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Comment by feross | Hacker News Reader

One by one, the Chrome engineers continue to chip away at the techniques in The Annoying Site https://theannoyingsite.com (warning: open in a secondary browser).

Talk video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFZ-pwErSl4 Source code here: https://theannoyingsite.com/index.js

Well done.

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Wow, Firefox failed the chaos monkeyt test miserably! Felt like IE in 2001!

Don't open this site with 'reopen tabs after crash' option activated!! How can they even popup so much and how can the print dialog disable closing buttons??

Looking at the video, Chrome and Safari are in no way better off. Still, I thought popups were fixed 2008.

By the "choas monkey test" do you mean the annoying site in the parent comment? I'm using FireFox and it didn't do much for me. As I mentioned in another comment, I have set popups to appear in tabs, and that seems to mostly neuter the site.

It still managed to go full screen and play audio in the form of Nyein cat and some text to speech, which admittedly was annoying. But I managed to close the site and any "popup" tabs it made with two actions: Alt+F4 (I'm on Windows) followed by clicking "leave page". I had opened the site in its own window so my existing tabs were unaffected, but I wouldn't have been much worse off if I hadn't.

I believe Safari has an option to send all popups to tabs rather than new windows, so it is probably affected to a similar (low) level as FireFox. But I don't believe that Chrome has this option.

What is allowing site JS to physically move the browser window on my screen and how do I burn this feature with fire?

This only works in popup windows. According to the guy who made this website [1] this is to stop cross-origin communication, which is quite interesting. But it also has the effect that if you force popup windows to appear in tabs rather than windows then you do indeed burn the feature with fire. And IMO it's worth doing anyway, because no one has the right to open a browser window on my computer except me. It's possible in FireFox by changing browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 in about:config [2].

[1] https://youtu.be/QFZ-pwErSl4?t=558

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1066799

FireFox used to have an option to disallow pop ups to move themselves... I can't find that setting anymore, and I think Chrome used to as well, it still might. It's one of the first things I disable on my browsers due to some prank sites using this tactic for maximum trolling.

The "dom.disable_window_move_resize" preference is still there. There doesn't seem to be UI for it, but it can certainly be set in about:config.

I wonder what could possibly be a use case why they would allow it and even built an API/interface for that.

Window.moveBy()

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/move...

"how do I burn this feature with fire?"

What I do (for different reasons, but would still be effective) is to not allow Javascript to execute. Sites that are so poorly designed that they cannot operate without Javascript enabled are sites I simply don't use.

I shouldn't have done that. Though my downloads are now filled with cats which is nice :)

Jeez. probably could have done with a "don't open this in work" warning too...

>https://theannoyingsite.com

This is worse than I thought.

Dear god. I didn't even know some of these things were possible to do via JS.

There was a cat and mouse game with adblockers and websockets a couple years ago, but I'm not sure how things work now.

Is anyone keeping an annotated list of annoyingsite techniques, to see what's still broken?

I'd love to gaze at the medusa, but indirectly if at all possible.

Opened it in chrome (my primary browser) in a new tab. It wasn't that bad to kill all the pop-ups from the task bar in windows. Took about a few minutes (<5). Rest of my open tabs remained unaffected.

Does anybody follows those "warning" advices?

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