Skuunk Works

On my site we noticed that some of our users had some JavaScript problems which was affecting content editing. After a bit of nosing around we found the problem was a Firefox extension called The Browser Highlighter. This extension was created by eBay and it injects some JavaScript into the page which can affect the JS in your site. You can view this JavaScript in Firebug (it is in the script tag added just after the head tag) What follows is a means of detecting this extension so you can protect your code from it. Unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox does not provide an API into detecting browser extensions, but there is a work around. If the extension injects a graphic into the page (which this one does), it does so by referencing it from the chrome protocol. i.e. chrome://shim/content/compareLang-1/eBayCompareIcon_yellow.gif as opposed to the normal http protocol So all you have to do is reference this image and place an onload event on it. If the event fires then the extension is install...

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx Yay, the "geniuses" (genii?) at Microsoft are finally doing something right! IE8 will now render in standards mode by default (and if you want to make it run on IE7 mode you have to put in some meta tag thingy). If by standards mode they mean it will render pages like Firefox then I am happy. Now all they have to do is put some Windows update code out there which will permanently destroy all copies of IE6 so no one will even think of using it anymore. In all reality and sadness, I know we should be encouraging everyone to use Firefox, but unfortunately most people just use their system's default browser... I am not even really happy about Safari for that matter...