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My name is Veeti Paananen. I live in Finland, and I write desktop and web applications using technologies such as Qt and Ruby on Rails. This is my personal website and blog. Close this...
2 Comments » Why can JavaScript & alert lock up a browser?
January 26th, 2009
JavaScript often provides “Web 2.0″ functionality to websites. But one of the simplest commands that is still being used to date is the alert box:
Hello World!
Simple, right? Useful? Yes. But what about websites with malicious intents (we’re using this word in a “light way”; what can JS do?): what if we want to lock up the browser?
Create an infinite loop of alert boxes. The only way out seems to be killing the browser process (or with Chrome, the tab process). This brings us to an question – why?
A good example of this is how in Firefox 2, the Password Manager dialog was intrusive, like this (it also blocked any user input until a button was pushed):
(What happened to the Vista theme?)
While in Firefox 3, it shows up a prompt like this at the top of the page, that does not block any user interaction (like an alert prompt):
Much better
You can see where I’m aiming at. Why can’t we have something like this for the alert box too? Why does the alert box block the browser? The user should still be able to interact with the browser even with an infinite loop of them. A similar solution is used for some security alerts in Internet Explorer, but not any user JavaScript.
There’s actually a Mozilla bug tracker issue about it. From 2000.
GoDaddy
January 18th, 2009
First post of my new personal website/blog! Yay!
This domain (tuntis.net) was registered at GoDaddy in 2005. I also used their shared hosting for a year. This post is about my bad experiences with them and a generic complaint at their aggressive marketing.
To date, I remember all the extra products and ads they pushed at me while registering my domain. No, I don’t want e-mail hosting; I don’t want hosting… I just want to register a domain! After the registration, I used a free host for a while to host a very early personal website of mine. After that, I decided to buy GoDaddy’s Linux Shared Web Hosting.
That was a huge mistake. I’m sure you can find a lot of hateful writing about them already in the internet, but one blog post more can’t hurt.
Incidentally, I had trouble with my first blog I tried to install on their hosting package. That’s one of the reasons why I later moved to another host. I think that was WordPress version 2.1 or something.
Anyway… back to GoDaddy’s hosting. Here’s a small disclaimer, first: I haven’t used it in about 2 years. Things might have changed, but a friend of mine doesn’t seem to think so.
GoDaddy’s hosting control panel sucks. A really huge problem with it was that whatever you wanted to do, would get added to a queue. Any action usually took hours to execute (like creating a simple MySQL database).
Speaking of the MySQL databases, they were all hosted on remote servers (“secureserver.net”). I kept trying to install WordPress with the DB address as “localhost” before I even realized what I was doing wrong.
I recall having a lot of speed issues with these databases. And anything you did in the control panel seriously took an hour to complete. Sometimes even more, as I mentioned above.
I’m not going to get into much technicalities here, but GoDaddy kept dropping MySQL connections. I kept getting 500 Internal Server Errors.
So I moved hosts. But now, back to present day.
In December, Dreamhost (referrer link) ran a “get 1 year of hosting for 9$” promotion. I fell for it – and bought it for my small photography site that I had just finished. It’s been really great so far.
Anyway, I then decided to move my personal website (tuntis.net) to DH too (which you are now reading). When I went to change my nameservers at GoDaddy, I saw the following:
GoDaddy likes to advertise a lot.
This for some reason ticked me off. Sure, it’s just a small ad – but think about it. Do other domain registrars show you this? No, they don’t. Namecheap doesn’t.
I’ve decided to transfer tuntis.net to Namecheap once it’s about to expire and never use GoDaddy again. It’s not just the ads – but GoDaddy’s domain management interface is very bulky, too. And why would I keep maintaining 1 domain on another registrar instead of transferring?
But the ads are a major contribution in why I’ll transfer.