darkoshi: (Default)
My main Firefox browser that I use at work, which is on an ESR update channel, was finally updated from a pre-Quantum version to version 60.

I found that there is actually a way to get back a status bar, for displaying URLs when hovering over links, rather than having the URLs pop up and disappear:

http://www.optimiced.com/en/2018/02/11/restore-status-bar-in-firefox-quantum/


It sounds like there's even a way to put add-on buttons on the status bar too. But I haven't tried this yet, so I'm not sure:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/8bfxji/been_trying_to_revive_the_addon_bar_statuspanel/

Hmmm. I'll need to see if there's a way of changing the status bar color. I don't like it being gray.

Date: 2018-09-09 08:43 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
Thanks for posting this. It seems I need to dig up the link you posted for the bug to restore the status bar (I lost it I don't know how many months back, and search engines are doing nothing to help me find it). I keep thinking maybe it's on my own blog, but only if you put it there in a comment. It's been like a year since we last discussed it and I'm wondering, did they wait for everyone to shut up so they could quietly shelve ever coming through with it, or is any progress being made?

ETA: maybe this is it? (Just did a sort of Hail Mary search): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215064

Now that I see it, I think it's the one; what tells me is I remember how badly all the "hidden comment - advocacy/me-too" blurbs got me last time - they're getting me again now. Oh, and comments closed. In other words, if you ever see this feature again, it'll be after it's been nice and quiet on this page anywhere from five months to a few years, maybe when Jupiter aligns with Venus after a Dem gets elected pres in 2020, but this could still all crash and burn if we make a deal with Yahoo over Google for search which could happen anytime now, so go away.

There are a lot of good CSS files all over the place and some download status bar add-ons, but without API access it's still all kind of half-baked, isn't it.
Edited (ETA) Date: 2018-09-09 09:17 am (UTC)

Date: 2018-09-10 05:01 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
Every time I look at that page, I'm heartened by the part at the top that says "Modified: 4 days ago". It makes me hope that maybe the bug is being worked on after all. But I found the page's history link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_activity.cgi?id=1215064 and I think that those "CC" updates are only people signing up to be notified about changes to the bug's status. Sigh.

From https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla/Fields#CC_/_CC_List:
CC / CC List This field will add people to a mailing list which notifies users when a bug has been changed. It's generally not a good idea to add people other than yourself to the CC list unless you know that they welcome such notifications.

I don't know what the difference (if any) is between "changes to the bug's status" and "when a bug has been changed". Does "change" indicate its description, scope, or what someone feels is needed to close it has been modified somehow? Does it mean it's actually being worked on so progress is being made? Yay, vagueness...

I still haven't tried out the example in the 2nd link, for add-on buttons.

Yeah, that's why this is my backburner project - when I get into the CSS, I want to see what happens when I use the workaround(s) to add the add-on buttons in. I imagine on some level I'm either going to think it's a disaster by my standards, and/or that having the buttons is useless because they don't work.

Either state's either going to stop my project altogether or else require extra fiddling to carry on until I can live with the results. I haven't even gotten back to modifying an add-on that needs some work (I simply stopped using it in the meantime, because it's hard to see it and *not work on it* - I get that itch so bad, but just don't have time right now).

Re: Mozilla/Firefox did it again

Date: 2018-09-16 08:46 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
Does this sandbox userChrome.js? User tustamido seems to say AutoConfig and userChrome.js are equivalent, in which case I'm glad I never bothered testing the CSS or add-on icon code from the pages we discussed, because I'm not sure I'd want to use ESR just to maintain that functionality (but I'm not sure why I would not want to. Security's a concern, though; while the ESR version might be as fully patched as that version of Firefox can be, that doesn't resolve security holes only fixed in later versions that also affect ESR but don't get patched for ESR).

Tustamido also campaigned for AutoConfig to remain unsandboxed in Nightly, Betas and so on, but no one ever said if it would be or not. I'd continue to pursue workarounds for Nightly or Betas but I just don't see myself jumping backward for an ESR (I'm already using Waterfox just to edit CSS because tools I'm comfortable using/that do what I want literally don't exist outside of it, and Waterfox is slow/insecure/backwards enough as it is. It's actually really awful).
Edited (typos) Date: 2018-09-16 08:50 am (UTC)

Re: Mozilla/Firefox did it again

Date: 2018-09-17 04:21 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
I looked up AutoConfig last night (very briefly). Off the top of my head it doesn't seem to have anything (or else much) to do with userChrome. js but I'm not 100% sure on that either, just yet.

Re: liking Waterfox, I might too if I'd never moved on to using Quantum (which I started doing pretty much as soon as it came out, if not sooner (I can't recall now if I grabbed any Betas or Nightlys before it did)).

I didn't realize Waterfox was slow except by comparison. Quantum's so fast it makes Waterfox look like a turtle. Maybe on better hardware, though, its slowdowns/bottlenecks/general lagginess might not be as noticeable.

Re: security on Waterfox, that's why I keep it strictly for DW coding (mostly while logged out) - I figure me and the browser just can't get into too much trouble right here. :)

Re: Mozilla/Firefox did it again

Date: 2018-09-18 12:23 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
I'm just this minute starting to look into that flag, but had to stop as soon as I started: it's not in the Beta (63.0b6) and I don't have latest official Firefox installed. I don't know what it being missing from the Beta could mean: either they haven't disabled AutoConfig in Beta or they've disabled it entirely are my two very best guesses. Just gonna dig around for more info on it now, I guess.

Edit: in my first swipe through Google I found the Beta release notes: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/62.0beta/releasenotes/ which say the same thing official release notes do about the flag, so are we supposed to create the flag ourselves? The way it's worded on both pages I thought it was already baked in.

Edit 2: they haven't updated their official FAQ, either, to explain AutoConfig's soon to be limited to ESR, only: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-autoconfig

Edit 3: created the flag (New > Boolean), set it to true, created a Chrome folder and userChrome.css using these instructions: https://www.howtogeek.com/334716/how-to-customize-firefoxs-user-interface-with-userchrome.css/, then copied/pasted the CSS from the first link in your top post into it and it worked. Immediately disabled the flag, restarted Firefox, and the userchrome.css is still working, so apparently userChrome.css isn't dependent on AutoConfig.

I was going to put off messing with Firefox internal CSS (I have a hundred linkposts I'm clearly never going to make) but wondering if userChrome.css is dependent on AutoConfig to work just blew that idea to bits. At least now I've got that answer. Now I might as well see how the add-on icon CSS works, since I'm in there anyhow.
Edited (more info, sort of; added links; added dependency followup) Date: 2018-09-18 01:31 am (UTC)

Re: Mozilla/Firefox did it again

Date: 2018-09-18 05:05 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
Yeah, the flag doesn't affect userChrome.css or userChrome.js at all (I've tried it every which way and even reset it (cleared the value) just to make sure).

The JS and CSS in the first link in your top post didn't work, but for some reason this identical JS did (I've done a line-by-line comparison and can't find any errors in the first. I could run an actual diff but don't _think_ I have to?): https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8kxpbc/is_there_any_extension_that_can_create_a_status/dzbzw9v/ (parent: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8kxpbc/is_there_any_extension_that_can_create_a_status/) Edit: ran a diff but it just brought up spacing and comment variations that shouldn't affect the result.

It looks like the instructions there are incomplete so I got the JS at the second link to work only by accident by adding and deleting other files before I added the bottombar JS: you need that and the CSS they give you, but you also need an XML file found here: https://github.com/nuchi/firefox-quantum-userchromejs (and you might also need the userChrome.js file found there, but until I can clear Fx script cache a few more times, I won't know for sure!) edit: you don't need it, actually, just the JS, CSS and XML files mentioned are needed.

Screen cap, with a few add-on icons dragged over for demo purposes: https://intoolate.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/bottombar.png

Turns out AutoConfig and userChrome.css can control very similar things so maybe that's why people get them mixed up: https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-js.html. As far as I can tell one seems to have no dependency on the other, while AutoConfig can do things like set browser preferences that I'm thinking userChrome can't.
Edited (more info) Date: 2018-09-19 02:13 am (UTC)

Re: Mozilla/Firefox did it again

Date: 2018-09-19 06:28 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
Hopefully...*crosses fingers for you*

Date: 2018-09-10 05:27 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] marahmarie
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)
Just noticed people on the mailing list get CC'd on everything - even advocacy and me-too comments. That's got to be a drag - especially if you're only subscribed to keep up with actual changes.

This one near the end kind of intrigues me: (Who) automation (When) 2018-06-19 13:04:03 PDT (What) Product (Removed) Toolkit (Added) WebExtensions...hmmm

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