omniweb crash
 

i had a truly weird incident while ordering fios from verizon.com at their website.
they kept executing some script which opened new tabs where salespersons were trying to chat me up for a bigger sale.
these tabs would open and switch me as often as every 15 seconds. it became difficult to type and fill out forms and complete my transaction.
ultimately omniweb became unresponsive and i force quit the app, losing all my work. crash reporter came up.
now here's the really weird part: i waited a few minutes and tried again. i knew the ropes and did things faster and sucessfully. but even after i closed the main verizon tab, these chat windows would still come up many times.
my only recourse was to close down omni web and restart it.
i consider a crash report based on how the internal javascript was handled.
i used the site earlier today on a vista box at a friends place running IE to order dsl for her. there i was only offered chat window once and when i declined it stopped pestering me.
therefore i surmise, perhaps incorrectly, that scripting is a fatal issue in this case.

Yeah that sounds like a frustrating situation! It does sound like JavaScript is the culprit here, I'm not sure if it's the fault of OmniWeb specifically or something going on in the underlying WebKit engine (which would impact Safari as well).

One thing you could have stopped in OmniWeb though is the pop-up forcing you to change tabs. Well it sounds like that's what was happening to you anyways. If you open site preferences for this page and then disable "Allow scripts to reorder windows" you should no longer see this happen.

thanks for your quick and courteous reply, troy. normally new tabs don't switch me when these open, such as AMEX card pop ups in newspaper sites like the nytimes. perhaps these are pop-unders?
what happened was very pernicious. i cannot even be sure whether the designers deliberately used malicious code because the chat windows kept opening after i left their verizon site and closed the tab.
i have made a point of mentioning verizon here in case your staff wants to test this.

i just looked at the log of permissions repaired on my macmini by a maintenance program that i used today. a lot of javascript related permissions were wrong. i am wondering if that set off the problem.
if your tech 'ninjas' need the log i will send it to you.
-marc