Darkoshi

Every once in a while, Firefox shows me error messages (like Page Not Found) in German. I don't know why. I happen to be able to read and understand German, but what could that have to do with it? This time, Google is doing it to me:



The only reason Google shows me as signed in, is because I signed into YouTube. Yet my YouTube pages are still in English.

I bet it is related to one of my plug-ins. But why would it happen so intermittently?

The "View - Reload" menu item has been removed from version 25 of Firefox. Apparently for quite a while already, "Reload" was only available when pressing "Alt+V" to view the menu. But now it's no longer there at all. I wonder why the Firefox designers feel the need to remove functionality from the menus, when the menus aren't even visible by default anymore.

Why do little changes like this bother me so much? Because it's like coming home to find that all your door handles have been removed and replaced by knobs, and furthermore, the knobs are on the top of the doors rather than in their hitherto-normal positions. Then you find out that for the last 10 years, 98% of other people have been using wireless mobilephone apps to remotely open all their doors, rather than using the door handles.

Now I have to remember to use either F5 or Ctrl+R to refresh the page when I don't have my hand on the mouse. I feel like I'm too old to learn new mnemonics. I can never even remember that Ctrl+Tab is for switching between tabs, even though I constantly use Alt+Tab for switching between windows. (I also can never remember the hotkeys for indenting or outdenting a block of text, in my email program at work).

Hmm. To press either F5 or a Control key combination, I have to look at the keyboard. Maybe that's why I find the menu mnemonics using the Alt keys easier to learn/remember. If I need to copy/paste something while typing, I still tend to use the Alt-Edit-Copy and Alt-Edit-Paste keys. My fingers however, know that Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins,and Ctrl-C can also be used.... but I don't use Ctrl-V much because how am I supposed to remember that V is for Paste?

Hmm. When editing text (as opposed to typing), my left hand is in the normal position, but my right hand is centered on the arrow keys. That lets me scroll through the text with my right hand, and also lets me do copy/paste/delete operations using the keys on that side.

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I've found that it is much easier to iron clothes while they are still damp from the washer. No need to first let them dry. No need to put water into the iron, nor to drain it out afterwards. Ironing damp clothes makes them dry faster too.

This makes me more likely to iron clothes right after I've washed them, avoiding an ever-increasing accumulation of wrinkled clothes waiting to be ironed. If I know that I won't have time to iron right after washing, I may not even put those particular items into the wash.

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I've been noticing a recent tendency to bite my lower lip while washing dishes, especially if I'm in a hurry. It's an odd subconscious thing; as if biting my lip will somehow make me get done faster. I have to consciously put effort into not doing it, as it's not a habit I want to have.

Based on an articles such as these, I've gone ahead and disabled Java in my browsers:

• Java Security Fix Issued By Oracle, Feds Maintain Warning To Users


• Serious Flaw in Java Software Is Found, Then Patched


• How to turn off Java on your browser - and why you should do it now

As it turns out, I had a fairly old version of Java on my machine, due to having turned off updates a couple of years ago. So I updated to the Java version with the latest patches (1.7.0_11) and turned updates back on. As I had disabled Java in the browsers, I decided to have Java to check for updates on a weekly rather than daily basis.

The next day after I booting my computer, my ESET firewall notified me that Java Update Scheduler (jusched.exe) was attempting to access the internet. In order to track how often Java was checking for updates, I only gave it temporary permission and did not create a firewall rule for it yet. I also changed the Java settings to check monthly instead of weekly, to see if that would make a difference.

Yet jusched.exe still attempts to access the internet every day! I'm not even clear why jusched.exe is accessing the internet. From what I understand, it is only a scheduler, and jucheck.exe is the program which should check for updates.

In addition, the Java "Automatic Update Advanced Settings" dialog is quite odd. There isn't really a setting to control how often it checks for updates. There is only a setting to control how often you are *notified* of updates.



When you select "Weekly", it says, "Java will check every Sunday at 12:00AM and notify you within 7 days".

When you select "Monthly", it says "Java will check weekly on Sunday and notify you within 30 days".

Regardless if you select weekly or monthly, it claims that it will check weekly. Furthermore, what is the point of checking for updates but then waiting 7 or 30 days to notify you that updates are available? I would expect a program to notify me of available updates right after it has checked and found them. I want to control how often it checks for them, not how long it waits to tell me about them after it finds them.

I believe that this is why I turned off updates 2 years ago - it annoys me the settings dialog claims that it will check weekly when in fact it checks daily, and that I can't control how often it checks for updates.

This page explains how to set up your own task in Windows Task Scheduler to check for updates, rather than using the Java Update Scheduler. But each time this task runs, you'll get at least 1 popup window which you'll have to close, even when no updates are available.

I feel that one shouldn't have to go through that much trouble... I'm feeling rather disappointed by Java, which is a shame as it is currently my preferred programming language.

Yesterday I encountered this problem again, where the wrong search term was passed in the Referring URL, when I clicked a result in Google's search results. I narrowed down that the problem only happened when NoScript was enabled.

More info can be found on this thread that I posted to the NoScript forum.

Other things that I've discovered in the last 24 hours:

If NoScript is set to block JavaScript for google.com, then on the Google page, you don't get the drop-down with search suggestions, as you type. (But the Firefox Search Bar does still provide search suggestions.)
When you open the main Google page, the focus won't automatically be set to the search box.
Most of the search functionality is still there even with JavaScript disabled, but small niceties like those are missing.

This page has info on using either "https://www.google.com" or "https://encrypted.google.com" for encrypting your searches. It also mentions some of the differences between them.

Using https google.com prevents referring URLs being sent, except for ad links.
Using encrypted google.com prevents referring URLs being sent, including ad links.

You can configure NoScript to force connections to google.com to use HTTPS:
Options - Advanced - HTTPS - Behavior - add *.google.com in the box for "Force the following sites to use secure (HTTPS) connections".

For certain pages to work, the following also need to be configured in the "Never force" box:
www.google.com/imgres
translate.google.com

With NoScript forcing HTTPS for *.google.com, it appears that no referring URL is sent, even when you click on ad links in the Google search results.

There's no simple/obvious way to update the Firefox Search Manager settings to customize the URL/parameters that get used for each search engine. But with the above "Force HTTPS" NoScript configuration for google.com, any Google searches initiated via Firefox's search bar or the "Search Google for..." context menu item will get sent to the encrypted https://www.google.com site rather than the default non-encrypted http://www.google.com site.

Changing the search engine which is selected in the Firefox Search bar also controls the search engine that is included in the context menu item "Search ... for ...". (It always struck me as preferential treatment that only a Google search entry was included in the Context menu; I didn't realize that it was controlled by the Search bar selection).

In Opera, it is easy to update the URL/parameters used for each search engine. Simply click the Search drop-down, select "Manage Search Engines", and click the "Add..." or "Edit..." button.

This page lets you manually add a search provider for IE7. I didn't test it. It might not work in IE9. There isn't any other obvious way of manually entering your own search provider in IE9.


In Firefox, you can configure whether or not referring URLs are passed (for all sites) via the network.http.sendRefererHeader setting on the about:config page.

In Opera, you can configure whether or not referring URLs are passed (for all sites) via:
Tools - Preferences - Network - Send Referrer information
or
Tools - Quick Preferences - Send Referrer information



Info on configuring ABE in NoScript. (need to whitelist the domain first)

I just found out that when Firefox opens a new page in a separate tab, you can drag the tab out of that browser window and it becomes its own browser window. Yay!

I prefer not to use tabs. But the built-in right-click "Search Google for..." option, and some other add-ons, always open new pages in tabs.

I was able to update the ToggleDocumentColors extension to do what I wanted it to do. Now I can set my colors to whatever values I want, without it causing problems when I'm using the page-specified settings.

I emailed the add-on's author in case they want to incorporate my change into a new version of the add-on. But the change might confuse some people, and maybe most people don't set their colors like I did anyway, so it would not be an issue for them in the first place. So, I'm not really sure if it would be a good idea to update the add-on for other people, or not.

Instead of feeling accomplished by my accomplishment, I just feel tired. It took way longer to get it working than I was expecting, which is rather typical. Don't get me wrong - coding the add-ons does seem to be quite simple; it just takes a while to figure things out. (especially when the functions throw exceptions for undocumented reasons! grrr!)

Firefox add-on ToggleDocumentColors - adds a toolbar button and keyboard short-cut which you can use to switch between the page-specified document settings (colors) and the settings you've specified in the Firefox options. (The Opera browser has this feature built-in.) So, for example, in the Firefox options, you can set your page background color to black and the text to bright yellow and links to bright green. Then whenever you open a page which has a bright white background, you can click the button on the toolbar to switch to your own colors. Comes in handy for me on the YouTube site, since I have to switch my monitor settings to nearly their brightest, in order to watch the videos, and then having bright white on the rest of the page hurts my eyes.

Hmmm. It seems that YouTube sets the text color based on *your* settings, even when you are using the page-specified settings. The page background color is set to white, based on *their* settings, and yellow on white is not nice. At first I thought it was a bug with the add-on, but it happens even with the add-on uninstalled. Oh well. As long as I can always toggle to my settings when on their site, I think it's still worthwhile to have the add-on.

Hummmmmmm.... I'm just trying out the latest version of Opera, and it doesn't even let you specify your own text color anymore! It only has settings for the page background and link colors. Maybe Opera decided not to have the text color setting anymore, because too many webpages, like YouTube, assume that the user's default text color is black.

Whenever I open a new Firefox browser window, it now seems to lock up my computer for several seconds. It used to be, I could right-click a link to open it in a new window, and continue reading/scrolling the original window while the other one opened. This is something I do fairly often, sometimes opening 2 or 3 other windows, while finishing reading the first. Now the browser locks up until the new window finishes opening.

It's either something with my computer, or something with a recent Firefox update. Anyone else notice anything similar?

According to my browser history, I've opened about 430 web pages today. Although it's actually a new day now. And I wasn't even on the computer all day. But I haven't yet found the page in my history which I am trying to find. It's got to be in there somewhere.

430... that's a big number, hard to believe. I've been doing searches, looking for info, not reading all the pages, but still.