Safari crash, + Malware warning

[buyusfear]

I put this here because I am relatively a mac newb.

Here's what happened, opened safari, went to photobucket, and the the window instantly shrunk t the bottom right hand corner of my screen to the size of an icon only showing the red orange green circles, then a windo popped up saying something about malware and xp, and then a safari window opened taking me to xponlinescanner.com/

That screen looks like the screen someone posted in another thread i've seen here, and they laughed at it (so i'm assuming it's no big deal) however at the time I didn't get it, now that part makes sense.
But, the fact that safari went coo coo is what concerns me,
any tips?
much appreicated.

 

[mkrishnan]

Safari went "cuckoo" because of javascript telling it to resize and move the window... There's no malware or anything persistently installed on your computer. It's just a feature of Javascript that has legitimate uses but predominantly gets massively abused by advertisers.

In Safari, you can't explicitly turn this feature off while preserving Javascript functions, as far as I know. (For reference, in Firefox, you turn this off by Preferences -> Content -> Advanced button to the right of Enable Javascript -> uncheck at least the first two boxes.)

One option is to install something like PithHelmet or SafariBlock to block ads (in which these kinds of things are usually embedded). Make sure the option to block pop-ups in the Safari menu is checked, also.

Also, realistically, it is pretty unlikely that it was done by any ads on Photobucket. They're a legitimate site, and I don't think they do that kind of thing. It's more likely that it was activated in another site you went to, e.g. the one you navigated away from when you went to Photobucket.

Or, you're sure you didn't hit the yellow ball in the upper left corner of the Safari window?

 

[buyusfear]

Thanks for the quick reply mkrishnan.

It very well could have been from another window as I do have Opera and firefox running aswell (i'm so bad for running a billion browser windows at once) . It was just weird as the safari window is set to open on my 2nd screen and that screen was empty. (and i'm pretty sure no yellow button was hit )

Your explanation helps calm my nerves, thanks again.

Any reason I was instantly redirected to that xponline scan site?

thanks again
Alex