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An Ajax Tabbed Browser

posted 03 Dec 2006

ajax tab browser

Ryan Miglavs, high school friend and hacker, came up with the idea of an in browser tabbed browser a few months ago. It was brilliant! People without tabbed browsers could use a tabbed interface and those people constantly on the go could use the service to access their tabs from anywhere.

But, as we wrote a demo implementation a number of "technical issues" were discovered:

  • A parent IFrame can't get a child's title. So, how do you name the tabs?
  • Flash doesn't obey z-index! Every ad shows up on every tab!
  • Websites can pop out of frames! if(top.location!=location) top.location.href=document.location.href;

If you want to reproduce these bugs for yourself check out the proof of concept demo.

Perhaps there are good solutions to these problems. And perhaps someone reading this entry knows the answer. If you do- please leave a comment!

Although the outcomes of this experiment were suboptimal it did yield some good. I learned a bit of Javascript and discovered the wonders of FireBug, a javascript development tool for Firefox. Also, I had the chance to eat my fill of Triscuits and hummus at Ryan's house.

topics: ajax, code

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About

Brandon Philips by Mujtaba Ali

ifup.org is the weblog of Brandon Philips and contains excerpts from my code, work and play.

I write Linux software and work on the systems layer of Linux. In the last two years I have helped to organize Linux Plumbers Conf and Freedom HEC Taipei. It has been rewarding to bring together these communities to discuss current Linux issues.

Robotics is another passion and I had the opportunity to mentor a FIRST Robotics team in Portland recently too. I also continue to work with my friend Ron Jackson to build some neat USB devices for robotics.