Ok, so there have been some developments.<\/p>\n
Before I go into this though, I just want to make it clear that I have very little <\/em>knowledge or experience working with XUL, or writing Firefox extensions in general.\u00a0 I’ve dabbled, but I’m mostly ignorant.\u00a0 So all you Firefox aficionados out there…go easy on me.<\/p>\n So, developments:<\/p>\n Using this site<\/a>, I created a skeleton for my extension, calling it “alertCheck”.<\/p>\n And then I hit a brick wall right away, trying to find the right “alert” to override.<\/p>\n Let me explain.\u00a0 Mozilla extension development is strange for me because of all of the various layers to Firefox, and the distance<\/em> between the JavaScript in the extension, and any page that is loaded in the browser.\u00a0 It feels like a security layer – and it makes sense:\u00a0 you really<\/em> don’t want the Javascript on a website to monkey around with the internals of your browser.<\/p>\n Thankfully, this forum<\/a> and this forum<\/a> provided some help.<\/p>\n Now, after the appcontent is loaded, I wait for the DOMContentLoaded event to fire, and then write my new alert function to here:<\/p>\n The problem is, if I wait for the DOMContentLoaded event to fire, the alert override happens (obviously) after <\/em>all of the DOM Content is loaded into the browser.\u00a0 This is only useful if the alert’s that we want to capture are fired using <body onLoad> or some other function that detects when the DOM has been loaded.\u00a0 It’s no good for inline Javascript alerts, since these commands are parsed and executed line by line as the HTML is processed.<\/p>\n Phew.\u00a0 Big mouthful.<\/p>\n So, where does that leave me?\u00a0 Well, I was just hanging out in irc.mozilla.net in the #extdev channel.\u00a0 Here’s a chunk of what was said:<\/p>\n So maybe there’s another approach that I should be taking – I’m going to look into overriding commonDialog.xul… I’ll write more when I have it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ok, so there have been some developments. Before I go into this though, I just want to make it clear that I have very little knowledge or experience working with XUL, or writing Firefox extensions in general.\u00a0 I’ve dabbled, but I’m mostly ignorant.\u00a0 So all you Firefox aficionados out there…go easy on me. So, developments: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[380,5,220,44,68,51,79],"tags":[207,210,215,214,208,213,125,35,212],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alertcheck-firefox-extensions-technology","category-computer-science","category-firefox-extensions","category-internet","category-javascript","category-security","category-technology","tag-alert","tag-alertcheck","tag-commondialogxul","tag-contentalert","tag-dos","tag-extension","tag-firefox","tag-mozilla","tag-windowalert"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-69","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":670,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}document.getElementById('content').contentWindow.wrappedJSObject.alert<\/pre>\n<mike_conley> Hey all - I'm trying to write an extension to override window.alert, with an alertCheck that allows users to disable future alerts.\r\n<mike_conley> So far, I'm able to override alert by writing to document.getElementById('content').contentWindow.wrappedJSObject.alert\r\n<mike_conley> however, now it's a matter of timing - I'm doing the override after the DOMContentLoaded event is fired\r\n<mike_conley> But this means that it doesn't catch alerts that are fired using inline javascript.\r\n<mike_conley> So my question is, when should I do the override?\r\n<Mook> I suspect just overriding commonDialog.xul is easier\r\n<Mook> trying to poke the content JS's definition is going to be full of pain\r\n<mike_conley> Cool, I'll look into that - thanks!\r\n<Mook> (the content JS starts around http:\/\/mxr.mozilla.org\/mozilla\/source\/dom\/src\/base\/nsGlobalWindow.cpp#4022 and goes the the prompt service which pokes that xul)\r\n<mike_conley> Excellent - I appreciate it.<\/pre>\n