Friday, February 19, 2016

Prevent websites from hiding UI elements in Firefox browser window

This is freaking annoying
I find it very annoying when websites disable the menu bar, back and forward buttons, navigation bar, or bookmarks in windows. Banking websites and Paypal both have pop-up windows that 'castrate' my browser.

The JavaScript / HTML code that does this is quite straightforward; this is a comma-separated properties list of string tokens that define the new window behaviour:
window.open ("url","title",
"toolbar=no,
status=no,
scrollbars=no,
resizable=no,
location=no,
directories=no,
copyhistory=no,
menubar=no")

It took some digging, but Firefox allows you to disable modification of the attributes of windows with a little bit of about:config magic. Simply search for disable_window_open_feature as shown below, and double-click on the attributes that you don't want websites to be able to enable or disable. My preferences are to manually set the following properties to true:

  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.personalbar
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.toolbar

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