Every once and a while, I come across a website where some bumblefuck idiot tries to stop visitors from right-clicking on their page, usually in a sad little attempt to prevent people from downloading their images. They copy and paste the little Javascript trick to disable right-clicking and sleep peacefully, under the impression that their dearest little JPEGS are safe and secure.

Anyone with half a brain cell should know that if you’re going to insist on controlling your content and being a greedy little fuck, putting your crap on a website is not the way to go. By viewing a web page , your computer is requesting and downloading the files that create the page to it’s hard drive and then displaying them in your browser. If you put an image in a web page, anyone who views it has already downloaded it. Disabling the right-click is not only pointless and retarded, it’s really fucking annoying and a bit insulting. Who the fuck tells you what you can or cannot right-click on? Screw that!

If someone’s decided to go all control freaky and disable right-clicking, they should know that it takes me all of a few seconds to open my browser cache to get at it. Easy shit.

So fuck this anti-right-clicking shit. It pisses me off. I rarely make a habit of using images from other websites and if I do, it’s a site that has an explicit Creative Commons license encouraging me to do so. So why be such a hater? Loosen that sphincter! Your shitty Photoshop Elements pixel vomit is hardly worth stealing anyway.

It’s possible that at this point, dearest reader, that you may be picking up on the fact that this stupid little practice seriously irritates me. Okay, okay, I admit it. It makes me want stab things and fling poop like an irate Rhesus monkey. So is daveb the type of punk-ass bitch to take this no right-clicking shit by bending over, grabbing his ankles and reciting the Lord’s Prayer? Fuck no, people of the world! You can disable that shit permanently and he’s going to show you how. This wild man we call daveb rules!

First off, this tutorial assumes you are using Firefox 1.5. If you’re not using it, you should be, so switch. Do it. Do it now. It’s the dog’s fucking balls, daveb swears. Got it? Cool.

Disabling right-click blocking with Firefox

1. Open Firefox (duh)
2. Get all up in your options/preferences. It varies by OS. For Linux, it’s Edit>Preferences. OSX is Firefox>Preferences. Windows hides it in Tools>options.
3. From there, get your ass into the section named “Content” and find the little checkbox named “enable Javascript” and click the “Advanced” button that’s next to it. This will pop up a new little options window.
4. In this window, you will see a checkbox named “Disable or replace context menus“. Uncheck that shit!

That’s it!

If you’re a Firefox junky like me, you probably take the built in pop-up blocker for granted. It’s a dandy little feature that helps make browsing bearable. However, you may have noticed that over the past few months, the blocker seems to be letting stuff through. This is due to scumbag pop-up spammers taking a new tactic by using Flash to trigger the new windows. The honeymoon is looking to be at an end.

But, before you hang yourself from the shower curtain rod, there’s a way around this issue. Pour a stiff drink, sit down, tear up the suicide notes (you really aren’t sorry for all the trouble you’ve caused anyway, c’mon) and prepare to do some fixing!

How to stop pop-ups from Flash in Firefox

1. Open a window in Firefox (…duh) and type about:config in the address bar.
2. Right-click (CTRL + click for Mac users) on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
   
4. Set the value to 2.

That’s it motherfucker! You’re a man now. Have a cigar or something. Buck the fuck up, you did it yourself. Stop slouching. It’s okay to smile, but ain’t a damn thing funny…yadda, yadda, yadda.

To take it further, you can adjust the value of the integer (we’d set it at 2) to customize how strong the pop-up spanking should be:

• 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
• 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
• 2: Block popups from plugins.
• 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.

Just thought I’d spread the word. Thanks Pete Bevin for figuring it out and thanks StumbleUpon for bringing it to my attention.

The thing that I like the most about Firefox is the customization you can have through extensions and themes. There’s a lot of really great stuff out there that can really change the way you can interact with web pages. I try not to run too many plugins, although I have no real reason for feeling like I need to be conservative about it. Since listing your favorite plugins seems to be the thing to do and honestly, reading other people’s posts about their preferred plugins is the main way I find out about new ones I can’t live without, I figured I’d make a list of my own.

1. Spellbound: A simple and easy to use spell check plugin. I’ve played with other spell check plugins for WordPress and also back when I was using Movable Type and while all three work well, Spellbound took 3 minutes to install, runs locally and is usable with any text input form on any website. It rocks my world and is the sole reason this post is not full of misspellings.
2. Sage: A lightweight RSS aggregator. I’ve used RSS aggregators infrequently for a few years now and it’s only until recently, using Sage, that I’ve actually begun to rely on them. Sage operates out of the sidebar and uses a customizable style sheet to display the feeds. It works well.
3. Adblock: Perhaps the most awesome, shockingly powerful plugin to end all plugins. Adblock stops advertisements, both image and Flash. It works better than any of the closed source proprietary programs I’ve used in the past and had to pay for. Plus, since you can actively manage and train it, you can enjoy a certain giddy pleasure at discovering a new URL string or keyword to add to the blacklist. Adblock is the one plugin above all others that I consider essential to civilized browsing
4. Bookmarks Synchronizer: I use Firefox both at home as well as at work and I find it handy to be able to have access to my bookmarks wherever I go. This plugin will export your bookmarks to an encrypted xml file and upload to a web directory of your designation as well as download this file and synchronize it with your bookmarks, enabling to be able to maintain one organized list of links instead of having them spread out amongst more than one machine. While it’s true that other systems exist for manging links such as del.icio.us, which I use I use as well, but I still find this plugin very useful and considering the fact that del.icio.us is often down, it doesn’t hurt to be making your own backups.
5. SwitchProxy: If you occasionally need to use a proxy because you’re a student, connect to several different networks or are a bit on the paranoid side like I am, SwitchProxy manages any amount of proxy profiles for you and makes switching between them as simple a pushing a button on the bottom of the browser window.
6. Gmail Notifier: Simply a small icon, residing in the bottom right of your browser window that reports when you have received mail to the specified Gmail account. Handy.
7. PasswordMaker: A small, lightweight, free, open-source extension for Firefox and Mozilla which creates unique, secure passwords that are very easy to retrieve. Nothing is stored anywhere, anytime, so there’s nothing to be hacked, lost, or stolen. You designate a “master password”, one, single password you like and the URL of the website requiring a password. Through the magic of one-way hash algorithms, passwordmaker calculates a message digest, also known as a digital fingerprint, which can be used as your password for the website. The resulting fingerprint (password) does “not reveal anything about the input that was used to generate it.” In other words, if someone has one or more of your passwordmaker-generated passwords, it is computationally infeasible for him to derive your master password or to calculate your other passwords. It makes you feel a lot better about the fact that you are too brain damaged to remember more than one dumb-ass password.
8. X Paranoia: Puts a little icon that gives you one-click browser cookie/cache/history clearing convenience.
9. Go Up: Enables a keyboard shortcut as well as a button to enable you to navigate up a directory of any website, for those moments you might be feeling sneaky.
10. Image Zoom: Not like the really annoying default resize thing with Explorer, this plugin lets you manually resize and zoom images as you need. I use it daily for a for a variety of scenarios.
11. Web Developer Toolbar: This is one seriously handy toolbar. Edit CSS. Validate. Outline elements and display all kinds of information about the page you are working on.

While I use several other plugins on a regular basis, this list is what I would term as the most essential and the first things I add after a fresh Firefox install. Alone or as a team, they improve my web browsing experience immensely. Fuck Internet Explorer.