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

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

The Dark One posted:

The geolocation stuff that Firefox is capable of is pretty startling. I've seen services using my IP address get within about twenty kilometres of my house, but somehow Google Maps was able to locate me pretty much exactly.

While it's not strictly related to Firefox itself, I'd like to explain just how this method of geolocation works, as I think it's really a clever system.

So you know how Google drives every-freaking-place in those street view cars? Well, when they do they're also collecting all sorts of wifi data. Primarily SSIDs, MAC addresses, broadcast power, and signal strengths of access points. They poll these maybe once every second (just guessing, it may be (and probably is) much more often than that) and pair this data up with very high quality GPS locations. From there, they can triangulate the location of any given wireless router by its transmit power and received signal strength down to that startling accuracy you mentioned.

Now for Firefox's end. When a website asks for your location and you tell Firefox yes, Firefox polls the routers nearby. It sees, any routers that your wireless card is capable of seeing. It takes their SSIDs, MAC addresses, and signal strengths and gives them to Google. Google compares that data with their own, and can use that to put you on the map through standard triangulation and can pin your location down fairly accurately. Even if you're not connected to a router that's in Google's database.

If this system fails -- say because you live in the middle of bufu nowhere and they have not seen fit to send street view cars into your neighborhood -- Google will rely on the standard backup of IP-based geolocation and tell you that you're 2 towns over.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2011 20:36

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 09:34

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

Does anyone know how to stop Firefox from running javascript that disables text selection and right clicking without disabling javascript altogether? Why the hell does any browser obey this sort of thing in the first place?

Example (please no derailing talking about the content of the link I'm posting. This is not the thread for it): http://www.michaelcrook.org/2011/11/15/ashley-billasano-did-not-defend-her-virtue/

In case anyone's wondering, Chrome and IE obey this as well.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2011 00:37

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

pseudorandom name posted:

For the right click, in the preferences dialog, Content tab, the Advanced button next to Enable JavaScript, uncheck "Disable or replace context menus"

I KNEW there was something like this in the options, I just couldn't find it for the life of me.

Mr. Fix It posted:

Use noscript or the web developer tool bar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/ and disable javascript.

Web developer toolbar works. Still, I'd rather the browser was able to prevent sites from doing this crap. Oh well, can't always get what you want, I suppose.

Thanks, guys. Problem solved.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2011 01:22

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

The Merkinman posted:

Then why is it I can't see special ads more than once? Don't they store a cookie so they only show X times per Y?

Private browsing mode has its own set of cookies that it accesses. Once they're set, you have them until you leave private browsing mode, then they are deleted. The same is true of your history in private browsing mode.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2011 22:51

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

The Dark One posted:

Are there any known issues with Firefox and AMD drivers? I updated mine and now the text in the address bar and tab titles is all weird and unpleasant.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's so that you know what domain you're on, as an antiphishing feature. If you don't like it, go to about :config and toggle browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled to false.

Edit: Dammit, that's what I get for being blind. VVV

Prize Loser fucked around with this message at 10:51 on Nov 28, 2011

# ¿ Nov 28, 2011 05:28

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

ICA posted:

Privacy.

What'd be ideal would be having my passwords etc. saved in Private Browsing mode. Can this be done?

Not without addons, but if you're willing to install an addon to do it, Lastpass might do the trick for you. Just don't log in to it until you're in private browsing mode, and the login cookie will be deleted when you switch back to normal browsing along with the rest of the cookies from the private browsing session.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2011 04:06

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

pseudorandom name posted:

Alternately, the Comcast opt-out is at http://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/

Actually, now that Comcast has finished the switch to DNSSEC, it's not possible for them to redirect your typos. The opt-out page is still up, yes, but it's useless now because the DNS helper service no longer functions.

http://www.dnssec.comcast.net/faq.htm#faq7

Edit: That said, I still prefer to use Google's servers anyway.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2012 01:47

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

Mister Roboto posted:

Anyone else having youtube buffering issues?

It's not the audio, just the video that's choppy with heavy animation.

Usually, even when the video is still loading, i.e. the grey bar is halfway, the video loads fine. You can watch it and fastforward all around the pre-loaded part. But recently it's been choppy.

This isn't a cpu issue, I tested the same video in opera and it was nice and smooth. It's just in firefox on youtube.

It must be SOMEthing that's changed, but what?

Just a shot in the dark, here, but try disabling hardware acceleration in Flash's settings. Right click a video, go to settings, untick the box. For some reason Flash's hardware acceleration and Firefox don't really cooperate for me.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2012 12:35

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

PUNCHITCHEWIE posted:

Thanks for the tip, but I don't run flash. Chrome handles switching devices fine though, and Firefox 9 seemed to as well. Not 10 though.

It's probably some random plugin that you don't even use that's causing the issue. Check what plugins you're running in Firefox>Addons>Plugins. Disable everything you don't need, restart Firefox, and try again.

If that doesn't fix it, try making a new profile for testing purposes and see if it happens in that profile.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2012 21:33

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

PUNCHITCHEWIE posted:

Just AdBlock and Firebug, disabled both and this didn't fix it. I don't know how to make a new profile and frankly I'm done spending time on this issue, but thanks anyway.

Those are extensions. Go to that page again, then on the left hand side click on the plugins tab. Disable all of the plugins you don't use. If you don't know if you use a plugin or not, you probably don't use it.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2012 02:54

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 09:34

Prize Loser: Nov 28, 2005; It's casual Friday! Pants are optional!

Xander77 posted:

It's a warning that comes up when you log into gmail. And youtube. And something awful. Etc. Etc. Etc.

So, yeah, I'm pretty sure I want to disable it.

(The rest of the story is really not relevant to this thread)

Copy and paste the part under the "technical details" arrow for us. Or screenshot it or something. There are a dozen reasons you could be getting an error on every SSL page, and some are pretty simple fixes. The page should give enough detail to figure out what problem it is without needing you to disable certificate checking.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 15:59

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