Warning: This is a tech post. So if this stuff bores you to tears, you may just want to skip it.

Sometimes you think you know how things work, or how a language works and you get a project that just makes you rethink how you use a certain technology or programming language. Well I've been finding that with Javascript lately. Especially digging in to AJAX/XMLHttpRequests objects. The IDE(Integrated Development Environment) I use for coding up html and javascript pages is HTMLKit. It's a great IDE and is shareware, which is fantastic and it allows you to write your own plugins for it. However, in browse mode it does use Internet Explorer (IE). Well IE is a great browser for lazy coders, it finishes your tables, and lets a lot of Javascript do a lot of things, that other browsers just don't do.

Firefox however likes to make you work for it just a little bit more. So what I found is while I was making a call to a page on an outside domain, I was getting a very strange and serious error. "uncaught exception: Permission denied to call methods XMLHttpRequest.open." Well this was confusing, how come it works perfectly in IE, but Firefox is giving me this error. Well after a quick google search on the error I found my answer. Simply put Firefox, or More correctly any Browser from Mozilla has a "security" feature that doesn't allow a XMLHttpRequest.open call to a url that isn't on the domain you are using. Funny enough, I've written several AJAX applications, but all of them only call within their own domain. So this error was completely new to me. One of the links that I helped pointed out that you have to set a specific property.

   try {
    netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalBrowserRead");
   } catch (e) {
    alert("Permission UniversalBrowserRead denied.");
   }