Firefox

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351
 
 

I've wanted to install an extension from outside addons.mozilla.org, but Firefox didn't let me do it

So I've did a small research and looks like there are 3 ways to sideload extensions, but all of them suck

  1. Using FF Developer Edition

In the Dev Edition you can set xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config, but the problem is that the Dev Edition isn't as stable as standard FF

  1. Temporarily load the extension

In about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox you can temporarily sideload extensions, but they will be removed next time you open FF, which is annoying

  1. Modify FF code

Lastly, I found this script which modifies the FF code, but this can break things so I don't want to use it

I'm really annoyed that Mozilla gets to decide which extensions I can install. So... what's the best way to sideload extensions?

Edit: thanks everyone, I'm now using a FF fork (Librewolf) which lets me sideload extensions after disabling xpinstall.signatures.required

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Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce one more release before I take a short break. I have some other stuff starting up, so I won't be pushing out new features as fast, but I'll still be around to manage the project. (more at the end)

Links:


❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant


⭐ What's new in v1.2.5?

  • Redirect posts to your home instance!: Post pages now have a redirect button that will find the same post on your home instance(1). You don't have to hunt it down yourself anymore.
  • Posts related to this webpage buttons in popup & sidebar
    • Make a post: You can now create a post from any webpage! Click the 'Make a Post' button in the extension popup or sidebar to generate a draft post with autofilled title, URL, and body contents. Afterwards, just select a community and hit post. (This currently works for both Lemmy & Kbin, but custom frontends are untested while they develop). Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/4478560
    • Open Posts: This will find any posts about the webpage/article/video that you are looking at. Use it to see if something has already been posted, or to find related discussions about it. When there are multiple posts, it will ask before opening them all. (see note on risks and why it doesn't count automatically)
  • Post an image: You can now right-click on an image, anywhere on the web, and hit "Post this image". It will open a new tab and autofill the title, image link, and add the page URL to the body as "Source: URL". Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303
  • Reorganizing popup:
    • I fixed the issue where the popup would still display a button after removing all instances from the list.
    • The number of default instances in the popup was reduced to 4
  • Added settings:
    • You can now hide onboardining guides to make the interfaces less wordy
  • General styling changes, wording improvements, and bugfixes

(1) This is an important feature to me because this little annoyance was part of why I set out to create the extension in the first place. Thanks to some help from @zero_gravitas, I was able to use the Lemmy API to grab the post details, and then run a search for it on your home instance. While most posts should only bring one result, there is a chance that there are multiple posts by the same user, in the same community, with the same title. If this is an issue, I'll make this search more specific.


🗣️ My questions for you:

Improving 'post to Lemmy'

  • Right now the 'Post to Lemmy' button does a very basic search in the page meta tags for information. This works for most websites, but it is not perfect. What websites do you usually post from, and is the extension doing a good job of replicating how you format the post? Please share both good and bad examples, so we can fix what isn't working and keep what is.

Improving Post search

  • Having the extension automatically count the number of posts and display it in the icon would be pretty nice, since then you would know about any posts for the news article / blog / video that you are looking at. However, there are privacy implications with this since it needs to send the URL to your home instance to do the search.
  • I would like to add the option to whitelist specific websites, so the user can choose what browsing data they want to find posts for. Is this something you would list to use? What websites would you whitelist?

Anything else?

Please share any issues that you find. Lemmy and Kbin instances have a lot of variation in how things are structured, so there are bound to be some bugs that I haven't found yet. If you have any ideas for new features, please share them too! I'm always looking for new ideas to add to the project.


🔮 Cool ideas being discussed for the future

  • Account switcher & ability to save login info to extension
  • Reddit migrator tools
    • multireddit input should convert subscriptions to official Threadiverse replacements, or large related communities
    • embeds on Subreddit sidebars to search for similar community
    • button on post pages to cross-post to home instance
  • Prepping for Firefox Mobile app, now that they are opening mobile up to all extensions!
  • Keyboard hotkeys, possibly collaborating with someone that already implemented something similar

For the most up to date information, see the issues or the project road map


💛 Finally

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback so far! I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with it in the future.

Like I said above, I won't be as active over the next few months in terms of getting new features out. The extension is now in good shape, and it covers most of the important use cases. There's still lots of cool stuff we can do with it, so please contribute ideas and expertise! When I get a chance, I'll pop in and grab a few more issues.

Cheers :)

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EDIT-2: The final solution was to add this to "My Filters":

@@||lemmy.fmhy.net^$3p

Based on Adblock Plus filters explained: Exception rules


EDIT: I went to the logger and found that EasyPrivacy filter list had a specific filter for ||fmhy.net^$3p:


This is the first time I see uBlock Origin blocking images from a random domain and I don't know how to whitelist them without disabling uBlock Origin for the whole site.

Any clues are welcome!
Thanks.

354
 
 

How's it with you guys ?

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I am currently a LibreWolf user, but I am also aware of Arkenfox User.js, which I am led to believe offers similar features.

Which is better?

358
 
 

Could anyone help me. I have a silly problem with wayland, using Firefox (tar.gz or snap are same, tried both, welp ubuntu option only has it, my fedora on Xorg using XFCE). When searching using bing.com, it likes to freeze. I only know from the ram usage, it suddenly surge till the OS can't put any memory or lack of RAM. I never encounter this in WIndows either nightly, beta, stable or on Fedora Xfce Xorg. I only see this problem in wayland.

My Firefox version is 117 on Linux both wayland or xorg and 119 for windows 10

I put the profiller on the link, I hope someone can point me, why this happen, and how to can overcome it. Thanks!

*probably if any Firefox dev, welcome. Thank you

ping @yoasif@fedia.io @yoasif@mastodon.social

359
 
 

I cancelled my subscription since I received a notification that my browser is not supported. Perhaps I should have mentioned my issues with DRM as well, but this may have gone too far. One message is clear, too many messages are noise.

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Recently switched computers and realized that Google maps is running really slow now. Severe stuttering, longer loading times, etc. The site works normally on chromium based browsers (tested edge, chrome, Vivaldi). Anything I can do?

Old PC had Radeon graphics and new has Intel integrated and Nvidia, if that's relevant.

362
 
 

I've just switched from Brave to Firefox on Android and so far liking it. There's one issue though. I use Bitwarden for my credentials & SwiftKey as keyboard. When I go to a website that asks for credentials, the Bitwarden button shows up above my keyboard to unlock my vault, as expected. I click it, unlock with fingerprint, and select the credentials. So far it's as expected and the same as Brave. However, when I select a credential, it goes back to Firefox, but then refreshes the page; so the credentials are gone. Luckily the credentials then show up above my keyboard as I've unlocked the vault, but after some time of inactivity I have to unlock again and the problem reoccurs.

Any idea how to resolve this?

/edit: looks like a long outstanding bug in Firefox, see here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1807364

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Is it possible? I'd like my dates, time etc. to be displayed in the way I'm used to while keeping the browser in English. I've tried setting the LC_DATE environment variable as well, but it doesn't respect that.

Edit: Solved!

  1. go to about:config
  2. set intl.regional_prefs.use_os_locales to true
  3. restart firefox.
365
 
 

edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.

I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.

This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.

So why is Firefox's market share dying?

I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?

  1. Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
  2. It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
  3. It's not the default.
  4. Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
  5. Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.

But what else?

I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.

occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google

366
 
 

I was trying to disable telemetry on firefox after having refreshed it (it wiped out everything and reset everything)

And I found this github page to be very concise and to the point. If you are planning on disabling telemetry, this might help https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection

367
 
 

edit: Oct 2 This didn't solve the problem. i.e., it randomly still reappears sometimes.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/3128264

edit: I refreshed firefox and except for one website, whatsapp and other websites seems to be working fine. Make sure you save the extensions and extension settings (and if you are not logged into your Mozilla account, everything else before you do it, even the themes, I lost a good theme because I didn't save it and even my mozilla account didn't sync it back)

I posted this a few days go and I am facing the same problem even now and I was wondering if someone knows how to make the clipboard paste thing work like Normal. I am using Linux. I can't paste images in some websites and texts in some websites at random times. One time it might work and another time it might not work. It was supposed to be a bug which was fixed by Monday (this monday), but it isn't fixed and it persists no matter what the state of dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled

368
 
 

How does it work anyway? I mean, how does Firefox make money? Are they paid per google search or something like that?

And, do they make money if I use forks of firefox and use Google on them?

And, what are the total number of active users for Mozilla and do the forks account into this count?

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One of the main arguments brought forth for the switching to the WebExtensions system for browser extensions was that it made cross-browser extensions easier. Firefox users may now reap the benefits of this promise, as Mozilla has implemented functionality in the browser to import extensions from other browsers.

The feature, which is in testing at the moment, can be enabled by all users of the latest stable version of Firefox.

The feature is limited at the time to Google Chrome and select extensions. Even though Firefox and Chrome extensions use the same framework, WebExtensions, they are not compatible immediately. Firefox users who attempt to install extensions from Chrome's Web Store may notice that this is not working.

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I'm running KDE Plasma, with the latest Firefox and have the titlebar turned off in the customize settings. When I set Firefox to use the "System theme - auto" it correctly uses my window decorations from the GTK theme I set in KDE's settings (top). Any Firefox theme I apply changes the window decorations to the below pic. Is there a way I can edit a theme to respect my system defined window decorations, or else I guess I'm looking for how edit the theme itself so I can define what decorations to use manually.

373
 
 

Okay so i have a addon that gives me a google logo i can press to try my search in google if i cant find something on duckduck go but i would like to have the opposite too so a button that would let me click to search on duckduck if googleing isn't successful eg. If someone sends me a google search link

374
 
 

source code is availabe here. I'd appreciate feedbacks!

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