Firefox 6 for web developers | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 6 for web developers

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150 pointstbassetto31 comments

"For security reasons, data: and javascript: URIs no longer inherit the security context of the current page when the user enters them in the location bar; instead, a new, empty, security context is created. This means that script loaded by entering javascript: URIs in the location bar no longer has access to DOM methods and the like, for example. These URIs continue to work as before when used by script, however."

Good bye bookmarklets?

I believe bookmarklets still work -- the restriction only applies if the javascript: URIs were typed in by the user.

Right. Apparently this "security" feature came about because people followed instructions on random facebook pages saying "paste this in your address bar to activate $RANDOM_FAKE_FACEBOOK_FEATURE".

You can still run Javascript via the Scratchpad (Web Developer -> Scratchpad, or hit Shift-F4).

Interesting. Copying the TinEye bookmarklet,

    javascript:void(window.open('http://tineye.com/search?pluginver=bookmark_1.0&url='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(document.URL)));

into the address bar did nothing; an "Error: uncaught exception: ReferenceError: window is not defined" was logged in the error console.

Clicking it as normal worked as expected, though.

Sounds smart. It's extremely easy to get an unsophisticated user (heck, any user who isn't a web developer) to paste a random string of junk in to their URL bar - and doing so is a very nasty XSS vector that works no matter what precautions a site's developers have taken.

I'm sure I've heard of this attack being used successfully on Facebook, spread through messages that say "paste this in to your URL bar to get X".

So those messages will say "press [whatever key combo activates the console] and paste this text there for a funny video" instead?

Or possibly "drag this link to the toolbar and click when on any page on Facebook to see which of your friends is viewing that page" or whatever.

Hopefully there is an about:config to undo that for power-users.

Yeah, I caught this hanging out at the bottom of the list too... Immediately set to thinking how I'm gonna have to go rewrite the dozen or so bookmarklets I've written to support FF6

Bookmarklets are not affected when used as bookmarks. Only URIs typed directly into the location bar are affected.

Oh, sweet.

> WebSockets are back!

I have a feeling that's going to make a lot of people very happy. Good to see that they were able to solve the security issues.

Server-sent events seem awesome as well. Open a connection to the server, let it stream you events, and each one generates a Javascript event.

It's hard to believe it's 2011 and there's still no standard way of sending data from a server to a browser other than ajax and comet trickery.

This sounds like a step in the right direction.

Also seems like server-sent events should be a lot easier to pass through standard load balancers and proxies than web sockets. Very cool...

For what it’s worth, you have to update your client code to instantiate a MozWebSocket and update your server to support the latest protocol. I know, because I’ve done this today :) We’re using the em-websocket gem though which has been updated recently so it really wasn’t that difficult.

Mozilla is supporting a new version of websockets (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=640003) that as of a week ago did not work with a lot of popular libraries yet (socket.io). Its awesome to see better security features in place and I hope that library distributors are fast to follow up with changes in their library.

Happy about websockets.

But mostly excited for FF 7 with the memory management improvements. http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...

Firebug needs a manual update. see http://getfirebug.com/downloads

[edited to add firebug link]

Learned that

Meh, I've been using FF8 nightly for a few weeks and the memory improvements are modest at best. I just had to restart my browser because it got up to 650mb even after closing tabs.

It may be caused by poorly written extensions and/or extensions "forced" to be compatible with nightlies.

Thanks for adopting the existing "standard" for touches, now I can remove some of the extra code I had for F4 mobile.

Awesome! Please let us know if you find any problems with the touch events in Fx6 mobile. (You can contact me directly at mbrubeck@mozilla.com or file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org under the "Fennec" product.)

I think my favorite part is that they've finally added an auto-update feature. If you open about Firefox, it checks to determine whether or not you're up to date. Especially if they're going to be bringing out frequent releases, I don't want to be constantly reinstalling Firefox.

That's been there since 4.0 for me.

That's been there for a while - I'd prefer if they would silently update the browser in the background and active it on the next restart, just as Chrome does.

I hate being told that Firefox 5.0 or 6.0 is out, only to find out that there are barely any major changes in this seemingly major version. If you want to release more often and make it a more seemless process, the app should stop announcing each new version like a major release.

The app doesn't announce each new version unless you have add-ons that are incompatible with the new version (in which case you get a dialog telling you so), last I checked.

It does tell you that it's applying an update when you do the update startup, so far. That's likely to go away as well.

It'll be interesting to see whether sites start using the CSS auto-hyphenation features....

That's good, but what I really want to know is "Will Firebug still work after I upgrade?"

Yes: https://getfirebug.com/downloads/

Server sent events and WebSockets are the +1 for me!

I'm getting a download rate of anywhere from 4kb/s to 10kb/s for the download. :'(

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