So an asshole friend of mine sent me a link. And now I’m sharing it with you because… well because I don’t want to be the only one that had to suffer watching it ;)
You don’t have to follow them, but trust me, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do it. Don’t worry, I’ll explain everything in a bit.
Don’t panic!
I took a look at the code; it’s safe despite how obnoxiously that page behaves. So don’t worry about security exploits and whatnot. The page is just there to irritate and disturb you; which personally, I think it does extremely well.
So you want to get out of that page without having to force-quit? No problem.
As you can see, aside from making it nearly impossible to “close” via mouse - that fucking page also catches critical keyboard shortcuts a savvy internet surfer may try to use. But if you’re on a Mac, your menubar/taskbar is still accessible and so are the commands.
What you need to do is select “close window” from the menubar - which will then trigger a javascript alert window that says “Hello!”
For windows users, we know the menubar for an application is right there in the application, so I guess you’re stuck with the task of actually clicking the close button via mouse - cause you sure as hell don’t have enough time to navigate a menu on a moving browser window. It sucks but it is possible (because I was able to do it)
The secret
So like I said, the trick is to make it show the “Hello!” javascript alert box - as closing that box slides it up and gives you a window of opportunity of using the shortcut without the page’s script intercepting it.1 So now would be a good time to find out what keyboard shortcut closes the window (it’s shift-command-w on the Mac… not sure what it is on Windows)
Since you opened it in a new window, the previous window (which in some cases, you’re reading this entry) is still unaffected, so you can just check out in the menu the shortcut, or google it in a new tab or something.
My point is that once you know the shortcut, close the alert box, and while it’s closing perform the shortcut. And it should kill the window.
The good thing about the page is that once you’ve successfully triggered the “Hello!” alert box, it will keep on popping up after it closes, which gives you an unlimited amount of chances to time that keyboard shortcut right.
Bonus points
If you have the web-developer add-on/extension, everything becomes trivial as you can disable javascript in realtime; which just stops the page in its tracks (which is what allowed me to view the code, experiment with it, and decide wether it would be “safe”2 to share with regular viewers.
If all else fails
If for some reason, none of the methods above are working for you. Then you can always safely resort to force quitting the application/process.
It’s command-option-esc on a Mac or ctrl-alt-del in Windows. Select Firefox then kill it.
- Unfortunately other browsers like Safari don’t “animate” so after clicking close, it IMMEDIATELY pops back up… which is why I suggested you use Firefox in the first place.
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- And by “safe” I mean wouldn’t piss people off.
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post updated on July 14, 2008 @ 06:43PM
