Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Why Open Source Is Pretty Awesome

At some point I think it’s easy to take things for granted. Being able to alter software to meet your needs is an awesome power.

Today, a tweet rehashed an annoyance regarding a tactic on websites to alter copy/paste and put a link with tracking code in your clipboard. I could opt out, but that doesn’t fix when websites roll their own. It’s a fairly simple thing to implement. In my mind there’s little (read: no) legitimate justification for oncopy, oncut or onpaste events.

So I did an hg pull while working on some other stuff. I came back and wrote a quick patch, started compiling and went back to working on other stuff.

Then came back to a shiny new Firefox build with a shiny new preference that disabled the offending functionality. A quick test against a few websites shows it works as I intended by simply killing that event. You can’t do these things with closed source.

Of course I found the relevant bug and added a patch for anyone interested.

A 15 minute diversion and my web browsing experience got a little better. Sometimes I forget I’ve got experience on that side of the wire too 😉 .

2 replies on “Why Open Source Is Pretty Awesome”

Open Source is really AWESOME!
1st I read Robert post via Planet Mozilla feed.
2nd I thought I would prefer solve this problem without patching Firefox code (who did say “add-on”??)
3rd I searched on AMO for oncopy/onpaste keywords and found nothing.
4th Why not asking directly to Robert for this? I’ll comment his post with my request.
5th Seeing Wladimir reply made me smile. (LOL!)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *