Troubleshooting Overbite, resolving conflicts with NoScript and script blockers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Overbite is designed to be as seamless an experience as possible, but the maintainers of the Overbite Project recognize that there will be bugs and problems. If this document does not answer your question, or you believe you have found a bug or security flaw in Overbite, or even if you just have a suggestion, please send information to gopher@floodgap.com Please send log or image attachments only after we have reviewed your initial report and specifically request them. Thank you! - Notes on proxy support If you are behind a firewall or on a network that uses a proxy to reach the outside world, Overbite will try to use whatever proxy settings are enabled in your browser. SOCKS is preferred, but Overbite may be able to make use of certain HTTP proxies. The only sure way to know is to try it and see. If you are unable to get Overbite working with your particular network setup, please send details to gopher@floodgap.com to consider support in a future version. If the proxy does not natively work with your browser normally, however, it will certainly not work with Overbite either. If you use an actual Gopher proxy to access Gopherspace, such as Squid when enabled for Gopher proxy support, you cannot use Overbite with such a proxy. These proxies do the translation step themselves, and Overbite is not even involved in this configuration. - Inline viewing doesn't work (the plus signs don't ever appear). - related: NoScript keeps "blocking" gopher sites. OverbiteFF uses two separate large scripts: a "chrome" script which acts as a browser component and handles the downloading and translation of gopher content to your browser, and a "content" script that handles interactions that you do with the content, such as searching and viewing items inline. The "chrome" script runs with special privileges and cannot be blocked. For security reasons, however, the "content" script runs with no special privileges to help guard against the (very unlikely and remote) possibility that a malicious server may try to exploit a browser flaw. Because it is otherwise unprivileged, it is blockable by script blockers such as NoScript, and if you turn off JavaScript in the browser entirely, it will also not work. The "content" script is designed such that if it cannot execute because you have JavaScript turned off or disabled, you can still browse the site by clicking the links in the menu as usual. If this is satisfactory to you, then you don't need to do anything else. If you wish to use inline viewing with NoScript, however, you have some options: 1. You can enable scripts globally while using Gopher, and then reenable blocking afterwards. This is easy, but the least safe option. 2. You can whitelist the gopher protocol globally by going to your NoScript whitelist and entering "gopher:" (no quotes, by itself). This is the most convenient option for most people, assuming you trust the sites you view. 3. You can whitelist the gopher protocol only for certain hosts by going to your NoScript whitelist and entering "gopher://" (no quotes, by itself, and notice the extra slashes). Then you can enable individual hosts in NoScript the usual way. You may need to reload the page after enabling privileges for the inline viewing interface to appear. - Sites don't work the way they used to - related: Overbite 'can't see' a gopher host that regular Firefox/SM can - related: Gopher-hosted HTML documents have broken images and links If a site behaved in a particular way when accessed with Mozilla's internal gopher support, but does not now, it may fall under some of the changes that Overbite enforces. The two situations above are probably the most common symptoms of these changes. Please refer to the section on Differences between Mozilla Gopher support and Overbite. This no longer applies to Firefox as of Firefox 4.0, as Gopher support is no longer a built-in part of the browser; similarly, it no longer applies to SeaMonkey 2.1 and later as well. - Foreign encodings are not automatically detected Many international Gopher sites were created before the wide use of Unicode and may use an encoding that is not correctly detected, particularly for Asian languages. Try going to View, Character Encoding, and then selecting a new one (for example, for Chinese, Big5 was commonly used; for Japanese, try ShiftJIS). .