Browser Hijacking…

For the techies out there, I’m not talking about click-hijacking, or even sneaky hacker ways of taking over your browser… No… I’m talking about my wife. More specifically my wife’s internet browsing habits and how they have started to affect me.

I got Melisa hooked on using Mozilla Firefox a while back (because, afterall, it is the better browser). Anyhow, Melisa got hooked specifically on the abiulity to open multiple tabs at one time (for those of you not in-the-know, each tab can open up a different web page & allows you to keep them all up at one time).  She got hooked so much that the first time she really got digging into some research topic she had to call me in there because she “lost” some of her open tabs.  What really happened is she had so many opened that she now had to scroll left & right to see them all.

Well, she’s gotten used to all that & has even gotten used to having multiple windows open, with multiple tabs open on each of them. So used to it, in fact, that recently I took a look & found 49 total tabs opened thorughout 4 windows!!!

Needless to say, I installed a session manager add-on in Firefox to easily close Firefox without losing all those “precious” tabs (they’d all pop back open when you restarted Firefox), and also created a separate profile for myself so I can still use Firefox without getting swallowed up in Melisa’s sink-hole of a collection of tabs.

To get into my Firefox profile, I created a separate shortcut file & kept it on the desktop. Her profile was the default one, so she just had to go about her way as usual, and I was the only one who had to mess with a different route. Nice, easy, straightforward (for her).

Now we get to the hijacking bit…  Melisa got to the point that she had so many tabs opened, then she started to use my profile to look up some things… WAIT A SECOND!!! Now when I get on the internet, I all of a sudden have 15 tabs open in addition to the 2 or 3 I had opened last time I was poking around. That’s IT! I moved my shortcut so she doesn’t know where is it (although still fairly obvious if you went looking for it). A few days later, she found it… NNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!!  I even have IE (Internet Explorer), and Chrome (Google Chrome, Google’s web browser) on the desktop so she can spill over to that if she feels the need to stray from her own growing cesspool. But that just wasn’t good enough.

I moved access to my profile to a place she wouldn’t find it and renamed it. And now I access it in such a way that she wouldn’t be able to figure it out. (Not that she couldn’t figure it out, but I’m hoping it’s obscure enough to at least keep her in her own playground & out of my personal one…)

Of course, the other night, I leave my profile open because I plan on getting back to it & Melisa decides to play a little trick on me for keeping her out of my profile. She clicks on each of my bookmarks about 3 times each (I’ve got about 10 bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar) to open up a bunch of tabs in my browser.

Ha…Ha…Ha…

Love you honey! (JUST STAY OUT OF MY FIREFOX SESSIONS!)