I recently worked on a website

http://www.instrunet.com

and I ran into an issue here w/ these newer browsers w/ all the blocking features.

If one goes to

http://www.instrunet.com/dll

it is supposed to redirect to another page via jscript

location.replace( gRedirectToThisNewUrl );

yet on safari/mac, this is not working. On IE-WinXp, it does fine. I’m not sure about firefox and IE-Mac, yet I have a Mac 10ft away from me and when I press the POST button, I’m going to open it and see what it does here.

I’m not sure what to do here. I definitely need to redirect from one page to another.

ALSO, I’m running into trouble on MANY websites where the back button does not work properly when in the middle of an order. I think the blocking software is causing trouble.

I’m not sure how we get blocked junk AND nicely working sites.

The internet is definitely not a civilised place. I’m still using Mozilla, and that bloody “crazy frog” advertisement – some mobile phone ring tune that got into the music top ten? – drove me crazy, playing the tune from “Beverly Hills Cop” ad nauseum until I finangled my hosts file to make squid fail to resolve the origin site of the ad.

And now, bare seconds after reading your blog, I find that my CPU is around 85%, doing nothing. At least it wasn’t supposed to be doing anything. Turns out that http://www.dictionary.com, which I usually have up, sometimes runs a very very very ‘verbose’ advertisement for smilies at the top of the page. I assume it’s just an animated gif, but one with heaps of winking, smiling, nudging, wobbling, giggling and INFURIATING bloody smilies all doing their thing.

I think I’m going to have to nobble another host or two in my /etc/hosts file …

I’ve found ie to be the best browser.

YKW: I can’t see how that is, except possibly for the fact that because of Microsoft’s domination, that too many lazy web page designers have done what Bill Gates wants: design their sites so they work on IE and nothing else. That doesn’t mean that IE is the best browser, though–it simply means that they have become the dominant browser, by means of sheer market domination. It may be the standard browser, but it sure as heck is not the best one.

IE has had only one upgrade outside of security fixes for years. It lacks tabbed browsing and other features standard elsewhere, has only just recently added a pop-up blocker, is full of security holes, is the target of most virus, adware and spyware attacks, and is woefully behind most other browsers, especially Firefox.

I guess when I say “ie is the best browser”, I’m not referring to it’s features, I’m referring to the fact that it works the best w/ the websites I visit, which, yes, is due to ms’s market domination. Yet I can’t worry about that. I need to browse, browse quickly, and have websites run w/o buggy behaviour. Therefore, I’m a big fan of IE !

YKW: then you should use Firefox most of the time, and then when a site doesn’t work, go to IE for that. A bit kludgy, but it’ll wind up giving you the best of both worlds, making your browsing safer and generally easier, I would think.

Even a noted Windows guru recommends not to use the new IE 7.0 coming up…

IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch
By Paul Thurrott, August 2, 2005
more discussion at this Slashdot page.

– – – – – – – –

Regarding ads, popups, etc, I’ve long used the ad blocking scheme discussed on the Mozilla Tips page…

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/adblock

This entails updating a few files in the Firefox user profile folder, namely ‘userContent.css’. And it supposedly works for both Windows and Mac (maybe Linux too).

I use Windows and ever since adding these files, except for occasional false positives, I’ve not had any problems whatsoever with any popups or ads of any sort, on any page, including that obnoxious smiley one on the http://www.dictionary.com page. I think that might have been the one that prompted me to look for a simple and better solution in the first place.

More details of exactly how to set up these files are discussed at these links. The second link has the latest text files you can just copy and use to create the necessary text files on your system.

Note: You can either stuff all the code into the ‘userContent.css’ file, or better, leave the ‘userContent.css’ file basically alone, create two separate CSS files, ‘ad_blocking.css’ and ‘sites.css’, and then import them from the ‘userContent.css’ file. The second link explains how to do this. This 2nd link also describes a Styles tweaker too, but I don’t use this one. Not yet, anyway.

http://www.floppymoose.com/

http://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/

Also, I’ve identified some Japanese-site-specific lines to add to the ‘ad_blocking.css’ file, so if anyone wants those, let me know. What I did here, for simplicity though, is create a third file, ‘ad_blocking (Ron).css’, and then import this from the ‘userContent.css’ file as with the others. This is all shown in the diagram below, for Windows. Sorry, don’t know offhand how the Mac would be set up.

(in Windows)

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.default\chrome
    |
   +— userContent.css
       |
      +— ad_blocking.css
       |
      +— sites.css
       |
      +— ad_blocking (Ron).css
       |
      +— style.css [I’m not using this one.]

It’ll be interesting to see whether the new 1.5 beta does some of this tweaking inside the browser. It could be that these CSS files won’t be needed later, but somehow I doubt that.