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Block a specific request by it's url in firefox

how to prevent firefox from making a specific request
to an url, ex: site.com/ajax/something.php
i have found a lot of addons but they couldn't really do the job they
can block requests to another domain but not an absolute uri,
Is there any way to accomplish this ?

The solution with addons is to use AdsBlockPlus->Filter preferences->Add filter, then simply put the url after || eg: ||facebook.com/ajax/mercury/change_read_status.phpwhich will prevent any requests to the url, Programmatically #Noitidart link is a perfect solution i was looking for that too.

Here you go man: firefox extension: intercepting url it is requesting and blocking conditionally
That uses observer service. Ideally you want to use nsIContentPolicy which i think is more performant but i dont have a solution with that to share. The Adblock Plus author is on this forum he may be able to give us a solution i can spam. :P

How can I change URL without refreshing page like Google+?

When I was examining Google+, I'm surprized when I see usage of URLs. Google profile URLs change without refresing page. For example this is a photos tab URL: https://plus.google.com/104560124403688998123/photos When you click Videos tab, URL exactly goes to https://plus.google.com/104560124403688998123/videos without refreshing page. How Google coders success this?

Have a look at the history object https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browser_history
Especially history.pushState and history.replaceState
(Should mention that this only works in modern browsers, for old ones use hashes).

This is about HTML 5. take a look at "onpopstate event". For further information go to the link. http://spoiledmilk.dk/blog/html5-changing-the-browser-url-without-refreshing-page

You could try using a pushState.
You can change the URL to another URL within the same domain, but can not change the domain for security reasons.In Javascript, you can use.
window.history.pushState(“object or string”, “Title”, “/new-url”);
Object and string is your domain ex. www.google.co.in
title you can give whats you want.
and lastly you place new url ex. 'webhp?source=search_app'
ex. window.history.pushState(“www.google.co.in”, “Google”, “/webhp?source=search_app”);

You could try using a hash. This is not how google does it, but it doesn't force a refresh. In Javascript, you can use
parent.location.hash = "Text";
so that the URL will be http://yoursite.com/yourpage#text
Edit: This seems to be new to Google+. GMail uses a hash like
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/130f48da33c5330

Call the function only after the browser is fully redirected?

<script>
function test() {
alert("this should only be called after the browser is fully redirected?");
}
window.location = "http://google.com";
test();
</script>
I'm about redirecting the user guys to a page and I want to do something (call a function) only after the browser is fully redirected but I can't get it to work. Is there any way for me to do so?

Is there any way for me to do so?
Nope. When the page has opened google.com, you no longer have any control over the browser window.

Once URL changes, all execution of the current page is stopped.

Not really. You'd have to put the page you were redirecting in a frame and keep the script in another frame, then watch for the content frame to get updated. But you'd also run into cross-domain issues because of the Same Origin Policy (which governs access to one document's contents [the new page] from another document [the one containing the script you're running]). So basically, you can't do this.
If you post a separate question saying what you're trying to achieve by running more code afterward, it may be that people can help you with alternative approaches.

i don't believe this would work. it's a form of XSS/injection and therefore a security risk. i don't think the W3C allowed this sort of thing because it's very dangerous. as soon as the user is loading a different page, the browser ignores the previous one.
http://www.coderanch.com/t/439675/HTML-JavaScript/Javascript-call-AFTER-redirect
see that guy's answer for a visual

Creating a tweet button without opening a new window

I'm looking to add a "tweet this" button to a site. Simple enough, right? The catch is that the site is meant to run on an embedded platform that doesn't particularly handle popup windows, so I'm trying to do everything inside the page.
I'm able to successfully create my tweet button, attach an onClick handler to it, and construct a proper twitter.com/share URL for the relevant content. All works fine when I open that URL in a new window with window.open. However, if I try to open the URL in an iframe, nothing loads inside the frame. Even loading http://twitter.com into the iframe fails in the same way. However, loading Google or any other website seems to work just fine.
Any thoughts on what I'm missing here? Thanks! --zach
Edit:
Yep, they are detecting the iframe on load and blanking the page:
if (window.top !== window.self) {
document.write = "";
window.top.location = window.self.location;
setTimeout(function(){ document.body.innerHTML='';},1);
window.self.onload=function(evt){document.body.innerHTML='';};
}
Any reasonable way to get around this, or am I stuck writing my own auth pipeline through oauth? I don't need anything from their API, just letting users tweet to their own accounts.

Twitter (like Stack Overflow) is probably using some Javascript to ensure they're not being presented in an iFrame:
if(top!=self){
//hates you
}
I ran into something similar recently, and ended up re-doing part of my app without the iFrame element.

Go and get a developper account on twitter and things are made easy for you :)

Can you simply redirect the the twitter share URL? I'm guessing they want to be careful about opening the window in iframe's to prevent malicious sites from tweeting in a user's account without giving the user a chance to first confirm their intent to send this tweet.

You said window.open worked fine for popping up the url in a new window but have you tried popping it into the parent frame?
twtWindow=window.open([url],'_parent',[specs])

#yuval Unfortunately for you, the twitter url goes to a page that has the X-FRAME-OPTIONS:SAMEORIGIN header set in the response. It's not a Javascript check. The browser will simply refuse to render the page after seeing the header. This is done to prevent a clickjacking attack, usually done to steal a user's password.
So your only other option is really to redirect your current page with window.location.href=url.

Is there a way to mitigate downloading of resources (images/css and js files) with Javascript?

I have a html page on my localhost - get_description.html.
The snippet below is part of the code:
<input type="text" id="url"/>
<button id="get_description_button">Get description</button>
<iframe id="description_container" src="#"/>
When the button is clicked the src of the iframe is set to the url entered in the textbox. The pages fetched this way are very big with lots of linked files. What I am interested in the page is a block of text contained in a <div id="description"> element.
Is there a way to mitigate downloading of resources linked in the page that loads into the iframe?
I don't want to use curl because the data is only available to logged in users and the steps to take with curl to get the content is too complicated. The iframe is simple as I use this on a box which sends the right cookies to identify the request as coming from a logged in user, but the problem is that it is very wasteful to get nearly 1 MB of data to keep 1 KB of it and throw out the rest.
Edit
If the proposed method just works in Firefox it is fine, so I added Firefox tag. Also, it is possible that the answer actually is from the realm of Firefox add-on techniques, so I added that tag as well.
The problem is not that I cannot get at what I'm looking for, rather, the problem is the easy iframe method is wasteful.
I know that Firefox does allow loading only the text of a page. If you open a page and press Ctrl+U you are taken to 'view page source' window, There links behave as normal and are clickable, if you click on a link in source view, the source of the new page is loaded into the view source window, without the linked resources being downloaded, exactly what I'm trying to get. But I don't know how to access this behaviour.
Another example is the Adblock add-on. It somehow kills elements before they get loaded. With plain Javascript this is not possible. Because it only is triggered too late to intervene in good time.

The Same Origin Policy forbids any web page to access contents of any other web page in a different domain so basically you cannot do that.
However it seems that with some browsers it is allowed to access web pages content if you are trying to access it from a local web page which seems to be your case.
Safari, IE 6/7/8 are browser that allow a local web page to do so via XMLHttpRequest (source: Google Browser Security Handbook) so you may want to choose to use one of those browsers to do what you need (note that future versions of those browsers may not allow to do so anymore).
A part from this solution I only see two possibities:
If the web pages you need to fetch content from are somehow controlled by you, you can create a simpler interface to let other web pages to get the content you need (for example allowing JSONP requests).
If the web pages you need to fetch content from are not controlled by you the only solution I see is to fetch content server side logging in from the server directly (I know that you don't want to do so, but I don't see any other possibility if the previous I mentioned are not practicable)
Hope it helps.

Actually I've seen Cross Domain jQuery .load request before, here: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/cross-domain-requests-with-jquery/
The author claims that codes like these found on that page
$('#container').load('http://google.com'); // SERIOUSLY!
$.ajax({
url: 'http://news.bbc.co.uk',
type: 'GET',
success: function(res) {
var headline = $(res.responseText).find('a.tsh').text();
alert(headline);
}
});
// Works with $.get too!
would work. (The BBC code might not work because of the recent redesign, but you get the idea)
Apparently it is using YQL wrapped into a jQuery plugin to do the trick. Now I cannot say I fully understand what he is doing there but it appears to work, and fits the bill. Once you load the data I suppose it is a simple matter of filtering out the data that you need.
If you prefer something that works at the browser level, may I suggest Mozilla's Jetpack framework for lightweight extensions. I've not yet read the documentations in its entirety but it should contain the APIs needed for this to work.

There are various ways to go about this in AJAX, I'm going to show the jQuery way for brevity as one option, though you could do this in vanilla JavaScript as well.
Instead of an <iframe> you can just use a container, let's say a <div> like this:
<div id="description_container"></div>
Then to load it:
$(function() {
$("#get_description_button").click(function() {
$("#description_container").load($("input").val() + " #description");
});
});
This uses the .load() method which takes a string in this format: .load("url selector"), then takes that element in the page and places it's content inside the container you're loading, in this case #description_container.
This is just the jQuery route, mainly to illustrate that yes, you can do what you want, but you don't have to do it exactly like this, just showing the concept is getting what you want from an AJAX request, rather than in an <iframe>.

Your description sounds like you are fetching pages from the same domain (you said that you need to be logged in and have session credentials) so have you tried to use async request via XMLHttpRequest? It might complain if the html on a page is particularly messed up but you chould still be able to get raw text via .responseText and extract what you need with a regex.