[PLUG] Strange Firefox Hijacking?

[Dick Steffens]

This afternoon I had occasion to visit three YouTube pages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5PJ0JZUhgc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIVa_nkU0j4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dBGnUSrjQo

The first two are old Disney cartoons, and the third is a collection of 
German Shepherd videos that I got to by following click bait from a news 
site. Later in the afternoon Firefox was very slow to respond, and then 
other programs were affected -- ran slowly, too. I'm guessing one of 
these links caused the problem. I looked at top and saw Firefox spending 
a lot of time near the top. Somewhere else I saw that Firefox was 
looking at a YouTube site. I don't remember what tool showed that to me 
and, sadly, I didn't write down which site was referenced. I assume 
there's a log somewhere I could look at to find out which one, but 
that's currently outside my skill set. The thing is, I had closed the 
Firefox tabs with those things on them, and left Firefox on about:blank. 
So, Firefox should not have been running near the top in top. I tried 
closing Firefox, but it wouldn't respond to the mouse click. At that 
point I ran ps ax | grep firefox, found the process number, and killed 
it. After a couple of seconds it closed. I've been out for the evening 
and have restarted Firefox. It appears to be running normally now.

The important question is, how does a website take so much control of 
Firefox, and do I need to be looking for any other bad side effects?


-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens