. I submitted this to Mozilla a ways back, and fortunately it was fixed for Firefox 3. This, IMO, is one of the most important fixes for Firefox 3, and it wasn’t even really advertised.
• OpenDownload:
  • “Allows you to open ANY file (executables, etc.) from the internet into the default program assigned by your operating system, without needing to save it first.”
  • Notes: This is not marked as compatible with Firefox 3, but works fine. Firefox has added an “applications” tab to its options dialog that kind of takes care of this, but this still does at least allow direct opening of all file extensions without also mapping them in Firefox.
• Tab Mix Plus:
  • “Tab browsing with an added boost.”
  • Notes: This is becoming less needed with each Firefox version upgrade, but it still has a lot of options in it that make it worthwhile.
• User Agent Switcher:
  • Switch the “User Agent” of Firefox to fool pages into thinking you are using a different web browser or crawler.
  • Notes: There are many uses for this, one being to see how pages change for web crawlers.
• View Cookies:
  • “View cookies of the current web page.”
  • Notes: Firefox 3 has added a feature to make this no longer needed, but I still much prefer the way this extension handles cookie viewing.
• Web Developer:
  • A plethora of very useful web developer tools.

• Answers:
  • Alt+Click on any word or term for quick info from answers.com.
• ChatZilla:
  • An IRC (it’s a kind of chat room protocol) interface through Firefox.
  • Notes: I’m sure I’d use this a lot more... if I actually used IRC.
• DownThemAll! & FlashGot:
  • Ability to download lots of content and/or links from web pages.
• Morning Coffee:
  • “Keep track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs.” You can set websites to load by individual day, weekday/weekend, or every day.
  • Notes: No longer really needed since RSS has become so commonplace.
• Page Update Checker:
  • “Automatically checks to see if a web page has changed.”
  • Notes: No longer really needed since RSS has become so commonplace.
• Referrer History:
  • Viewing how you browsed to pages through a referrer tree.
  • Notes: This is not compatible with Firefox 3, hasn’t been updated for ages, and is extremely slow as it uses a brute force method to build the referrer tree. I might see if I can find a better version of something like this (or make it) if the need ever arises again.
• Torbutton:
  • Toggle completely anonymous web browsing at the push of a button.
  • Notes: I found using the tor network way too slow, so I have since abandoned it for faster methods, which I will post about some day. Tor still remains an excellent “full-proof” way to stay anonymous on the internet though.
• VideoDownloader:
  • Download videos from many popular sites.
  • Notes: I prefer just using Firebug and a download manager now...

• Enhanced History Manager:
  • Lots of neat history managing features...
  • Notes: This addon hasn’t been updated in a long time... I’m not sure if it works with Firefox 3. To be honest, I don’t even remember what it does completely.
• Image Zoom:
  • “Adds zoom functionality for images...”
  • Notes: Firefox 3 now has full page zoom, as opposed to just text, so this is no longer really needed.

And as a Bonus, MozBackup is a simple utility for creating backups of Mozilla products’ profiles.

GreaseMonkey, FireBug, and JavaScripting

Keeping up with the webmasters

A few days ago I threw together a script for a friend in GreaseMonkey (a FireFox extension) that removes the side banner from Demonoid. It was as follows (JavaScript).

This simple snippet is a useful example that is used for a lot of webpage operations. Most web page scripting just involves finding objects and then manipulating them and their parent objects. There are two common ways to get the reference to objects on a web page. One is document.getElementById, and another is through form objects in the DOM.
With the first getElementById, you can get any object by passing it’s id tag, for example,

<div id=example>
<script language=JavaScript>
	var MyObject=document.getElementById('example');
</script>

This function is used so often, many frameworks also abbreviate it with a function: I know of at least one framework that actually names the function as just a dollar sign $.

The second way is through the name tag on objects, which both the form and any of its form elements require. Only form elements like input, textarea, and select can use this.

<body>
	<form name=MyForm>
		<input type=text name=ExampleText value=Example>
	</form>
	<script language=JavaScript>
		document.MyForm.ExampleText.value='New Example'; //Must use format document.FormName.ObjectName
	</script>
</body>

This is the very basis of all JavaScript/web page (client side only) programming. The rest is just learning all the types of objects with their functions and properties.

So, anyways, yesterday, Demonoid changed their page so it no longer worked. All that needed to be done was change the 'navtower' to 'smn' because they renamed the object (and made it an IFrame). This kind of information is very easy to find and edit using a very nice and useful FireFox extension called FireBug. I have been using this for a while to develop web pages and do editing (for both designing and JavaScript coding) and highly recommend it.