Tech Tuesday
I know, it’s been months. And if you give me a few more months I’m sure I can come up with a good enough excuse.
First on the menu, a Firefox extension called RefreshBlocker. Two of the sites that I visit most frequently are the Newsday and Google News. Both of these sites however have a most annoying quality - they auto refresh. The auto refresh feature on the Google News website isn’t such a bad idea since it helps to supply fresh news to the visitors, but I still don’t like it because I can refresh my own browser when I feel like it. But auto refresh on the Newsday? Why? The Newsday like all other news websites in Trinidad and Tobago does not update their stories or publish new stories during the day. So in their case, the auto renew feature is completely useless. On top of it being useless, it sucks up my bandwidth if I have quite a few pages open )which is often the case).
Obviously I’m not the only person who feels that way about auto refreshing because someone came up with a Firefox extension to stop it from happening.
There are two drawbacks of using RefreshBlocker: (1) It creates a large yellow, blue-fonted banner at the top of the page (which I have learnt to ignore)
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| RefreshBlocker Screenshot: Ugly Yellow Banner |
and (2) Many pages that naturally redirect are also inadvertently blocked. There is a whitelist/blacklist feature in the options to change the blocker settings per site, but it gives mixed results. However if the RefreshBlocker does prevent a site from redirecting, you can click on the link in the ugly yellow banner at the top to help it along its way.
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| RefreshBlocker Screenshot: Whitelist/Blacklist |
I’ve read reviews of RefreshBlocker that state that the extension works only with auto-refresh pages that use a Meta tag element and won’t work with pages that use Javascript to refresh the page. However I haven’t yet encountered that problem.
By the way I’m aware that it is no longer Tuesday, but I began this post on Tuesday and I reserve the right to make up the rules as I go.
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