April 11th, 2007
Ugh... that just might be the worst title I've ever written...
For a "ultra-top secret"™ web application I've been working on, I need to take all focus away from the browser screen, and allow/force the user to interact with a window before being able to continue. Commonly, these are called modal windows, and gained some credibility for having practical uses with Lokesh Dhakar's wonderful Lightbox script (incidently, I use a variation of it on this script on DerekAllard.com).
There are many variations of modal windows running around, but I wanted a simple, unanimated "overlay" would would require a user's interaction, so I set about to build my own. The first thing I needed, was an alpha transparent div to sit on top of the whole screen. I stole was inspired by Matthew Pennel's great article on Easy Cross Browser Transparency, and began building from there. The ultimate alpha transparent solution I chose was a pure CSS base.
Continue reading “Inspired by Lightbox: Anatomy of a Modal Window”. Posted in
Browsers, How-To, Javascript with 5 comments 
April 07th, 2007
One of my very favourite-est Firefox extensions, Firebug, has a security update
About an hour ago I received word of a 0-day security exploit that has been discovered and reported. I have just released a new Firebug (version 1.03) with a fix for this bug, and I recommend that everyone install it as soon as possible.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Firebug Exploit… upgrade time”. Posted in
Browsers, Javascript with no comments
March 07th, 2007
Are you reading this page in Internet Explorer 6? For shame…
I’ve never thought that my site attracted an “average” interweb visitor. I mean, we talk about boring things like accessibility, frameworks, scripting… the kind of things that makes Joanne roll her eyes if I even think about getting started*. In short, my readers tend to be web-savvy, standards-aware and generally pretty technically “hip”, so it doesn’t surprise me in the least that most of you would choose to surf in something besides Internet Explorer.
Continue reading “Browser Stats for DerekAllard.com for March 2007”. Posted in
Browsers, Noteworthy with 8 comments
February 09th, 2007
As if you needed a reason to stay up to date, but its worth noting that a validation error in the processing of certain tags has been reported in the Sage RSS reader extension for Firefox. This can be exploited to insert and execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a local context by tricking a user into adding a malicious feed and then viewing its contents.
I've recommended Sage in the past, and fortunately this was fixed some time ago in Sage 1.3.10, so run your updates.
Continue reading “Sage Vulnerability Reported”. Posted in
Browsers with 1 comment
January 11th, 2007
One of the more innovative things I’ve seen lately for Firefox is the Tab Effect Extension. It adds an interesting transition between tabs reminiscent of how Suse handles desktop transitions.
I’ve got to admit it does look sexy, but after living with it for 5 minutes, I’ve already removed it. The authors should be commended for creating this wonderful extension, but to me this is a clear case of eye-candy getting in the way of practicality.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Tab Effect for Firefox”. Posted in
Browsers, Quick Links with 4 comments
December 07th, 2006
If you use pretty much any browser except IE 6 (more on that later) when you visit this site, you've probably noticed that the dark-grey sidebar scrolls with you just until the banner and menu are off the page, and then locks itself into position or "sticks". When you scroll back to the top, if the menu and/or banner need to be seen again, the sidebar politely resumes its normal scrolling duties. Go ahead, try it now, I'll wait. Fun isn't it? I've had a number of people comment on that, so I thought I would outline how I accomplished it.
Continue reading “Conditionally Sticky Sidebar”. Posted in
Browsers, Javascript with 13 comments
December 04th, 2006
One of my favourite Firefox extensions has just released a new version. Firebug announced today that the 1.0 version is out now in beta, and even more importantly, has been released under the same open source license as Firefox itself. From the site: Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
Fancy-pants DOM features abound, and the usual AJAX debugging goodness is in there. Thanks go to Joe Hewitt.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Firebug 1.0 is out in beta”. Posted in
Browsers, Quick Links with no comments
November 04th, 2006
I don't like the way Firefox 2 handles closing tabs. Here's how I fixed my Firefox to get back to the behaviour I wanted.
Continue reading “Firefox 2 tabs - Hate em…”. Posted in
Browsers, How-To with 1 comment
November 04th, 2006
I can't believe I just discovered this now. The Tamper Data extension for Firefox.
TamperData is an extension to track and modify http/https requests. It is great for security testing and just in general trying to break your applications. In fact, if breaking is what you want to do, check out the pre-packaged built in SQL Injections, Cross Site Scripting (XXS) vulnerabilities and other goodies.
Continue reading “Tamper Data for Fun and Security”. Posted in
Browsers with no comments
October 24th, 2006
Get it now. http://www.mozilla.com/
Good God I hate the new location of the tab closing button.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Firefox 2 is out”. Posted in
Browsers, Quick Links with no comments
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