Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

I want to thank you guys for opening up the world of visualizing random websites to me. I just had to use it on the greatest site on earth.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2012 03:00

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 00:48

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Is there an extension that does nothing but move/let me move the hamburger button to the left? I've tried to google, and maybe I'm using dumb search terms or something, but all I see is people bitching about how the new UI is terrible and begging for a way to revert most of the changes. I don't like to install an extension only to disable 90% of the functionality if I can avoid it, and I actually like all of the changes except the immovable hamburger.

Scott808 posted:

I don't like lots of little things about this new UI... the unmovable and/or stuck together back/forward,stop/reload, and bookmark this page/bookmark list, the options hamburger thing being stuck on the right side where before the mostly same function orange Firefox button was on the left. The stupid animation and moving of the address bar when the forward button comes and goes. But the thing that's driving me the most crazy is that I have to essentially use NoScript with the list in reverse order now that it's stuck on top with no add on bar.

I honestly can't understand these overhauls of the UI where elements get moved around so you have to kind of relearn where everything is. I also don't get the Chrome-ification obsession; if I wanted to use Chrome I'd use Chrome, dammit.

I'm (getting?) old and hate change, I guess.

Mozilla uses telemetry to track what features people actually use, versus what they report using. The two are always different. I'm going off memory here, but I recall their data showing that most people use F5 instead of hitting refresh, and rarely using stop at all. More than anything else the button was just an indicator of when you could refresh, so they moved it somewhere it wouldn't be competing with regular buttons for space, which happens to also be where the progress bar lives, making for a nice grouping of functionality.

They originally made stop/reload stuck together because it's pointless for both to apply to the same page. You can't stop when there's nothing to stop, and there's no reason to reload when it's already reloading. It's a really logical change, and while I haven't actually looked for this particular piece of information my experience with reading the various posts and articles from Mozilla on these sorts of decisions leads me to believe their telemetry showed that hardly anyone separated reload and stop out, so there's no point handling code for them acting like regular buttons AND the in-address bar special case AND the logic for detecting which to do. Removing behavior is typically a matter of reducing the amount of crap to maintain rather than some kind of minimalism fetish.

You may disagree with the reasoning, but if you say "I don't understand why they'd do this" you haven't actually tried to understand, which is why some people assume the complains ultimately reduce to fear of change.

# ¿ May 5, 2014 04:51

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Magic Underwear posted:

Since you seem to be the expert, could you explain why it looks so much like chrome? What telemetry data did they use to make that decision?

That came out way snarkier than intended. Sorry, I'm not actually an expert and I don't usually pretend to be. It's just that those specific things, those things that you mentioned as being particularly awful, have been explicitly addressed. I'm suggesting that it's likely each individual change, with a few possible exceptions, can be independently justified as a sensible choice, at which point any resemblance of the final product to another browser may well be a matter of parallel evolution.

Incidentally, if you open Chrome you'll see that most of the odious changes you listed don't actually match Chrome. Chrome has the combined refresh and stop buttons but it puts them left of the address bar instead of inside and on the right. Chrome also has separate back and forward (which aren't attached to the address bar), has the star in the address bar (which Mozilla used to have but has now reverted), has angular tabs rather than gently curved ones, and basically nothing else in common except the tabs on top (which all browsers are moving towards independently for the same reasons) and the unified menu button (aka hamburger, except Firefox has less stuff irrevocably glomped into it).

The point I'm trying to make is that you're free to not like the changes, but insinuating some secret plan to mindlessly copy Chrome just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

jeeves posted:

Anyone know how to remove the slight animation fade-down that happens when you open the bookmark menu now? It's only like half a second long but it is really annoying to me because after using FF for so long it looks like the sort of stutter that happens when your computer is running slowly and it has to read the bookmark files from disk poorly or something.

I agree with Aleron. For me, the animation is done long before I can actually move my cursor over something. I tried just now and it literally opens in about the time it takes me to blink. If it's really half a second long for you, there's something wrong; it should be like a tenth of a second at most.

Avenging Dentist posted:

The following userChrome (probably) works. I didn't really test it very thoroughly and just injected the CSS via the DOM Inspector, so it's possible I made a mistake somewhere:
code:
#PanelUI-button {
  background-position: calc(100% - 0px) 0px, calc(100% - 1px) 0px, calc(100% - 2px) 0px !important;
}

#nav-bar-customization-target {
  -moz-box-ordinal-group: 2 !important;
}

#nav-bar-overflow-button {
  -moz-box-ordinal-group: 3 !important;
}

Huh, thanks. I'll try that out.

# ¿ May 6, 2014 00:41

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

xamphear posted:

Why is there a popup blocker icon perpetually in my address bar now? Is this something one of my weird addons did?

Yes, that or something is borked and you need a clean profile.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2014 01:29

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

...
Basically what I was trying to say (under the assumption that FF was behaving as normal for me) was that if someone approves several updates where "nothing happens", eventually they just stop accepting the updates.

Do you have a source for this being an actual thing, or is this just your experience?

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 03:14

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Lum posted:

Well this update (FF33) has broken the Tab Utilities addon in a rather ridiculous way. With that addon installed, typing into the address bar and pressing enter does nothing.

Also at some point Status-4-Evar has stopped working properly. I'd like to have it so that when I hover over a link, the URL of that link is shown in the statusbar so that I know it's not goatse.cx or whatever.

Anyone know of a workaround or replacement for these?

Yeah, waiting for Tab Utilities to update is always the most obnoxious part of firefox updates. Really, the only really crucial feature for me is being able to set up middle clicking on empty space in the tab bar or on the new tab button to re-open closed tabs. That, more than anything else, is what's kept me in firefox instead of moving to Chrome.

I'd heard a while back that the dev of Tab Utilities had friggin died. Did it get picked up by a new developer or was this just internet rumors run amok again?

# ¿ Nov 17, 2014 03:45

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

The Merkinman posted:

There is a certain level of irony about the drama being "people should be paid for their work" when the point of the add-on is to block ads.

Honestly I'd be fine with ads if I could rely on the major ad services to always catch malicious ads before they go live, and there weren't sites that cause my browser to hang because all the advertising is just that lovely.

Alternatively, if Firefox provided a way to telepathically induce aneurisms in lovely advertisers.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 16:07

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

isndl posted:

Fitt's Law doesn't account for a decade or more of FPS gaming teaching you to maintain precise mouse control at all times.

Having precise mouse control makes you faster at clicking arbitrary points than other people clicking arbitrary points. It will still be faster to click a large button than a small one for any given person. Back in college I had to make a program to test this and run it on a bunch of people. FPS players still show the same overall trend, even if overall speed is greater.

It's irrelevant to the question of where tabs go, of courses, since that's a matter of conceptual hierarchy, and most folks don't run maximized. Edit: I thought about it a bit more, and it actually wouldn't surprise me if most people with smaller screens or ones running below, say, 1080p actually run maximized.

It does mean there's no good reason the menu button should be in a corner. I'm just not sure there's any element in a web browser more deserving of that location.

Is there any reason to make the hamburger immovable, though? I could see making it impossible to remove so that you can't remove it, though that's a weak argument given that you can right click anywhere on the navigation bar and select customize; surely anyone who couldn't figure that out wouldn't customize in the first place. I literally can't think of a single reason to not let users move it at all.

Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Aug 24, 2015

# ¿ Aug 24, 2015 13:24

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Read posted:

Re: Why use Firefox.

Apart from addons, I can gently caress around with the UI waaaaaaay more than Chrome allows me.

This. I have buttons on the left (except for hamburger) and more importantly can un-close tabs by middle clicking the tab bar or new tab button. That feature will have to be pried from my cold, dead hands.

Edit: for mobile, I just plain like Firefox more than chrome.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 20:01

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

slidebite posted:

Holy poo poo, I had no idea middle button did that

Fun fact: the Tab Utilities Fixed extension keys you configure what clicking with different buttons does. I have mine set up so middle clicking links opens tabs and middle clicking tabs closes them (same as stock) but made middle clicking the new tab button re-open the last closed tab. I also hid the close tab buttons. These two features are most of what keeps me using Firefox.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 16:17

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

~Coxy posted:

I really have to wonder if there are any actual Firefox users left who aren't "power users" for whom the lack of CTR and other extensions are deal breakers.
It would certainly be ideal if there was enough development effort behind something like Pale Moon.

None of the Firefox users I know give a poo poo about CTR. They either prefer certain parts of the UI over chrome, or they have some particular extension (besides CTR) they can't do without.

For me, I hate close tab buttons. I close tabs with middle click. It's easier, leaves a smidge more space for text, and saves me from occasional accidental tab closings.

I also use tab utilities to mage it so middle clicking the new tab button re-opens the last closed tab. There's a key chord for this, but I like to mouse browse.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 16:29

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

The Dark One posted:

Whoops! Google forgot/was too lazy to make Hangsouts voice/video calls work in Firefox without requiring any plugins!

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts-temporary-issues-with-firefox.html

Hangouts hasn't worked worth a drat in Firefox for me for a while now. I just get blank boxes.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 13:01

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Alereon posted:

(standard edition portable zip doesn't have anime or ads).

Thread title?

# ¿ May 8, 2017 06:05

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

After some fiddling, 57 isn't too bad. I actually like the compact mode.

The only things I want that I haven't found an extension for are hiding the close buttons on tabs and reopening closed tabs when I middle click the new tab button.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 18:47

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Does anyone else have problems with google play music hitching momentarily? It just abruptly freezes for like half a second then continues like nothing happened. It seems to happen every fifth song or so, and I can't figure out why.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2018 01:13

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Celexi posted:

I'm the lone solaris user

Welp, time to boot up my windows 98 machine.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2019 18:56

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Inceltown posted:

This is just going to be another hosed up thing to do with webp isn't it? Mother fuckers want tracking in everything and will break the internet to get it.

What does webp have up do with tracking? I thought it was just an image format.

# ¿ May 22, 2020 17:37

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Geemer posted:

Unless you're on mobile.

Then you can use Newpipe and not watch ads.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2020 05:00

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

I could survive switching to another browser at this point. The main modifications I use are uBlock origin, disabling close tab buttons, and moving as many buttons as I can to the left side.

I really miss having middle clicks on the new tab button reopen closed tabs, but I haven't been able to do that for years. :smith:

# ¿ Aug 12, 2020 20:48

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Truga posted:

you can't not post the firefox bugzilla entry
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1618257#c8
this comment in particular

lmfao

I'm actually having trouble making sense of the post and its context. Is he saying that introducing a bug to block an exploit is "underhanded"??

Edit: oh my god, was the bug report originally filed by the guy who invented the tracking trick???

Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Feb 19, 2021

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 21:47

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Dylan16807 posted:

....
Yep!

I''m having brain trouble today so I thought I was just reading things wrong, but it was because I was psychologically unprepared for that level of hamfisted duplicity. :psyduck:

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 21:58

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Klyith posted:

Not without MITM'ing yourself by installing a root cert, which is doable and IMO safe for technical people on a home network, but not for normal users or outside the home.

There's also DNS-based adblocking, but that isn't as effective in the first place and also is harder to do with DNS over HTTPS. Again, you *can* but it's become a lot harder than the simple 1-2-3 of pihole.

(I run a pihole-like DNS blocker on my router, mostly for adblocking my phone, and took the lazy solution of disabling DoH. But the router itself is using DNS over TLS to the outside world.)

Really the best solution to adblocking is ublock, and switching browsers to Firefox or a chromium-based alternative is the best way to go.

Pihole can do DNS over https via Cloudflared, which oddly enough works with other than Cloudflare. It's pretty simple.

# ¿ May 31, 2021 04:51

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

It's so bizarre that it's a boolean choice, but it uses an integer as its datatype.
justmozillathings.txt

In a lot of database systems true is negative one. Computers, man.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2021 18:32

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Nth Doctor posted:

I mean thanks to two's complement, -1 is much more one-y than 1.

Yeah, it makes sense, it's just kinda funny how often software casually exposes that implementation detail.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2021 06:47

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

As of today, I'm having random sites not work in firefox. They work fine in other browsers, but in firefox I just get a blank page that says "blocked."

It still happens even if I start firefox without extensions. My last step before ~~committing honorable sudoku~~ creating a new profile is asking if one of you have any idea wtf.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 20:09

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

CMYK BLYAT! posted:

reddit hasn't used cloudflare since like 2017. it's either reddit themselves or fastly that hosed it

i blame reddit's cdn admin deploying some new poo poo that didn't quite work right and "oh fuk"ing as their traffic subsequently dropped 30%

Y'know, I thought it happened to a couple other sites but I may have confused myself because it looks to be just reddit. Mystery solved...ish??

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 20:43

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Did the most recent update set anyone else's default search to bing?

# ¿ Sep 14, 2022 02:30

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

You can also use policies.json to disable things like studies, pocket, telemetry, and DNS over HTTPS.

Is there a reason to disable DNS over https?

# ¿ Jun 30, 2023 18:59

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Klyith posted:

Fifefox's built-in DNS-over-HTTPS sends all DNS requests directly to cloudflare. Regardless of how you feel about cloudflare, it means your router is ignored.

This means you don't get router-based DNS caching or Pihole type stuff. And maybe local domain stuff?

If you have some basic networking skills and a decent router you can turn on DNS-over-TLS at the router level, and then just use plaintext DNS for all machines inside your network. All your DNS queries to the outside world are encrypted, you still can use piholes easily, it's the best of both worlds.

Ah, ok. I have my pihole set up to use DNS over HTTPS using cloudflared, but not with cloudflare (iirc I'm using 9999). Now I've disabled Firefox's DNS over HTTPS in the settings menu. Not sure what policies.json does that this doesn't, but there's an option for disabling studies, too.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2023 19:35

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Flipperwaldt posted:

I was a great fan of the menu editor add-on before it was killed in the mass extinction. It should be core functionality much like the customize toolbar thingy. Well, it probably shouldn't for probably arguable reasons, but I want it to.

I have never wanted to email an image from the context menu, but Mozilla will move heaven and earth to make sure I can.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2023 21:10

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

astral posted:

Meanwhile I'm over here wanting to make the "Middle click the new-tab button" behavior the default new-tab button/ctrl+t behavior.

For years I had it so middle clicking the new tab button opened the last closed tab, until they broke the extensions. It's the one thing I still miss from that era.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2023 16:18

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Knormal posted:

Ctrl-Shift-T will reopen the last tab, no extension needed.

Yes it will. But my mouse doesn't have those buttons. I spend a significant amount of browsing time with neither hand on the keyboard, or with the keyboard shoved entirely out of the way to make room for a notebook or sandwich.

Thanks for mentioning it, because lord knows this poo poo isn't discoverable. I know tons of people who still don't know you can close tabs with middle click. They boggle when they see I've hidden close tab buttons entirely.

Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Aug 14, 2023

# ¿ Aug 14, 2023 22:12

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Do you have a Logitech mouse or one with programmable buttons?

Logitech G Hub lets you assign macros to mouse buttons and I could not live without it. I have my scrollwheel set to reopen tabs if I click it in.

not sure why I didn't think of this. It's not like I use the DPI buttons, but it never occurred to me to check if they're programmable. Will check when I get home.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2023 16:28

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

slidebite posted:

I've been away for a while and just tried YT with the same issue about blocker detected.

I just X the pop up that detected the blocker message and reloading the page seems to work.

Stupid question, but how is the FF browser for android? Does it allow plug ins like ublock?

I've been using duck duck go with mixed satisfaction for general browsing.

In addition to what mobby said, Mozilla shows limited signs of caring about the Android app. The limited extension support was supposed to get better, but it's been years. There are silly issues like the tab list losing its place for reasons of varying opacity. And some other apps that open a browser window automatically will do weird poo poo, like not recognize that you've done whatever you were asked to do. But it generally works fine.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2023 18:33

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Computer viking posted:

My partner has written a couple of firefox android extensions (that are not currently supported), and he just got contacted asking if it was OK for mozilla to create new point releases of them, in preparation for them being included when they expand the supported list sometime ... soonish. So there's finally some movement.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2023 23:47

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Nitrousoxide posted:

I'm giving Floorp a shot, which is built on Firefox's ESR stream. The defaults privacy defaults don't cripple the usecase like Librewolf does and it's got the Vivaldi sidebars if that's your jam (you can turn them off if you don't like 'em). I like it so far. Might switch off Brave for it.

Still mind-boggling that Firefox doesn't support PWA's for anything other than windows though.

What's wrong with librewolf? I haven't used it.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2023 22:54

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 00:48

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

101 posted:

You can configure it but the defaults are super extreme.

Out of the box it basically resets itself every time you close it. No cookies or passwords or history kept whatsoever

Thanks. Also: :stonk:

Lol floorp

# ¿ Nov 23, 2023 01:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California