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Topic update: Firefox v85.0 released (changelog at www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/85.0/releasenotes/).

Incidentally, one of the biggest changes is the containment of so-called 'supercookies':

In Firefox 85, we’re introducing a fundamental change in the browser’s network architecture to make all of our users safer: we now partition network connections and caches by the website being visited. Trackers can abuse caches to create supercookies and can use connection identifiers to track users. But by isolating caches and network connections to the website they were created on, we make them useless for cross-site tracking.

OTOH, a favicon security flaw is likely not solved -- but this isn't exclusive to Firefox...

Security researchers of the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a new method to track Internet users that is persistent across sessions, even if users clear cookies and the browsing cache. The research paper "Tales of FAVICONS and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers" highlights that favicons may be used in conjunction with fingerprinting techniques to track users.

Scratch that last quote -- it seems an unreported bug has made Firefox immune to this attack:

• www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/l0fjbl/firefox_is_resistant_to_new/

It appears Firefox team has gone to great lengths to remove all options to quickly restart the browser, something that I use(d) a lot on my daily web explorations (caused by the massive amount of memory it uses -- I usually see it hovering way up of the 1GB mark -- which a times turns even the best PC to a slug racing on molasses, there are physical laws preventing swift management of that much memory).

The only way still working for me is to open "about:profiles" and click the "Restart normally..." button, which is very much inconvenient if you ask me.

Used to be there was a XUL command you could add to the menus with a little tweaking -- but that possibility was gone with the death of XUL.

After that, you could open the browser console (with SHFT+F2) and issue a "restart" command -- far from being as convenient, but still a way to achieve the same goal. Alas, with the removal of GCLI that possibility went away, too.

Mozilla Browser Console help docs (click here and scroll up a couple of lines) suggest that it's possible to achieve a restart by pressing a CTRL+ALT+R combo -- but try as I might that shortcut does nothing in Firefox latest version (v86.0).

Finally, sometime ago there seemed to be an alternative way of forcing a restart (cf. "Method 2" here) by going to the internal "about:restartrequired" page -- but that too appears to have been removed.

This whole issue not only manifests the way software development can be extremely inimical towards its users but also proves to be a rather frustrating time waster.

FTR, from a very unhappy user...

Midas wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 10:53 am It appears Firefox team has gone to great lengths to remove all options to quickly restart the browser, something that I use(d) a lot on my daily web explorations (caused by the massive amount of memory it uses -- I usually see it hovering way up of the 1GB mark -- which a times turns even the best PC to a slug racing on molasses, there are physical laws preventing swift management of that much memory).

You could install an extension for that.

SYSTEM wrote:You could install an extension for that.

I will, thanks for the info. But I'll still feel dumb doing it, adding another heap to the mem pool...

There's still ways to tweak Firefox even with the removal of XUL. UserChromeJS scripts can still be used to tweak such things like restart menus and buttons, bring back old password manager, and old about:config menu, and even bring back fully functioning pre-quantum DownThemAll extension.

https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-js.html
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforFx
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforF ... er/scripts - you can find restart button and restart menu scripts here
https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts - personally using xiaoxiaoflood method. He also has modded extensions like old downthemall that works past FF56.
https://github.com/alice0775/userChrome.js - more scripts. I use downloadstatusbar, textlink, showparentfolder, patches for bugs, etc.

Thanks for reminding me of UserChrome and providing the useful pointers, Userfriendly. One has to grasp at every straw as it is...

What doesn't bode well is Ghacks.net -- long time users of UserChrome hacks -- reporting about it's Firefox integration. Here's the latest I found:

Firefox does not load userChrome.css and userContent.css by default. Administrators need to set the preference toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true to enable support.

Userfriendly wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:31 pm ...bring back old password manager

I definitely prefer the old version. Can you point to a link on that?

webfork wrote: ↑Fri Feb 26, 2021 10:38 am I definitely prefer the old version. Can you point to a link on that?

xiaoxiaoflood userChromeJS has it.

about:config and password manager
https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefo ... oved-pages

instructions on how to use
https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefo ... structions

Can use in conjuction with password manager button to access both old and new with left click or middle click
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforF ... tton.uc.js

However need to modify line 40 of script to make it work with xiaoxiaoflood restored old password manager.
Change "var old_pw_manager = 'chrome://passwordmgr/content/passwordManager.xhtml';"
to "var old_pw_manager = 'chrome://userchromejs/content/passwordmgr/passwordManager.xhtml';"

Not everything is uphill with the old Fox, as it is apparently immune to the latest advertisers trickery...

Chrome lacks an API for scrutinizing DNS in the same way as Firefox (dns.resolve), which limits what Chrome (and Edge) extensions can do.

Userfriendly wrote: ↑Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:09 pm

webfork wrote: ↑Fri Feb 26, 2021 10:38 am I definitely prefer the old version. Can you point to a link on that?

about:config and password manager

Got it, thanks

So it has finally come to this:

Mozilla is now showing ads in the form of sponsored Firefox contextual suggestions when US users type in the URL address bar. Mozilla says the feature was introduced with Firefox 92 in September to fund development and optimization.

Midas wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 3:41 am So it has finally come to this:

Mozilla is now showing ads in the form of sponsored Firefox contextual suggestions when US users type in the URL address bar. Mozilla says the feature was introduced with Firefox 92 in September to fund development and optimization.

@ www.bleepingcomputer.com
/news/security/firefox-now-shows-ads-as-sponsored-address-bar-suggestions/

That sounds outright desperate. Guess Mozilla is backed against the wall, given that nearly all their income is coming from a competitor (Google, in the form of search field deal).

Nice extra feature in Firefox -- you can setup this site (or any other) to have it's own container automatically:



Now every time I open portablefreeware, it's automatically in a different space than other websites, enabling some separation. So for example I can open up a dozen tabs in the same Discord instance without having to re-login to anything, but other containers have no idea I'm on Discord. I've talked about a tweak to enable this in another post, but now it's available by default.

Note that because Facebook and Google both have a whole variety of websites and semi-related tracker sites, there's add-ons for both (Google Container and Facebook Container) to help keep them separate.

If you're looking for additional privacy and have Mozilla's VPN, you can give each container it's own VPN connection. Although I use that service, it's little overkill for my needs.

"Chrome has won the desktop browser war," says one former Firefox staff member.

"This market needs variety." [...] If Firefox diminishes further, there’ll be less competition for Chrome. "We need that difference for open internet standards, for the sake of preventing monopolies," [Bart] Willemsen [VP analyst focusing on privacy at Gartner] says...

Firefox could start by stopping from dragging forever users like myself kicking and screaming into new unwanted UI updates and multiple other spurious features.

Oh, and please revert the memory hogging monstrosity into which Firefox has morphed in recent years...

Myself, I'm quite fed up with it, so I stopped updating desktop Firefox at v88.0.1 and (Android) Focus at v94.1.2 -- even if I have to deal with daily nags to update, since most the fixes I have tried don't seem to be working.

Moreover, I am back at trying to master a portable K-Meleon setup to see if I can get some web browsing sanity back.

Midas wrote: ↑Thu Feb 17, 2022 8:07 am Oh, and please revert the memory hogging monstrosity into which Firefox has morphed in recent years...

Firefox's biggest memory usage increase lately is caused by Site Isolation, also known as Project Fission. It was enabled in Firefox 94. It creates a dedicated process for every domain open (including in frames), and each process has memory overhead.

For now it can be disabled by setting fission.autostart to false in about:config, but I doubt the preference will remain for long. Site Isolation is done for security and Mozilla doesn't view security as optional.