All posts by Lachlan Hunt

Stopping the New Popup

Mozilla

For those of you who haven’t heard there’s a new way for advertisers to bypass the Mozilla/Firefox popup blocker, as discussed in bug 281472 and in Slashdot’s article: The Return of the Pop-Up Ad. Well, there is now a work around for this problem, as I wrote in bug 281472 comment 8.

  1. Go to about:config (type it in the address bar)
  2. Set browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs to true (type “single” in the Filter to find it quickly)
  3. Go to Tools > Options…
  4. Select the Advanced tab
  5. Check Force links that open new windows to open in:
  6. Check the same tab/window as the link

That will also stop all those annoying target attributes spawning unwanted new windows. However, some people may not want to block the target attribute completely, but everyone hates those pop-unders. To control whether or not a popup can actually pop under or not, that’s very simple too. (There’s no need to change the setting in about:config above before making this change)

  1. Go to Tools > Options…
  2. Select the Web Features tab
  3. Select the Advanced… button
  4. Uncheck Raise or lower windows
  5. I recommend you uncheck all of them, except for change images, but that’s your choice.

New Hosting

Server-Side

I have finally decided that I’d better move to a new web host fairly quickly. I’m rapidly using up my disk quota, having used 29.88MB of my 30MB quota (99.60% full). Additionally Blogger is just driving me insane with its total lack of useful features, and inability to delete comment spam without including a delete icon on the pages, which I don’t like to have. Also, in an attempt to simulate the delete icon by just generating the link manually, somehow I ended up totally deleting an entire post from August last year, instead of just the comment spam (I have no idea how or why). Luckily, I have a copy of it available and it will be returning.

So, back to the web hosting… I have decided to go with A Small Orange, which was suggested to me by Tim White. I’ve just gone with the tiny plan (75MB/$30 per year), which is less than half that I’m paying now and more than twice the disk quota. I expect the change over to be some time during the next two weeks, if not sooner. During that time, some resources on this site may be temporarily unavailable, but rest assured that I will do my best to have everything back to normal as soon as possible.

IE File Upload Validation

MarkUp, Microsoft, Standards, User Agents

At last, Microsoft have finally fixed an extraordinarily annoying broken feature of IE introduced with Windows XP Service Pack 2. The problem, for which I previously published a temporary solution and which has been experienced and documented by many since at least September last year, has been resolved. The W3C’s Bug 838 tracked and discussed this issue up until its resolution that has come with Microsoft’s Security Bulletin MS05-014. The patch is available through Windows Update.

The W3C QA team have published a document explaining the issue and solutions, which has been linked from the MarkUp Validator. Hopefully, this now means the continuing flow of error reports to www-validator will cease, or at least slow down. Of course my recommended solution has been, and always will be, to use an alternate browser that does not suffer from such fatal bugs. This is especially the case for user’s of the validator since most will be web developers that really need to develop within standards compliant environments; however, the persistent use of IE among many developers is one thing I fail to understand.