Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting hundreds of spam comments a day, apparently from Chinese blog spammers. The spam comments are quite long and fill up a really tall web page. I have not upgraded to WordPress 2 yet and haven’t gotten around to installing blog spam protection (coming soon, believe me!). So if I leave my blog unattended for a half a day, my comment moderation queue fills up with Chinese comments!

Message to spammers: you are absolutely the lowest life form on the planet. I really hope all this comes back to haunt you one day.

Anyway..

I mostly use Apple’s Safari for browsing and blog management. WordPress has a ‘Mark All for Deletion’ button that enables me to do just that with the junk comment from China (and elsewhere). But I have been suffering from Safari’s Javascript handling. The ‘Mark All’ function is obviously a Javascript that changes the a radio button (to change the status of the comment) on all the listed comments in the moderation queue.

Safari takes ages to go through a few hundred comments. I was very forgiving, thinking such behavior for Javascript is normal. The thing is, Safari completely freezes up when performing this function and just leaves me the colored spinning beach ball to look at. It takes so long that I usually switch to another application and do something there until Safari finishes. Often Safari just freezes forever and I have to force quit it.

The other day, I decided to perform this function using Camino, a Mozilla based browser for the Mac, that I’ve been using in parallel with Safari for some time now. It was a SHOCK when I saw that Camino went through the task of marking hundreds of messages INSTANTANEOUSLY. Just like that!

This shows that there is something seriously wrong in Safari’s Javascript handling. It also shows how good the open source Camino can be.

Message to Apple’s Safari team: fix your Javascript.

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Comments

2 responses to “Attack of the chinese blog spammers (and why Safari’s Javascript sucks and Camino’s rules)”

  1. EmiratesMac Avatar
    EmiratesMac

    Yeah, as much as I love Safari, JavaScript is not one if its strong features. That’s something Apple really need to work on. I still use Safari all the time but have to switch to Camino once in a while for some sites that just won’t work.

  2. Dotan Mazor Avatar
    Dotan Mazor

    Ahmad,

    The specific problem could very well be a non-standard JavaScript code in WordPress.

    If indeed this is the case, than it would be a very bad surprise, since I consider WP to be one of the most Standard Compliant web authoring systems.

    And JBTW, why don’t you download the FireFox browser from the mozilla site? I use it both on GNU/Linux and Windows, and it’s just fabulous.

    Dotan