The eBayla Virus

An anonymous reader linked us a Tasty Bit from Tasty Bits about the eBayla virus: an auction item that contains some Java Script that will email your private eBay info to the creator of the auction. Eek.

Comments

Re: Javascript

[jandrese]

>RANT< As a web user I find Javascript generally useless and slow.

It seems to me that 50% of the Javascript on the web is used to hilite a link when you move your cursor over it, which I think is absolutely useless. My cursor already changes when I move it over a link, and loading a button twice just to have it reinforce the cursor change is not how I want to spend my time.

Another 40% of the Javascript code out there opens annoying, useless "consoles" that take valuble screen space and rarely have any sort of meat to them.

The last 10% is a mixed bag consisting of opening up a homepage to a site when you leave the site (Really really irritating ones force you to kill the browser to get off the site); making forms more "interactive", where the most frequent offender is the pulldown menu that automatically jumps to whatever you select, nevermind if you get it wrong or don't have Javascript. Frequently these pages omit the "submit" button as well, irritating Lynx users to no end.

As if this isn't bad enough, Javascript is not exactly a solid standard, with Netscape and Microsoft implementing their own set of bugs and incompatibilities into each version of their browsers. "But this works on my machine at home and in the lab!".

In conclusion: Javascript does not add enough value to my web surfing experiance to counterbalance all of the negative issues associated with it. &gt;/RANT&lt;