Just been looking at Tilt, a Firefox add-in that shows a 3D visualisation of a webpage. The result is pretty spectacular.
Archive for the firefox tag
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Check out Tilt
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Session cookies not expiring when Firefox closes
I’ve just been looking into a slightly strange issue where closing Firefox and opening again didn’t clear out session cookies. It looks like in the latest version of Firefox this behaviour is by design if you have certain preferences set.
They have introduced a feature where closing the browser can remember the tabs you had open, and rehydrates these again when you start Firefox. This feature is controlled in the Settings > General > Startup section. If you have this set to Show my windows and tabs from last time, Firefox will no longer expire session cookies when the browser is closed.
This seems to be a pretty big security concern, as you are prompted to switch this setting on the first time you try to close the browser, so the majority of users would have this set-up. I’m not entirely sure how it decides when a session cookie should expire under these conditions, any ideas?
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Simulated Events and Firefox
Suppose you want to write some javascript to simulate an event taking place. For many of the common events, there is the equivalent method, so you can call click() on an element to simulate a mouse click. After a painful debugging session today I found that doing this in Firefox means that the wrong element ends up on the event.target property, which can cause various problems when you’re handling the event.
In this case I had an input element that was kicking off an ansychronous form submit when clicked. On top of this I’m implementing drag and drop behaviour, so I figured it would be as simple as simulating the click event when the item was dragged and dropped in the right way. The click handler already worked, and kicked off the async operation as desired, so it should be a nice layer on top.
The async operation basically hijacks the form submit if it is caused by certain elements, and performs an async post instead. The problem with the event target in Firefox meant that this behaviour never kicked in.
A workaround was to use dispatchEvent instead. This allows a simulated click which results in the correct event target set. This is in the W3C DOM level 2 spec, and is implemented in Firefox (but not IE).
