You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘firefox’ tag.
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 http://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
if (!unsafeWindow.sbHandler) { return; }
var sbHandler = unsafeWindow.sbHandler;
sbHandler.sbOffsets = [8,18,27,37,46,56,65,75,84,94];
sbHandler.displayStrings[0.5] = ".5 stars";
sbHandler.displayStrings[1.5] = "1.5 stars";
sbHandler.displayStrings[2.5] = "2.5 stars";
sbHandler.displayStrings[3.5] = "3.5 stars";
sbHandler.displayStrings[4.5] = "4.5 stars";
sbHandler.sbImages[0.5] = new Image();
sbHandler.sbImages[0.5].src = sbHandler.imageRoot+"stars_2_5.gif";
for(var i = 2; i < 11; i++) {
sbHandler.sbImages[i/2] = new Image();
sbHandler.sbImages[i/2].src = sbHandler.imageRoot + "stars_2_" +
(Math.floor(i/2)) + (i % 2 === 0 ? "0" : "5") + ".gif";
}
sbHandler.getStarCount = function (evt) {
var x = unsafeWindow.getElementMouseCoordinate(evt, this.element);
for(var ii = 0; ii < 10; ii++) {
if(x <= this.sbOffsets[ii]) { return (ii + 1) / 2; }
}
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.
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!
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?
Recent Comments