Reviews for Luminous: JavaScript events blocker
Luminous: JavaScript events blocker by gbaptista
1 review
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 12730903, 6 years agoAndroid user here.
The description promised I'd be "able to see and control what [JavaScript code] happens."
Naïvely, I assumed it'd give me a sensible list of scripts that have run on the webpage, in chronological order.
And broken up into blocks, or in tree format.
With checkboxes to block the script from running again.
Then I could block half the scripts, see if that worked, then block some in the other half if necessary.
And thus catch the offending script (- that kept putting a cursor in the Search Box every time an article loaded on the website I go to, and every time I came back to the page after tabbing away; this caused the mobile keyboard to open, and cover half of my screen. Even when I was looking at the list of tabs, for heaven's sake.)
I thought Luminous would make the job easy. As if.
It gave me three separate lists, titled "Web APIs", "triggered events (handleEvent)", and "attached events (addEventListener)".
What is that supposed to mean?
They seemed to be hierarchical, but I couldn't tell for sure.
The items in each list didn't seem to be in any particular order at all – and if there was a pattern, the program wasn't about to tell me.
In theory, you tap on an entry in the list to block it from executing again.
In practice, one of three things happened:
- the entry changes colour, but nothing else.
- a popup appears, showing script code.
- the item does toggle from being allowed, to blocked. And every time it does, an annoying, blinding white overlay appears for a few seconds.
And there were many dozens of entries in "attached events", all of which I had to toggle. It might take four or six tries for each item, depending on the program's mood.
Every time I blocked some, the number of items in the list kept changing.
The items that disappeared, weren't crossed out, didn't leave a placeholder - they vanished completely, and I couldn't make head or tail of the new list.
- Even if the entries did stay the same, their order kept changing.
- Some of the items in "triggered events" and "attached events" were the same.
- The extension's tab kept closing on its own, without my permission, whenever I switched to a different tab. And then I'd have to open it again every time.
The logger was unreliable too, sometimes giving 'nothing detected so far' under the "attached events (addEventListener)" heading, after a page reload. Yes, after the page has fully loaded. It would take another reload to make anything show up.
After two hours of this, I managed to narrow it down to two scripts – in the higher-level "triggered events" list.
It probably was just one script in the end, but if I tried to find the actual offender, in the shifting, massive "attached events" list, I'd have gone nuts.
And now I'll have to do that anyway, because it turns out that blocking those two scripts (blocking either one of them isn't enough) breaks the site's search function.
This interface is just RAAAAAAAAAAAAW. This is an extension for Java programmers to use, basically.