Holy cow! Nobody is going to believe me when I say this, but I swear it happened. A very, very bizzare undocumented "feature" in M18. But I can't reproduce it. I'm not even sure if I believe myself. But I know it happened. Twice.

Got home from work, ready to kick back a bit. So I browse on over to slashdot to check the latest headlines. One of the stories looks interesting, so I try to middle clicking on the link (open page in new window), but my finger slips. I accidently hit the roller, which scrolls the page, causing my click to hit whitespace. Then... this is just bizzare...

Porn site pops up. A nasty one. ("Nasty" being defined not so much in terms of the content, but the use of malicious Javascript to disable the back button, make more popus display whenever you try to close it, maximise the browser window, and other such evil tricks.)

I double take. "Wait a sec. I was visiting slashdot, and now... huh? Has CmdrTaco gone psycho on us? This can't be right. Let's go back and see where that link was REALLY pointing to. Doh! Back button don't work. Quit resizing you damn thing! (...And will ya look at the _____ on that _____.) BACK, I say!"

So finally I got it to go back by using the dropdown history, and then had to close three more popups until it finally left me alone. Peaceful Slashdot returns.

I checked the link I had tried again. It didn't look like the url that had appeared on my location bar a minute ago, but redirects can be a tricky thing. "And why would /. put a link to that anyway? Nah. Can't be." With some trepidation, I proceeded to click my link, and loaded the article I had been expecting to see.

But at this point, the article itself was no longer of immediate interest. My brain just kept asking itself, why and how did this happen? WTF?

Tried a few things, and then discovered that double middle clicking on an area of the page with no link reproduced the same behavior. Double middle click on Slashdot's white zone between columns, and it's back to the hardcore porn site we go. I'm sure the politicians would love to get their hands on this.

"[sob sob] All my little Johnny was doing was trying to find a page to teach him how to use his Woody toy, and then those big bad evil Internet people made THAT appear instead. Please, Mister congressman, make them go away. Make them go away!"

Well, a little investigation revealed that the url I was initially being directed to was www.shit.com, which then redirected me to the lovely shop where high moral standards such as elegant Javascript coding (an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) apparently have no meaning. This time, I had a harder time getting rid of it, so I finally just killed my browser.

Upon restarting, I have so far been unable to reproduce this odd behavior. Now, when I double middle click on a blank area of any page (including /.), nothing crazy happens.

My theory: Those great Mozilla programmers (I bow and worship at their feet) were probably writing code at 3am, and had to do some kind of error handling. But instead of writing a normal error message (who wants to be that bland?), they just threw "goto www.shit.com" at the bottom of some switch statement, or unhandled exception, or.... something. And I, being the lucky one that I am, have had the priviledge of discovering this. Yipee.

Of course, since I can't even reproduce it now, how can I possibly expect anyone to believe me? But I know what I saw.

Ho hum. Just thought I'd share that with the content vultures. I'll save my real rambling of the day for a bit later, should I decide to do one. Let the fun continue.