Nasty new web site trick

[Oniya]

So, Mr Oniya was surfing some adult sites today, and tried navigating away from one in particular after he was finished with it.  Note, I said tried.  I'm sure that you've all seen the sneaky pop-ups that say 'Are you sure you don't want to stay?  Click "OK" to stay on this page, or "Cancel" to navigate away.'  This one had the same text, but the window extended to the point where it went below the bottom of the monitor, even on the highest resolution.  After switching the monitor's display to 'Portrait' (essentially flipping it on its side), I found that not only was the window excessively long, but there were no buttons!

The only way to get out of it was to kill the Firefox process (Ctrl-Alt-Del), and restart the computer - twice.  The first time, Firefox respawned the tabs (like normal) and the second time, it apologized for not being able to respawn one of the tabs.

Thought people should know.

[Avis habilis]

Did Alt-F4 not work?

[Oniya]

Any regular attempt to close the web page or the pop-up gave a 'ding' and the pop-up flashed (the way it flashes to say 'You need to do something here first.')

[jouzinka]

Did you report it to FF support? They would likely block it as an attacking site...

Thanks for the warning though. :-)

[Avis habilis]

Hmm. So no chrome, alarm bell when you try to do anything - sounds like some kind of JavaScript alert window. Now how they managed to blow it up to that size, that's an interesting question.

Anyhow, thanks for the heads up.

[Oniya]

I'd imagine that a window that size could be easily made by padding with
 tags (didn't think to look at the source - should have!) and something to prevent a scrollbar

It looked like your basic infinite loop:  [buttonpress] = False.  If [buttonpress] = True, then [react], else [beep]; with no way of altering [buttonpress].  Antivirus didn't light up or anything.

[Avis habilis]

You're probably right about the loop. If "OK keep looking at pr0n" button clicked, go back to pr0n. If "go away" button clicked, flash the same window again & again until pr0n is clicked.

[Oniya]

Except neither button is provided to click - so it ends up being broken.

[Haibane]

Actually it sounds like some eejit screwed up the code.

[MasterMischief]

There have been a few times I have to go into Task Manager.

Oops.  I just admited to surfing pr0n, didn't I?

>.>

[HairyHeretic]

Task manager would let you kill the whole browser, but not that one tab though.

[Oniya]

Right.  Apparently individual tab processes are yet to be implemented in Firefox.

[Avis habilis]

So can you kill one Chrome tab at a time? I thought I remembered reading that they were each their own process.

[Oniya]

I don't have any experience with Chrome.  After this happened, I went looking to see if there was a way to kill a single Firefox tab that I just hadn't known about, and found a Mozilla forum posting that hinted that they were thinking of implementing it in a later version.  Whether that's going to be in 4.0 or something further down the pipeline wasn't mentioned.

[Lilias]

So can you kill one Chrome tab at a time? I thought I remembered reading that they were each their own process.

A quick experiment says no *sadface*