This isn’t really a newsblur problem, but rather a side-effect of it being a web browser based system that opens up target sites in frames. Some sites, in an attempt to thwart sites that add their own toolbars to the top of other people’s websites will overwrite the top level frame of the website’s url with their own, and essentially break out of any existing frames. These sites are incredibly annoying when used in Newsblur, as you can’t even use the back button to get back to newsblur. They just immediately hijack Newsblur’s tab again.
I’ve mitigated the problem by putting all the sites that do this in their own folder, but it’s still annoying when a new site suddenly starts doing that and I have to set everything back up again and move them.
Alternately, if we could find a way to blacklist sites so that they kick you out of story mode automatically when you try to view a story from them that could help too.
Supposedly there are few scripts newblur could use to prevent the script on these stupid sites from redirecting them but I couldn’t get any of them to work (in a userscript)…
One thing you could do is install a addon such as thiswhich allows you to block all javascript from running on specified sites. By the looks of it they don’t run any javascript that is really needed so you won’t really lose anything by blocking it.
I tried to find some way to block just specific lines of javascript but to my amazement no such solutions seem to exist.
Block their scripts, block their ads, and inform they of how stupid and frankly pointless their behaviour is since being in a frame doesn’t impact their site in any way (like ad impressions for example).
Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that this kind of javascript is possible, if javascript can’t tell colour of links because that could be a privacy issues and a site can’t in any way interact with a site in a frame (sensible, good idea) why should it be able to tell if it’s being run inside a frame or not?
Well, I’ve brought it up to a few of them, only one of them acknowledged that it was annoying. The rest kind of brushed the whole thing off and said they weren’t going to change it. Ah well, I just hope that we don’t get more of them doing that and I can stick to just those 5 comics being annoying timesinks.