I prefer to not have cookies stored in my browser, but it’s impractical to not store any cookies since this would require repeatedly logging in to authenticated sites that I frequently use. A simple solution in Firefox is the following:

From the Edit menu, choose Preferences and then click the Privacy tab. You should see a dialog similar to the following one:

Check the “Accept cookies from sites” checkbox. For the “Keep until” setting, select “I close Firefox”. The latter is the key - it will erase all cookies from Firefox whenever you close the program. Of course, we don’t want to erase all the cookies, so click the “Exceptions…” button on the right and you’ll see a dialog similar to the following:

Just type the name of the web site you want to allow in the text box and click the “Allow” button, and Firefox will add it to the exception list so it won’t be deleted when you close Firefox. You can add a full URL such as www.MySite.com, or just the domain name MySite.com to allow cookies for any host in that domain. You an also add sites you want to disallow any cookies from by clicking the “Block” button.

I have about 30 sites that I allow Firefox to store cookies for, but this technique has helped me avoid accumulating tons of unwanted cookies in Firefox. I hope it’s helpful for you.

I was reading an article about adding code to JavaScript to make it more functional, and one of the blog commenters mentioned some built-in features that were added to JavaScript 1.6 & 1.7 on Firefox, so I checked out the links (see below) - very cool stuff.

• Array methods
  • indexOf
  • lastIndexOf
  • every
  • filter
  • forEach
  • map
  • some
• Array & String generics
• Generators & Iterators
• Array Comprehensions
• Block Scope w/ let
• Destructuring Assignment
• etc.

They won’t help if you have to target IE also, but it should be possible to conditionally include your own code to implement the ones that don’t require syntactic changes for pages loaded from IE. That would reduce network load for customers using Firefox.

New in JavaScript 1.6 (Firefox 1.5)

New in JavaScript 1.7 (Firefox 2.0)

Hopefully IE will catch up someday, but if not, I can see taking advantage of Firefox specific JavaScript enhancements for niche applications. Firefox is so easy to install, that it should be easy to convince customers to use it for certain custom applications.

I wrote an article back in May about a way to give half star ratings on Netflix. It had the advantage of working in any browser and not requiring any software installation, but it wasn’t very user friendly.

Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of JavaScript coding, so I thought I’d give Greasemonkey a try. I found a script here to give half-star ratings, but I didn’t care for the hover captions and JSLint pointed out a few issues, so I cleaned it up a little:

Code

// ==UserScript==
// @name Netflix Half Stars
// @description allows half star user ratings on Netflix
// @include http://*netflix.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
// http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/8118
// Modified by Brian Adkins

return 0;
};


Installation

Save the JavaScript code with .user.js extension e.g. netflix_halfstar.user.js and then open that file in Firefox and Greasemonkey should prompt you to install it.

This is so easy, you’re gonna love it! Thanks Tyler Pedersen.

Motivation

I’ve been using my laptop more frequently at wifi hotspots. Many web sites I visit encrypt traffic with SSL for authentication, but after that they send traffic in the clear which means the cookies that are used for authentication purposes are sent in the clear, so anyone with a sniffer within range of my laptop could easily intercept the traffic, steal my cookies and impersonate me on the web site. Not good! So, I went looking for a simple solution, and found a great article about using ssh for this purpose. Ya gotta love open source software

Prerequisites

I’ll assume the following:

1. You’ve used ssh before
2. You have access to a remote host running sshd

How To

Issue the following command on your local computer:

ssh -Nf username@hostname.com -D 1080

replace username@hostname.com with the appropriate information. Look at the man page for ssh, or read the article linked above for an explanation of the options.

The next step is to configure Firefox to use the SOCKS proxy you setup with the above command. I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Ubuntu 7.04 Linux.

Edit | Preferences | Advanced | Settings

Pulls up the following dialog:

Notice how I’ve switched from “Direct connection to the Internet” to “Manual proxy configuration”. I’ve also set the SOCKS Host to be ‘localhost’ and the port to be ‘1080′.

I can now surf and have encrypted traffic between my local computer and the remote host I ssh’d to. The traffic between my remote host and the destination web site will be unencrypted, but hopefully that traffic is harder to sniff without being detected.

At this point, I tested it out and everything worked fine. I then killed my local ssh process and Firefox complained about the connection being reset, so I knew it was in fact sending data over the ssh tunnel.

The final step is optional, but if you want to avoid having the bad guys detect your DNS requests (or possibly redirect them - d’oh!), you can configure Firefox to route DNS requests through the proxy.

1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.
2. Look for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and set the value to true

Is that easy or what? Thanks again Tyler.

Facebook.com just ran an ad that was quite offensive to me. I should’ve taken Scott Moonen’s advice from his blog earlier, but better late than never. He has simple instructions for installing Adblock on his blog. Check it out and get rid of ads!

Here’s a set of 3 videos by Douglas Crockford on the DOM that were in between his JavaScript and Advanced JavaScript presentations. Pretty basic material, but you may find a few helpful hints. A few comments:

1. Comment hack for JavaScript hasn’t been necessary for 10 years!
2. language=javascript has been deprecated
3. type=’text/javascript’ is ignored if you use the src attribute
4. remove any event handlers of a node before deleting it due to MS garbage collection incompetencies
5. avoid trickling, bubbling is where the action is

Theory of the DOM Part 1 of 3

Theory of the DOM Part 2 of 3

Theory of the DOM Part 3 of 3

I was listening to Buzz Out Loud and Tom mentioned being able to run Firefox from within Firefox from within …

Copy and paste the following URL into the location bar in Firefox:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Is that cool, or what?