Remove Horizon (Dynix) automatic refresh

A Tech article with View Comments posted 26 September 2008.
Tags: dynix, greasemonkey, horizon, library, wartburg, wts

I find the automatic refresh on my seminary library’s catalog really annoying. I like to open up lots of tabs of results and then evaluate them later. Horizon (Dynix) doesn’t let me do that – those tabs auto-refresh to the main search page after 6 or 7 minutes. I can always press the back button on each of those tabs, but it shouldn’t have to be that way.

Thus, I decided to learn Greasemonkey scripting. There’s a great online book to help you learn, and Greasemonkey is very intuitive.

The onLoad attribute of the body tag calls “setTimer(); setfocus();”. setTimer() is the culprit. So here’s the one-liner to get rid of that (and keep setfocus()):

document.body.setAttribute('onload', 'setfocus();');

Quick and easy. You can install my very first Greasemonkey script here: dynix_norefresh.user.js. You will, of course, need the Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox.