When I don’t have work to do, I get antsy.

And right now, I’ve got no work to do.

So I’ve come up with a project for myself:  remember how I created a Firefox Plugin a few months back?  I’d like to make another one – but this one will actually serve a useful purpose.

Have you ever been to a page that suddenly started spewing window.alert boxes at you?

If you haven’t, open up Firebug, and paste this into the console:

for(i = 0; i < 10; ++i){ alert(i); }

Now imagine if instead of 10 alert boxes, it spewed hundreds…or thousands….or god forbid, it uses a while(true) loop, and throws infinity alert boxes at you.

It totally cripples Firefox. It’s a super simple browser DoS attack.

Mozilla knows this, but so far, no solution except for killing the Firefox process, or disabling Javascript manually, or with NoScript (a plugin that I highly recommend).

Google Chrome has solved this problem by providing a checkbox on alert dialogs that allow a user to disable future popups from the current site.

Cool.  I want Firefox to have the same feature.

So, this summer, I’m going to try to build a Firefox Plugin that will override the standard window.alert function, with one that provides a checkbox, letting the user disable future alerts.

I don’t even know if this is possible, but I’m looking into it.

I’ll blog my research and progress as I go along, and share my code / final plugin when it’s all finished (or when I abandon it…hey, it happens).

So stay tuned.