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jokes
Dec 20, 2012

Uh... Kupo?

I have a lot of success with Edge instead of Firefox as a daily browser (on my PC at least). I used to insist on using Firefox because it has the addons that delete cookies all the time but Firefox generates a far more unique fingerprint than Edge so who's to say if it's providing better privacy? I just have Edge clear all cookies after I close it.

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Im_Special
Jan 2, 2011

Look At This!!! WOW!
It's F*cking Nothing.
Sup Nadella.

jokes
Dec 20, 2012

Uh... Kupo?

I'm just saying cookies aren't the only way they track yo rear end.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
I would love to give Edge a better try, especially now that the settings aren't dumbed down anymore. But there's a bunch of expansions I'm missing, and this Windows Store requirement doesn't really seem to entice people to port theirs over.

Snuffman
May 21, 2004

Privacy Badger or Ghostery for blocking tracking scripts?

I'm already running uBlock Origin to block ads.

Powered Descent
Jul 13, 2008

We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

Snuffman posted:

Privacy Badger or Ghostery for blocking tracking scripts?

I'm already running uBlock Origin to block ads.

My current privacy-enhancing loadout is pretty much straight out of privacytools.io and the tests in browserleaks.com:
  • Privacy Badger
  • uBlock Origin
  • Cookie Autodelete
  • CanvasBlocker
  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • NoScript
  • DecentralEyes
  • about :config -- privacy.resistFingerprinting = True
  • about :config -- privacy.firstparty.isolate = True
  • about :config -- media.peerconnection.enabled = False
  • And, most of the time, a decent VPN service.

The privacy.resistFingerprinting config entry switches your canvas fingerprint to match that of TorBrowser. Doing this makes the CanvasBlocker extension (which otherwise would randomize it for every page load) pretty much redundant, but eh, it's not hurting anything by being there.

...Why yes, I AM one of those paranoid people working in IT security. Why do you ask? How did you know that? Huh? HUH? :tinfoil:

isndl
May 2, 2012
I WON A CONTEST IN TG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CUSTOM TITLE

Snuffman posted:

Privacy Badger or Ghostery for blocking tracking scripts?

I'm already running uBlock Origin to block ads.

I don't know anything about Privacy Badger but Ghostery is selling your poo poo.

tonic
Jan 4, 2003

Recently updated to Mac OS Mojave. Suddenly, after the update, Firefox loads websites *insanely* slowly, like it will take ~20 seconds to pull up the New York Times. Safari loads websites quickly, so it's not my internet or Wi-Fi.

What's the culprit here?

tonic
Jan 4, 2003

Disabling UBlock Origin fixes the issue, but now I have ads. Is there another option I should be using?

Fangs404
Dec 20, 2004

I time bomb.

tonic posted:

Disabling UBlock Origin fixes the issue, but now I have ads. Is there another option I should be using?

No. Use uBlock Origin. Just spend some time trying to diagnose the issue. Reset the settings to default and see if that helps. It could be some funky subscription that's causing the issue.

mike12345
Jul 14, 2008

"Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."





Ok as of this morning now some of the posts on this site look like this



I don't know if I changed language/character coding settings, or what's going on there.

pairofdimes
May 20, 2001

blehhh

Combat Pretzel posted:

I would love to give Edge a better try, especially now that the settings aren't dumbed down anymore. But there's a bunch of expansions I'm missing, and this Windows Store requirement doesn't really seem to entice people to port theirs over.

Edge is alright since it at least has a uBlock Origin port. I mostly use it when I'm on my laptop on battery since it lasts noticeably longer compared to Firefox.

tonic posted:

Disabling UBlock Origin fixes the issue, but now I have ads. Is there another option I should be using?

You could try disabling filters in Settings->Filter lists. There's also an option to update them all, maybe you got a bad filter that needs to be fixed.

Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar

mike12345 posted:

Ok as of this morning now some of the posts on this site look like this



I don't know if I changed language/character coding settings, or what's going on there.

It's Apple users.

Seriously.




Posts from Apple phones using single inverted commas are causing this on a variety of platforms and browsers according to a bunch of threads. Of course, it would have been nice to find this out myself before I spent nearly an hour loving with fonts and browser settings :effort:

Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Oct 10, 2018

Powered Descent
Jul 13, 2008

We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

mike12345 posted:

Ok as of this morning now some of the posts on this site look like this



I don't know if I changed language/character coding settings, or what's going on there.

It's not just you, everyone is seeing it.

It seems to be something on the forums that's started failing to render Unicode right. It's only affecting some users' posts, though. Best guess: iPhones (or something) are translating plain-jane single-quote characters into some fancy unicode thing (which SA is now choking on for some reason), but I don't have proof of that.

Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar
Just did a test elsewhere, you can do it with a lot of special characters.



When posted becomes:

���ݶ��n��^]��ŕĦŵƫ


So, not just lovely Apple products.

Ola
Jul 19, 2004

The scandi-thread is full of ���

e: possibly related to the database work

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
� is what you get when you render the unicode replacement character (U+FFFD) in ISO 8859-1 encoding.

Somewhere in whatever horrible mess of code that comprises these dead forums, somebody has hosed something up and unicode characters are being replaced with the replacement character. Then, the content-type header for the web page is being set to "text/html; charset=iso-8859-1", which causes your web browser to further mangle everything up.

Try this out: View > Text Encoding > Unicode
You can now see the unicode replacement character in its full glory.

Kheldarn
Feb 17, 2011



It's all a server end issue, not a user end issue.

From the announcement:

Lowtax posted:

In other news, we're (still) working on re-indexing the search, as there have been, ahem, "difficulties" in my attempt to contact ZDR, so I had to set somebody else up with access to the db, and they're still trying to figure out how the virtual server worms powering our AMAZING CLOUD SERVICES function. I just wanted you all to know that we're aware of the issue and actively working on it.

post hole digger
Mar 21, 2011

Powered Descent posted:

My current privacy-enhancing loadout is pretty much straight out of privacytools.io and the tests in browserleaks.com:
  • Privacy Badger
  • uBlock Origin
  • Cookie Autodelete
  • CanvasBlocker
  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • NoScript
  • DecentralEyes
  • about :config -- privacy.resistFingerprinting = True
  • about :config -- privacy.firstparty.isolate = True
  • about :config -- media.peerconnection.enabled = False
  • And, most of the time, a decent VPN service.

The privacy.resistFingerprinting config entry switches your canvas fingerprint to match that of TorBrowser. Doing this makes the CanvasBlocker extension (which otherwise would randomize it for every page load) pretty much redundant, but eh, it's not hurting anything by being there.

...Why yes, I AM one of those paranoid people working in IT security. Why do you ask? How did you know that? Huh? HUH? :tinfoil:

thanks for those config tweaks, pretty cool.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

Megillah Gorilla posted:

It's Apple users.

Seriously.




Posts from Apple phones using single inverted commas are causing this on a variety of platforms and browsers according to a bunch of threads. Of course, it would have been nice to find this out myself before I spent nearly an hour loving with fonts and browser settings :effort:


Megillah Gorilla posted:

Just did a test elsewhere, you can do it with a lot of special characters.



When posted becomes:

���ݶ��n��^]��ŕĦŵƫ


So, not just lovely Apple products.

Could have tested it beforehand, or read the thread discussing this very issue.

Double Punctuation
Dec 30, 2009

Ships were made for sinking;
Whiskey made for drinking;
If we were made of cellophane
We'd all get stinking drunk much faster!
It’s fixed now, as evidenced by this post, so w/e.

Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar

endlessmonotony posted:

Could have tested it beforehand, or read the thread discussing this very issue.

Or I could have read several threads where the problem was identified as that. Then, after posting, found another thread which disputed their conclusion and posted a correction.

Must be great being aware of every single thread on the forums simultaneously, though.

Wheany
Mar 17, 2006

Spinyahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Doctor Rope

Powered Descent posted:

  • about :config -- privacy.resistFingerprinting = True


Man, this feature is spoiled for me by having the time zone be set to utc.

Pilsner
Nov 23, 2002

Combat Pretzel posted:

What is it with Firefox and not being able to reliably play video content? At some point during its runtime, it fails at playing Youtube videos, where the picture freezes with occasional skip aheads, unless the mouse cursor is over the video, while audio keeps playing. Looking it up, it's an issue that goes years back.

Desuwa posted:

Firefox in general is a browser where I put up with the jank and slow bug fixes because the alternatives are simply unusable.

If you're in Linux there are a bunch of unstable performance tweaks you need, which the arch wiki has a good page on. On windows I've sometimes fixed performance jank on YouTube after a graphics card charge or driver update by resetting all the non-default gfx. settings in about :config. Sometimes Firefox just holds on to old or wrong values and doesn't correct them, leading to awful performance issues.

Frankly I always use Chrome for anything involving video or heavy graphics, such as YouTube, Google Maps, Facebook, etc. Firefox just feels sluggish for such stuff, and always has.

I just permanently have both FF and Chrome open. FF on my main screen, for forums, research, resources and other "simple" websites. Chrome on the other screen for youtube, facebook, mail, etc. It works well both from a practical standpoint (It's not unusual to want to have a video playing on the second screen while browsing on the main screen), and with regards to performance.

So, you don't have to exclusively choose one browser over the other.

Wheany
Mar 17, 2006

Spinyahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Doctor Rope
privacy.firstparty.isolate owns though. I mean, I had to relog to websites, but other than that, I have not noticed anything

Snuffman
May 21, 2004

isndl posted:

I don't know anything about Privacy Badger but Ghostery is selling your poo poo.

I had that suspicion about Ghostery, Privacy Badger it is.

PB is made by the EFF, so its clean. Only downside is it seems to use some degree of heuristics to block trackers so not everything is blocked right away.

That and it doesn't appear to be available outside of Firefox and Chrome due to issues the EFF has with how Edge and Safari (I prefer Safari on MacOS) support and distribute extensions now.

post hole digger
Mar 21, 2011

Wheany posted:

Man, this feature is spoiled for me by having the time zone be set to utc.

its drivin me freakin crazy

Lutha Mahtin
Oct 10, 2010

Your brokebrain sin is absolved...go and shitpost no more!

Snuffman posted:

I had that suspicion about Ghostery, Privacy Badger it is.

PB is made by the EFF, so its clean. Only downside is it seems to use some degree of heuristics to block trackers so not everything is blocked right away.

Privacy Badger works by actually observing how sites do things when you visit them, as opposed to the extension grabbing a blocklist from a remote server. And while I don't know the specifics, I don't think it (entirely) works using heuristics.

Nam Taf
Jun 25, 2005

I am Fat Man, hear me roar!

Powered Descent posted:

My current privacy-enhancing loadout is pretty much straight out of privacytools.io and the tests in browserleaks.com:
  • Privacy Badger
  • uBlock Origin
  • Cookie Autodelete
  • CanvasBlocker
  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • NoScript
  • DecentralEyes
  • about :config -- privacy.resistFingerprinting = True
  • about :config -- privacy.firstparty.isolate = True
  • about :config -- media.peerconnection.enabled = False
  • And, most of the time, a decent VPN service.

The privacy.resistFingerprinting config entry switches your canvas fingerprint to match that of TorBrowser. Doing this makes the CanvasBlocker extension (which otherwise would randomize it for every page load) pretty much redundant, but eh, it's not hurting anything by being there.

...Why yes, I AM one of those paranoid people working in IT security. Why do you ask? How did you know that? Huh? HUH? :tinfoil:

Thanks for the about :config tweaks. FPI hasn't broken anything for me and resistFingerprinting is a nice change. When I test my fingerprint, I'm still unique among tests but it's my resolution that's killing me (1280x607x24 - a 1920x1080 screen @ 150% zoom, with Firefox fullscreened). I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where we can somehow spoof that without messing up site layouts? Maybe you could floor() the resolution to the nearest 10 pixels?

Storm One
Jan 12, 2011

Nam Taf posted:

I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where we can somehow spoof that without messing up site layouts? Maybe you could floor() the resolution to the nearest 10 pixels?

Try these but I don't know if resist FPing overrides them:
privacy.window.maxInnerWidth
privacy.window.maxInnerHeight

Something Witty
Jan 24, 2009
Fun Shoe
To add to the previous, I highly recommend the user.js config posted at https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js. Using it enforces about :config settings for locking down FF from a privacy/security perspective. It also documents and describes each recommended change and links to supporting evidence behind their reasoning. i.e. Configuring certain settings when used in conjunction with ResistFingerprinting may conversely make you more identifiable.

I was also (slightly) surprised about how many telemetry and leaky settings are still enabled even when you disable and lock down the browser through the options and using extensions.

Be warned that the default config WILL need editing and tweaking before you use it, unless you want to lose things like your browsing history. Make sure to backup your current profile or start a fresh one.

It probably took me couple of hours to tweak the config, however every setting is commented and documented, and the wiki contains lots of detail about the process. The configs are also updated regularly for each new Firefox version. You may experience site breakage depending on your final config and the sites you use, however it's been surprisingly painless for me.

Pilsner
Nov 23, 2002

Grumpy old me finally upgraded from 52 ESR (pre-Quantum) to 62 release build. I finally found a solution for one of the issues that nagged me the most:

1) I want a new tab to open next to the current one, and always load https://www.google.com
2) I want the search box (the small one in the top right corner) to search exclusively in Wikipedia

I still miss the old complete separation between the address bar and the search box (if they're the same, what's the point?), but now I can live with the change.

The "trick" was using the extensions "Open Tabs Next to Current" and "New Tab Override", and in the settings for New Tab Override, not check the checkbox "Set focus to the web page instead of the address bar". Checking this conflicts with Open Tabs Next to Current, and makes a new tab skip two times to the right instead of one.

I don't know if it's in my mind or because the world (websites) around us is changing, but amazon was becoming insufferably slow on the old FF. On the new, it's super fast to load a product page for example.

I still find is silly that very basic functionality with regards to tab behavior must be done with single-purpose extensions, or simply aren't possible at all. SAD!

Geemer
Nov 4, 2010



Pilsner posted:

I still find is silly that very basic functionality with regards to tab behavior must be done with single-purpose extensions, or simply aren't possible at all. SAD!

:rip: Tab Mix Plus, that new version is never gonna come. Want to close tabs to the left instead of to the right because you go through them left to right? Too bad.

isndl
May 2, 2012
I WON A CONTEST IN TG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CUSTOM TITLE

Pilsner posted:

Grumpy old me finally upgraded from 52 ESR (pre-Quantum) to 62 release build. I finally found a solution for one of the issues that nagged me the most:

1) I want a new tab to open next to the current one, and always load https://www.google.com
2) I want the search box (the small one in the top right corner) to search exclusively in Wikipedia

I still miss the old complete separation between the address bar and the search box (if they're the same, what's the point?), but now I can live with the change.

Middle clicking the new tab button opens it next to your current tab in case you weren't aware, though it's a little more convenient to simply left click the button. I seem to recall being able to set the new tab homepage but I just use the default one since it has a Google search box already, I just turned off the other junk on that page. :shrug:

You can definitely disable web searching from the address bar via an about :config tweak, though I don't recall the parameter offhand. You can also remove all the other search engines from the search box so it only searches Wikipedia.

FWT THE CUTTER
Oct 16, 2007

weed

isndl posted:

Middle clicking the new tab button opens it next to your current tab in case you weren't aware, though it's a little more convenient to simply left click the button.

setting browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent to true in about :config makes them open next to your current one with a left click of that button (same with ctrl+t) fyi

Pilsner
Nov 23, 2002

isndl posted:

Middle clicking the new tab button opens it next to your current tab in case you weren't aware, though it's a little more convenient to simply left click the button. I seem to recall being able to set the new tab homepage but I just use the default one since it has a Google search box already, I just turned off the other junk on that page. :shrug:

You can definitely disable web searching from the address bar via an about :config tweak, though I don't recall the parameter offhand. You can also remove all the other search engines from the search box so it only searches Wikipedia.
Okay, but I don't think I've ever used that + for opening a new tab, I use Ctrl+T.

FWT THE CUTTER posted:

setting browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent to true in about :config makes them open next to your current one with a left click of that button (same with ctrl+t) fyi

Sweet, thanks. That works. :)

Also anothing thing I miss are hotkeys for basic stuff like Duplicate Tab or Undo Close Tab. Are there some built-in? I tried Saka Key, but it seems to mess up the browser experience as it by default maps just about anything I press. I'm a huge fan of the "Search for text when you begin typing" feature, so I can't really accept that typing regular letters spawns functionality. I'd just love to map Ctrl+Alt+T to Duplicate tab and Ctrl+F12 to Undo close tab, for example.

Avenging Dentist
Oct 1, 2005

oh my god is that a circular saw that does not go in my mouth aaaaagh
"Undo Close Tab" is Ctrl+Shift+T.

Mr.Radar
Nov 5, 2005

You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.
You can duplicate the current tab by middle-clicking the "reload" button. I'm not sure if there's any way to do that with the keyboard though.

isndl
May 2, 2012
I WON A CONTEST IN TG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CUSTOM TITLE

FWT THE CUTTER posted:

setting browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent to true in about :config makes them open next to your current one with a left click of that button (same with ctrl+t) fyi

This is cool and now in my config, although now I have no way to open tabs at the end except by switching to the last tab first. :downs: Shouldn't matter for most purposes at least.

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Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar
God this discussion reminds me how much I miss full function Tab Mix Plus :(

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