Darkoshi

I've been using Waterfox Classic, which allows old pre-Quantum Firefox add-ons to work.
Today I finally tried out Waterfox Current, which doesn't support those old add-ons and is based more on the current version of Firefox.

With Waterfox Current, my prior methods of overriding the new tab page to display a local HTML file did not work. I tried out several other ideas*, which did not work either.

I finally found a way to make it work, using the js/cfg file method described on these pages:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1210576
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/elqmwf/new_tab_homepage_local_file_broken_userchromecss/

According to the 2nd page, that method worked for Firefox v72.
I had noticed a while back that the new tab override wasn't working for my current-version Firefox browser either, but I don't use that browser much anyway.
Now today when I try using the same 2 files that work for me in Waterfox Current, with Firefox 77.0.1, they still don't work there! Fie! Fie! Fie on you, Firefox!


*You can use an add-on to have new tabs open your home page, but it doesn't work when the home page is a local file.

You can use an add-on to open a specific website (but not a local file**) in new tabs.

**Unless the add-on copies the local file to the add-on's storage space, in which case you need to reload it in the add-on every time you update the file. Having a (static) local file which the add-on loads to its storage space redirect to another (dynamic) local file does not work.

You can use an add-on to redirect from one URL to another. But redirecting the new tabs from a specific website to a local file does not work; that gives a Security Error.

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.

I was looking for an add-on to let me save an image of a full web-page, even if only part of the page is visible without scrolling.

I found out that you can do it in Firefox (and Waterfox) even without an addon:
From the menu, select Tools - Web Developer - Developer Toolbar. That will make it show an entry bar at the bottom of the page.
Then type "screenshot --clipboard --fullpage" into the entry bar, to save the image to the clipboard. Or you can save it directly to a file, using other parameters.

In some cases you may get an error message while doing that, and it may not work. It depends on how the webpage is set up. But I got around that by first saving the page as a single HTML file, opening the saved file, and then doing the above. This way, the screenshot didn't have all the images and colors of the original page, but it had the important stuff that I wanted to save.

Over at Qiao's house, I hooked up a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to my laptop, as typing directly on the laptop gets frustrating after a while.

The laptop sits on a movable cart. First I tried putting the keyboard on another little table/stand in front of the cart. But that way, the screen was too far away. Then I tried turning the laptop sideways on the cart, so the keyboard could fit in front. But that way, the mouse didn't fit. Then I thought to try placing the keyboard right on top of the laptop's keyboard. I thought that would cause the laptop's keys to accidentally get pressed. But it doesn't. It works perfectly fine that way. Hah.

..

While searching for add-ons that work in Firefox 57, I found uMatrix. It's similar to NoScript, in that you can select what items are allowed to run for each web page. But it's a little different. For example, I think uMatrix can be configured to only allow Facebook scripts to run on Facebook pages. Setting up those kind of rules in NoScript isn't easy. Each add-on can do certain things that the other doesn't, and many people use both. So now I'm trying out uMatrix.

uMatrix can spoof your browser's user-agent string by randomly changing it every x minutes. You can customize the list of strings that are used. The next link has a dynamically created list of the most common user agents strings, based on the people who have visited that site. A comment on the page explains that the numbers are somewhat skewed to older browser versions, as it takes some time for the older entries to drop off.

As long as I'm still using Firefox, I think it is best to only spoof using other Firefox user-agent strings. Firefox's market share is low enough that I don't want to make it seem even lower by pretending to be using a different browser.

So, below is a list of the most common Firefox user agent strings, taken from that page today, along with their percentage. Each individual string is fairly uncommon, but sum is about 17%. That's actually pretty high, compared to the numbers on the Wikipedia browser usage share page.

2.7% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
2.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
1.5% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
1.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
1.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
1.1% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.8% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.6% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.6% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.5% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.5% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.4% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0

Let's see. Monday, the dogs dug out from Qiao's yard.
Tuesday night or morning, they dug out from my yard. Or maybe dug and climbed; I'm still not certain. Searched the neighborhood nearly 3 hours for them and then finally found them in 2 different backyards one street over. Which I only noticed because our neighbor's dog barked and looked in that direction. (When I was searching before, I tended to look everywhere *except* in other fenced areas, wrongly assuming that if a yard was fenced off with a closed gate, that the dogs wouldn't have been able to get in there).
Then we took them back to Qiao's place where we can keep the small dog (the main instigator) tied up with a cable more easily until the fence is better secured. I think I will have to put down mesh fencing along the ground after all.

Wednesday, I cut up and cooked 2 butternut squashes that my mom gave me from her yard. They grew on their own out from her compost bin; not just these 2, but several more, all summer long.

Thursday, Qiao's retina started detaching.. he had surgery on that eye just 2 months ago for the same problem, but this time it is even worse than before (even though at an appointment 2 weeks ago, the eye doctor said it was looking good). He has emergency surgery scheduled this week on Tuesday. I hope they can fix it. His other eye also had the same problem several years back, and that one has been ok since its surgery (which was done using silicone oil, versus the recent surgery which used a gas bubble). This time the doctor's notes say he might use a scleral buckle, and/or silicone, or another gas bubble. We're hoping it won't be a bubble again, because Qiao had a hard time keeping the required face down position last time.

Friday, I made a new patient appointment with a doctor, so that I'll finally have a "primary care doctor". The nearest doctor's offices to me weren't taking new patients. So it's at a place somewhat further away, but not too far. The earliest appointment date they had was early December. Initially, it will be to discuss these foot nerve issues and/or whatever comes back from the blood test results and/or maybe the cracking sounds my neck has been making for almost a year now.

Today I ordered a new washing machine. I found out that there aren't any specific standards that must be met to call a washer "high efficiency". I found out that different companies / countries use to measure tub capacity differently, so that what one might call 2.5 cubic feet, another might call 3 cubic feet. But around 2011 the U.S. government started enforcing standardized measurements. I found that a lot of washers now include a setting for "Casual" clothes. Ie., whites, colors, casual, delicates, jeans, bulky items. The other ones are familiar, but I have no idea how "casual" clothes are supposed to be different than the others, or how they are supposed to be specially washed.

At work, they are finally giving me a new laptop with an SSD hard drive. It will be Windows 10 though; I'll have to get used to that.

I've started updating my Firefox add-on "ToggleDocumentColors" for WebExtensions. But because of everything else, I haven't had time to do much yet. It has to be implemented totally differently than before, because WebExtensions don't let you read or update the browser about:config settings. That boggled my mind when I found out. So instead, the add-on will have to "inject" a CSS sheet into the page, and the user will have to enter their desired colors as add-on settings, instead of the add-on being able to use the color settings the user already entered in the browser settings.

On Friday morning, an alarm siren was going off in a nearby shopping center. It could be heard at my house even inside with the windows closed - in the rooms on that side. That includes the room with my computer, and we had a Skype meeting that morning, so I was hearing this faint high-low-high-low-high-low siren noise in the background for more than an hour. By the time I was ready to leave for work, I was so annoyed that I started yelling (inside the house), in a wailing way, imitating the sound. It was slightly amazing - I was really able to imitate it pretty well... sort of like the wailing done in some North African cultures when someone dies. Ululation, that is the word. But I was using my throat/vocal cords to ululate, as opposed to my tongue. My voice was hoarse for the rest of the day.

Late Friday evening when I got back from work, the siren was still going! I called the police to report it, and was thankful that I was going to Qiao's house for the weekend.

Sunday evening when I got back from Qiao's house, the siren was still going!!!! I called Qiao and told him that I was coming right back, after I gathered my stuff for work, and more food. On the way back, I drove down to see where exactly the siren was coming from. It wasn't from where I expected; it was from an empty store even further away.

About 6 years ago at work, I set up an online group on one of the corporate websites intended for that purpose. It was a group for our developers to share information and post questions & answers. Many coworkers joined the group, and it got a good bit of use in the first years (about 180 posts/threads). But the activity eventually lessened, and the last post was 2 years ago (for various reasons, I suppose).

Recently all group owners were notified that the website was being shut down soon, in favor of some other new site on different technology. We were told that if we wanted to save our group's content, no tools were being provided for doing so, but that we could copy and paste the content into Word documents.

I harrumphed at the thought. Opening each and every post, and copying/pasting it into a Word doc? You've got to be kidding. As the group hadn't even been used in 2 years, and much of the info there was no longer pertinent, there didn't seem much point in trying to save the content.

But yesterday I took some screenshots of the pages which listed the post titles, for memory's sake, or nostalgia, or because maybe that could somehow be useful.

Today a coworker emailed me a question. It reminded me of one of those posts, which explained how to find the foreign key relationships of a table in SQL Explorer. So I went back and read that post. It helped me answer the question.

Then I wondered if I could find an easier way to save the group data after all. I discovered that each thread had an option for saving to a PDF file - and to get that PDF, you only had to append ".pdf" to the URL of the thread's page.

If I could get a list of all those URLs, then I could save off the PDFs. Scrolling through the posts, 20 titles & URLs are shown per page. So I saved off about 10 HTML pages like that. Then I used File Locator Pro (an awesome tool; I highly recommend it) to parse out the URLs along with the titles. I used a reg-ex search query, and saved off the matches, using this method: export just the content found by a regex expression.

Then I determined how to save off the PDFs from the URLs. After logging into the website in my browser, entering the command "start firefox [URL]" in a command window would open the URL in a new tab of the browser. So I divided the URLs into groups of 10, and used a batch file to open the URLs, ten at a time. (I didn't want to do all 180 at once, as I had a feeling that would either crash the browser and/or get me into some kind of trouble, as in who's this person fetching a zillion pages from our webserver all at once?).

Then I used a Firefox plugin, Mozilla Archive Format, to save all open tabs to a MAFF file. A MAFF file is a zip file containing a folder for each tab. Each folder has an index.html (or in my case index.pdf) file, along with a RDF file which has metadata including the page's original filename.

So, once I had saved off MAFF files for all the URLs (about 18 MAFF files), I unzipped them all, extracted the PDFs, used another batch file to rename them back to the original numeric filenames (which puts the posts in order by date), and to include the post titles as part of the filenames.

For creating the batch files, I use Notepad++'s column editing to edit a bunch of lines at once, and macros to apply the same changes to each line.

And voila, I now have the group's entire content exported as PDF files which can be browsed or searched. And it only took me a few hours to do, most of which was figuring out how to do it as opposed to actually doing it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the files now, but at least I have them.

Figuring out how to do things like that makes me feel clever.

Yesterday while trying to get my LJ login to persist, I accidentally deleted all cookies. And now today it was Dreamwidth that kept logging me out! Even though I didn't change my Dreamwidth exception, which was working before.

Obviously I didn't completely understand how the cookie exceptions work, so I read up on them, and did some more testing.

Cookie settings - from http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/how-to-create-totally-secure-cookies :

Path: The default value of “/” means every request will get the cookie, while “/forums/” would limit the cookie to just that path.

Domain: Setting “www.example.com” will mean only the exact domain “www.example.com” will be matched, while “.example.com” will also match again any subdomain (forums.example.com, blog.example.com).

Secure: tells the browser (or other http clients) to only send the cookie over SSL connections.

HttpOnly: tells the browser that it should not allow JavaScript to access the contents of the cookie. This is primarily a defense against cross site scripting.

(so apparently "HttpOnly" has nothing to do with HTTP vs HTTPS, but "Secure" does.)

The DW cookies have Path = "/", Domain = ".dreamwidth.org", HttpOnly = true, Send for = "any type of connection" (which must mean Secure=false). So the cookies are sent from the browser to the DW server when any DW page on any subdomain is opened, and for both http and https.

But the Exceptions are what control how long the cookies are stored.

Based on the following pages, you don't have to enter subdomains (and you shouldn't use wildcards) in the URLs for Exceptions - all subdomains are included by default. Ie. "yahoo.com" includes "mail.yahoo.com".
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336207
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286499

Based on my testing, HTTP and HTTPS exceptions are mutually exclusive. Adding an "http://" exception will only work on pages using HTTP. Adding an "https://" exception will only work on pages using HTTPS. So if you've set your cookies to be deleted when closing the browser, but you want your "ljloggedin" cookie to persist whether you've logging in from an HTTP *or* an HTTPS dreamwidth page, you need to have "Allow" exceptions for both "http://dreamwidth.org" and "https://dreamwidth.org". Whereas if you are careful to only login from the HTTPS pages, you should only need the latter.

Just FYI. As of Firefox 48.0, for security reasons, add-ons will no longer work unless they've been verified/signed by Mozilla. This is done automatically for ones hosted on the Mozilla site, but for ones hosted on other sites, must be done manually by the developer. This is actually not a new thing - it has been the case since Firefox 43.0. But until now, users could override it by setting the "xpinstall.signatures.required" preference to false on the about:config page. Now, that preference is no longer supported - to avoid malware from being able to change the preference without the user's knowledge.

From what I understand, a side effect of this is that any add-on which as part of its functionality, changes the contents of its own folders, won't work either.
For example, the Change Profile's Window Icons add-on allowed the user to select a custom icon for Firefox browser windows, and copied the selected icon file to a subfolder, which allowed it to override the default Firefox icon. This allowed you to use different icons for different browser profiles. Now this add-on no longer works, although it can still be installed from the Mozilla site. The problem with this add-on doesn't happen after selecting a new icon, as I expected it would... The buttons in the add-on's options window don't even work anymore (probably due to some other issue), so you can't even select any icons.

As the above add-on no longer works, I created these 2 add-ons with static replacement icons, for me to use instead:
BrowserIconsBlue
BrowserIconsPink

I accidentally deleted my Firefox browsing history today. I have a backup from a few months ago, so only a few months are lost.

I only intended to delete the cache, cookies, and active logins. It didn't seem to be working (it wasn't logging me out of Dreamwidth) so I tried several times. On maybe the 3rd attempt, Firefox locked up at 50% CPU for a long time, so I terminated Firefox. Only then did I realize my mistake, and that maybe it was using a lot of CPU while trying to delete a decade's worth of history.

Then I checked my profile folder. My places.sqlite file was 71 MB in size, exactly the same size as my last backup. I wondered if maybe my history wasn't really deleted, even though it was no longer showing up in the History view.

So I installed the SQLite Manager add-on and opened the sqlite file.

Surprisingly, the moz_places table still seems to have all my history entries. The only thing which shows that they are deleted is that visit_count is zero, and last_visit_date is blank.
So the site history is still there, just not the dates of when I visited what. Yet, each entry has an ID, and the IDs are in increasing order based on the dates that I had visited the sites.

I have to assume that the entries are still there only because I terminated Firefox while it was in the middle of doing its deletes. According to this bug: Clearing firefox's browser history doesn't change places.sqlite file size, the deleted data should be getting zero-filled even if the file size remains the same. But that comment is 8 years old. The last comment seems to indicate the data may not be actually getting deleted or zero-filled, only hidden.

In comparing the current places.sqlite with the backup, the IDs of the old entries don't match up... the current one seems to be missing entries compared to the old one, even though the total number of entries is only different by 46. So... I guess old entries have been getting deleted automatically by Firefox anyway in the last months, due to the maximum allowed history size.

Hmm.

Let me try the delete again, without terminating it this time. I'll take my shower in the meanwhile. Then I'll check if the entries really get deleted.

Update: Allrighty, over an hour later and the Firefox window still hasn't refreshed, and Firefox is still using 50% CPU. (I'm posting this from a different browser). It can't take that long to clear out 71 MB of data. Or rather 61 MB, as I had earlier decreased the size by running the places maintenance add-on. So it must be looping, or have a serious performance issue. Oh well. I don't have the time to research it more. I'll just revert to my old backed up history.

... After closing Firefox, the places.sqlite file didn't change in size, but the places.sqlite-wal file was over 465 MB! Now after restarting Firefox, the latter file is back down to 37 MB. SQLite Manager is showing that the moz_places table now has about 1000 fewer entries in it (out of 104k) than before. Serious performance issue.

why firefox has been blocking flash

and today the download page does show a version number. weird.