I probably shouldn’t even mention this for fear of giving anybody any ideas but it looks like there’s a way of circumventing pop-up blockers.
If you visit the gas face site using a browser that blocks pop-up windows, like Safari or FireFox, you’ll still be presented with a new browser window. Normally these browsers stop this from happening by cancelling any JavaScript “onload” events that involve the creation of a new window. Viewing source on the gas face site shows that, although there’s a JavaScript function for the creation of a new window, it isn’t triggered by the “onload” event. Instead, it’s being triggered by a .swf file.
Because Flash is capable of executing JavaScript, the pop-up window is created as soon as the .swf file loads. Tricksy.
I sure hope there’s no advertising executives reading this.
It’s time to nip this in the bud. Although it’s not technically a bug, I’m going to press that little button in the top right corner of my browser chrome and inform Dave Hyatt of this discovery. I think I’ll also do a bit of digging to see if anyone has reported this as a Mozilla bug.