Ian On The Red Dot

Last night while clearing my email to pass the time as I waited for the Federer quarterfinal match to start, a funny thing happened when I was trying to log into Gmail with Firefox 2 on my MacBook Pro running Tiger.

What happened was that I couldn’t move to the next form field (i.e. the password text field) by pressing ‘tab’. Double ‘tab’ didn’t work either. I decided to try logging into another site - same problem with that site’s form.

The problem went away after I restarted Firefox. I tried to repeat the steps I took to recreate the same issue but couldn’t.

I was wondering if anyone else has faced similar issues?

I’m not a power user so maybe that’s the reason the advantages of using Google Chrome over Firefox is not so obvious to me yet. How have your experiences with Google Chrome been?

I have been obsessing over two events that have happened when using Firefox. I tried to replicate them but only managed to do it once for each case but not able to consistently trigger the events. Please do help me see if you face the same issues.

The first event happens when I’m typing a URL directly into Firefox. For example, when I type “singaporedaily.wordpress.com” I get redirected to the search.com site. I tried to figure out why this was happening so I typed in “singaporedaily.wordpress.com.com” and got redirected to the same site. I then realized whenever I key in a subdomain of com.com, I would get redirected to the search.com site.

Here is the thing. I’m pretty sure the URL I’m typing is “singaporedaily.wordpress.com” so how is the ‘.com’ being appended to make it “singaporedaily.wordpress.com.com”? This doesn’t happen all the time when I manually enter URLs. In fact, it has only happened twice. How am I sure that I’m using the correct URL? I typed the URL into TextMate and copied it.
Has anyone experienced anything similar?

The other thing I’ve been trying to replicate has to do with this Flash app to display Flickr photos - PictoBrowser. PictoBrowser has a function that generates the code which you can use to embed a similar browser into your own site. The problem is this. When I try to copy the code (i.e. select the text, right click, choose copy), I got redirected to this page which details a Apple Quicktime exploit. When I saw this happening, I immediately backed to the previous page with the PictoBrowser and tried again. And I got the same page again. I tried a third time. Nothing happened. Code got copied.

I have been trying again and again and this event isn’t occurring anymore. So I’m wondering, has anyone ever been redirected to a page when trying to copy stuff off a Flash swf file.