How to disable frames in a browser 4223

Here's a copy of an answer that I recently sent to a similar question in alt.html:

In addition to the possibility of installing a noframes-capable browser such as Opera, there's a simple way: Create a file that contains the to create a copy of your current frameset page and delete the

This won't tell how well the page works when the page is accessed using a browser that uses frames but presents them in a non-visual way, as e.g. speech-based browsers have to. Using the Lynx browser (or a Lynx simulator) is a simple tool for such testing, which is actually more important than noframes testing.

Quick test: read the names of your frames and ask someone to decide, on the basis of the names alone, which frame he would choose to find something on your page. (Use a novice, preferably. An experienced user might guess that "left" is navigation menu and "right" is content.)

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There was also the following reply, which I haven't tested: "for Mozilla (Firefox and probably Netscape as well) in address bar enter 'about:config' search for 'frames' then change the setting 'browser.frames.enabled' to 'false'"

But at least on Mozilla Firefox on Windows, changing that setting does not seem to change anything until I close Firefox. Then, when I try to restart it, I get "Error launching browser window:no XBL binding". Could be a coincidence, of course. But I still think that trying to make a noframes-incapable browser into a noframes-capable browser by directly changing its internal variables is a risky business: if they didn't make the setting part of the normal end user interface, they probably didn't test it well.

(Followups trimmed.)

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