The LoneWolf's Lair. . .

Presented by Mosh "LoneWolf" Teitelbaum
mosh@sightspecific.com

Disabling Blinking Text

Blinking text: the abomination that many of us 'Net users have to put up with in our daily travails. Only Netscape users have this unfortunate curse. But now, there's a cure...

The table below provides the instructions that one must follow in order to remove the curse of the BLINK tag (you don't believe me that it's a curse? Netscape users should enter "about:mozilla" into their location fields). The solution is listed by operating system.

OPERATING SYSTEM NAVIGATOR VERSION INSTRUCTIONS
Windows 95/NT Navigator 3.x and prior
  1. Push the START button and select "Run..."
  2. Enter "Regedit.exe" (without the quotes) in the Run... Dialog and push "OK."
  3. Navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Netscape\Netscape Navigator\Settings key, and for the Value Name "Blinking" change the Value Data from "yes" to "no."
Communicator 4.x and later
  1. Exit Communicator.
  2. Open the <install_path>\Users\<username>\prefs.js file in your favorite *text* editor where <install_path> is the path into which you initially installed Communicator (for example, C:\Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\) and <username> is the name of the user for which you want to disable blinking text.
  3. Move your cursor to the 4th line of the file and add the following:
     user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);
Windows 3.1 All (?)
  1. Open the NETSCAPE.INI file in your favorite *text* editor
  2. Find the section entitled [Settings]
  3. Set "Blinking" to "no" as in:
     [Settings]
     Blinking=no

Note that if the section or entry does not exist, you can create them yourself.

Unix All (?)
  1. Find your ..Xdefaults (or whatever) file.
  2. Add the following line:
     Netscape*blinkingEnabled:         False
Mac Navigator version 1.1N

The following method has been tested in version 1.1N of Navigator only. I hope that the same fix will work on other versions but I highly doubt it. However, the process should be very similar. It requires editing the executable's resources. To do so, you'll need Super ResEdit (Super_ResEdit_2.9.hqx, 680k).

  1. Open a copy of the Navigator executable with Super ResEdit.
  2. Locate the large DATA resource (the only one).
  3. At offset C0E1 hex, in the ASCII side of the hex editor display, locate the word "blink"
  4. Replace the word "blink" with another word of equal length.
Communicator version 4.x

The following method requires editing the executable's resources. To do so, you'll need Super ResEdit (Super_ResEdit_2.9.hqx, 680k).

  1. Open a copy of the Navigator executable with Super ResEdit.
  2. Locate the large TEXT resource (the only one).
  3. Double-click on the "allprefs" entry at ID:3010
  4. Locate the entry that reads pref("browser.blink_allowed", true) and change true to false.

For more information concerning the BLINK tag, please see my FAQ entry "How do I make text blink?"

 

This page was last updated Monday, November 04, 1997.
Copyright © 1993 - 2003 by LoneWolf.

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