Firefox: tips & tricks
 

Enable the overlay scrollbar

about:config

Heheh... I just want to know how to disable ALL macros when editing online documents. IMHO there is just zero value in assigning a single, somewhat hidden keypress, to delete everything I just spent a half hour typing. Until I actually find what key does that, I'm considering installing some sort of pressure sensor that delivers a deafening CRASH! sound when I pound on it, perhaps including sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth LOL

If you use libinput with a touchpad then there is no kinetic scrolling. With the older synaptics driver this was a "feature", but libinput skipped adding this since it was kind of buggy. They leave it up to applications to enable kinetic scrolling, so I turn it on for firefox by ensuring that the following is set in about:config
And then putting the following in a profile script:

If you don't like the modern "hamburger" menu (with its icon of three horizontal lines), just press the (left) Alt key and the traditional File/Edit/View/... menu appears. It will hide itself again if you select an item or press Alt a second time.

(I've tried this in Chromium, but it didn't work.)

Or right click on the toolbar, and check the box "Menu Bar"

Firefox 106 Promises PDF Annotation Features, Wayland Screen Sharing Improvements

With the Firefox 105 release out the door, Mozilla has promoted the upcoming major release, Firefox 106, to the beta channel for public testing to allow us to get an early taste of the new features and improvements.

https://9to5linux.com/firefox-106-pr...g-improvements

Another tip, I usually create a file named

/etc/firefox/policies/policies.json

to override config settings, this also makes the config settings read-only. Thus when a new firefox changes a default, I do not need to use about:config. This is what I have and this works across various Operating Systems.

You can safely use firefox profile without worrying that after FF upgrade it will be overwritten. Simply create a new custom profile. The advantage is that you can use the same profile irrelevant of OS/distro.

With FF 105, on start, the cursor focus is on the URL bar, instead of -previously- the search field of my home page (duckduckgo)

Anyone know if it's possible to change that and how ?

Thank you! I hate the new scrollbar. I get confused if I can't see where I am on the page. I just set this option to false and now I have a proper scrollbar again.

Same here, thank you ! Switched to false, as true is the (new ?) default.

To maintain some preferences "read-only" through upgrades on a per-account basis, there is the user.js file.

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/2.1-User.js

Replace the internal src editor with external (I use geany, but you can use whatever).

This will be reverted (FF 107):
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/a...v/f55cd89e1199

Damn! Disabling built-in PDF viewer is ... respectfully being said: ridiculous! And you got 4 thumb-ups!

And with all respect, the strong disabling of DNSOverHTTPS could be at best categorized as sabotage, if not social engineering with malicious intent.

So, sincere congratulations for successfully misleading at least 4 people until now! :hattip:

Something weird just happened to me: FF started reinterpreting all my signals. Mouse wheel scrolls became switches to larger or smaller fonts and page down caused a jump to another tab. I was also unable to close tabs by clicking on their X.

I closed FF, reopened it and got multiple tabs all trying to connect at once, many more than I have ever had open. Closed it again, waited, reopened it, and it's back to normal.

What happened? This is FF-102.2.0esr.

That'll be Ctrl key got physically stuck. No idea about the other stuff you've mentioned.

DOH does not make any sense if someone is using VPN. It does not help you at at all if your browser is going to go to an IP that is on a watchlist. DOH is sort of centralized DNS so from privacy point of view this is a serious problem.
I run VPN over SSL which works even when standard VPN does not and adding DoH does not make sense.


I would say that you are misleading people.

Touchpad Two-finger swipe tricks

Two-finger swipe
LEFT: back to previous page
RIGHT: go to next page


First Select a word in a long text line
Shift + Two-finger swipe DOWN (it seems to work also with any direction, but LEFT/RIGHT prevails for back/next page)
2 selectors appear to select more text on each side


Note: for now, it seems to work only with (full) wayland session

I agree - DOH is just harmful in most cases. Its only maybe a privacy/safety win for people who are regularly taking a portable onto untrusted networks and not using a VPN.

For everyone else it just means certainty the DOH provider can watch everything you do. It also means any other things you are doing at home or in the enterprise like DNS RPZ (PiHole) etc get effectively bypassed. There is a reason Google is so supportive of DOH it basically kills adblocking on pretty much any device that isnt under the users total control - (a non jailbroken phone / smart tv / IoT anything).

My belief is most people should disable doh. https://github.com/bambenek/block-doh

If you are in control of the network and have the facilities to do so - I'd say kill it with fire!

PiHole's using dnsmasq internally, which can easily do DNSSEC validation, and resolve over dnscrypt protocol which could use :443 just like DoH, FYI.
But I totally agree that DoH controls do not belong inside the browser, all it does there is let the end users bypass admin decisions.
Say for example, there's few hundred admins in total, trying to make sure that millions of users can't watch youtube at work all day..
And here comes chrome browser, to save the day, and casually enables a massive waste of time for everyone involved.

It's a result of "browser" becoming the new OS, and the OS becoming a placeholder for this new "browser".
TLDR; nothing specific to DoH protocol, because this sort of power grab shenanigans happen with all protocols, all the time.

I mostly agree elcore - but DOH is more problematic to me than many of the other protocols options for "secure" DNS like say DOT. The problem is you can't see what is in 443 traffic, even where you can its not easy to do for most people. With DOT I can see at the network layer easily enough if something is talking on port 853 and determine if you are bypassing my DNS and I can even choose to block that fairly easily(hey my network my rules).

With modern TLS 1.3 I am not even going to be able to tell by APN if 443 traffic is DNS easily. If say you decide to run a binary anything you downloaded that would be expected to do any web traffic you don't know what is DNS lookups, and what is other traffic. You can't apply your DNS policy for sure because you don't know if its using the system resolver or doing its own resolution via DOH unless you interrogate all the endpoints its hitting and then they could still be playing games to hide the DOH server from you.. Realistically this applies to OSS stuff because hey did you read all the code to chromium?

A big part of the problem with DOH is not JUST that it bypasses ever middle man along the path treating them a s a potential adversary, including middle men you put there yourself ( pi-hole dnsmasq etc, ) but that it conceals that it is even doing it. By attempting hide itself among other HTTPS traffic its actively designed to maximize the complexity of implementing any network policy against its use. Its not just "hey I am doing my own private DNS here" where you can make an up or down decision on if your Smart-TV should be permitted to that its intentionally put you in a position where its all or nothing in terms of communication to the internet for that device because you can't TLS intercept when you don't control its cert store and if you can intercept you can't tell the application DNS/Netflix...

DOH is both user and network owner hostile.

In other words, the DOH is bad for censorship. :p

Guess what? Exactly for this was invented. To bypass the censorship. And any way of bypassing censorship is good, dear Control Freak!

Anyway, I bet that a company with several millions of hired guys will not use Slackware.

Because the amount of manually tuning will be titanic for those "few hundred admins" and you know that. You need mass deployment of installations, mass deployment of updates, mass deployment of configuration changes, mass deployment of whatever. That's exactly what Slackware isn't. You describe RHEL there.

Mass deployment is not specific or dedicated to only one distro
Even if its RH tools

True, the mass deployment is not dedicated to only one distro, BUT to think about mass deployment, in my humble opinion first you should think about a high level of automation and scripting on system tools.

Slackware is exactly reverse of the coin - it's all about "doing everything manually" .

Heck, in the AD 2022 there's still a need to manually intervene to setup the bootloader after updating the kernel and we talk about the mass deployment in millions of computers?

It's why I said "example" rather than fact. It's not my problem, since I only ever did private home systems.
If you can read r/sysadmin, these guys over there hate DoH because what it does; well it basically outsources the filtering work to google.
So, if a company wants to censor, they can't rely on their admins anymore, and must consult with google instead, effectively costing these people their jobs.

Anyway, I shouldn't be talking to you, because you're under sanctions according to EU.
And I really don't want to be accused of "bypassing" EU restrictions by a bunch of facebook-reading, televison-watching folks, again.
One dude had shown me a "redstar" screenshot, and told me "if you're using linux, you're working for the commies" or something along those lines.

The is nothing wrong with wanting to exert control over ones own property. I have a right to decide who my my light bulbs can talk to. Similarly nothing is wrong with an Enterprise wanting to control how its computer assets are used.

Further you should stop drinking the ETF kool-aide you are not going to defeat censorship, with techno-toys. If Xi decides he doesn't want the general public going to luckys-tiananmen-memorial.com you are not going to enable that with DOH, at least not for very long. In fact if you cause such a regime to much difficulty they are very likely to crack down in much more draconian ways - go look at the news on just how China has recently started cracking down in VPNs and similar again recently..

You want to fight censorship write you congressmen tell them human rights matter as to how you vote and you want them to put the trade and sanctions screws to the bad guys. DOH isnt about censorship and its not really designed to defeat those who would censor, its designed to enable google to force ads onto you. The consequences in terms of more a free for all for malware and possibly very dangerous situation it creates for the dissidents you are so worried about when a bit of signals analysis shows they contacted some foreign DOH server be damned. Rest assured some despot some place will find that alone all the excuse required to do something terrible to someone they considered a problem. Even if that person didn't actually do anything other than download Chrome..

Hi all,

Be kind to (re)read this thread tittle

Thx :hattip:

There's a joke in there somewhere, about ancient tradition and great experience in building walls.
Don't worry, I'd use sneakernet instead, if I really was in some sort of trouble.
And obligatory: "Don't blame me, I didn't vote.".. :D

Sooooo nobody has a handle on how to edit FF keypress macros?

huh? I wonder where you get this opinion from. DOH is easiest to control, easiest to block.

hmm just try VPN over SSL

maybe this will help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...s-for-firefox/
or this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ddon/keysmith/

Thank you, Aeterna, those are indeed interesting but all I presently deeply desire to do is turn OFF whatever macro makes it default that apparently one misplaced keystroke can and does delete everything one has typed in a message board response. It's literally as if you swipe the entire body of text and hit Delete. I've been using Textarea caching addon for a long time and it is a great backup for typed responses but it isn't quite fast enough or lacks some sort of blocking to thwart this obnoxious macro. I've tried several methods including searching through "about:config" but turn up nada.

IF I correctly understood your problem, it's probably this.
So, chrome feature I guess, blame chrome. According to random reddit comment with links to bug report and code snippet,, "general.autoScroll" will now clear selections where previously it did not.

Thanks elcore. I really do appreciate your looking into it but it has nothing to do with the mouse. It is entirely a single key phenomenon and doesn't even require a modifier like Ctrl or Alt. I suppose it is possible that Shift could be involved since it is so abnormal to me it always takes me by devastating surprise. I really can't imagine who would want this or for what. I could have typed multiple paragraphs, hundreds of words and Bam! in apparently one keystroke all is poof!, gone.

This is especially troublesome because since my stroke my left hand sometimes spasms and tends to be quite clumsy.

Well, never happened to me, but I'd normally use external editor (geany) and just paste the text into browser.
I don't really use firefox anymore, only installed it for supporting 2-3 websites which wouldn't work otherwise.

However, I do know there's some accesibility features in it which could cause this.
And there is also a "private" mode which does clear the clipboard sometimes, and possibly some other stuff which clears the "form" when it's out of focus.
But, I'm no expert, you'd have better luck asking the guys at r/firefox.

Our year in review: How Firefox works for you

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/...ear-in-review/

Over a decade of anti-tracking work at Mozilla
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-...ones-timeline/

It's happened to me a few times. I have no idea what keystroke makes it happen but I'm sure it's an FF thing, not a site thing.

When I want to make a post that is longer than usual, I use an external editor like elcore.

I use this settings:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

with some editable overrides to that:

https://codeberg.org/12bytes.org/Fir....js-supplement

Hope helps someone :)

Hi,

KDE plasma5 / Firefox

I open download manager : ctrl + shift + y
right click / show in folder

It opens Thunar not dolphin
Any idea ?

For now, it only works if I uninstall Thunar

I had asked at Mozilla and finally did get what is most likely a definitive answer. So for anyone who may experience this I don't yet have a solution beyond typing outside a browser in a simple text editor, but the cause is most likely the system-wide "Ctrl-A" macro which if inadvertently hit within some range of timing selects everything and has the very next keystroke replace everything, effectively deleting it all. So far I've tried changing the macro from "Ctrl-A" by adding a 3rd character, such as "Ctrl-A-1", but unfortunately "Ctrl-A" still functions.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help.

Firefox 114 beta

https://9to5linux.com/firefox-114-be...nner-reduction

I’m not really a fan of this one

Just for fun and as I have a Microsoft account, I set my Firefox general.useragent.override to 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/110.0.100.0'. After I logged in at http://bing.com/ I could use the Bing Chat AI powered search.

Lately Firefox cannot sync the sub-titles (closed caption) when streaming videos on Amazon Prime.
It works on Netflix and elsewhere and sometimes it works on Prime. One time it works, the next it doesn't.
Any tips or tricks on how to get it to sync properly?
Thanks.
:)

Firefox 116 Should Have Experimental PipeWire Camera Support

The full story:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefo...ipeWire-Camera

@marav re Thunar, do you use thunar-volman ? is it in your autostart somewhere ? I think it loads thunar which registers a dbus interface making it the default filemanager.
I had a similar issue, though xfce4 is my DE. I eventually got so annoyed with this behaviour I commented all mention of dbus out of thunar and rebuilt it. Now I have no more thunar popping up when I click open folder in firefox.

Mozilla Firefox 116 To Allow For Wayland-Only Builds

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefo...w-Wayland-Only

This may be a bit off-topic but can anyone tell me why my Firefox tabs occasional mutate into separate windows? I find this behaviour very annoying.

There must be some key that I am accidentally pressing, but I have no idea what it might be.

@hazel this is true by default, but fixable in prefs.js or user.js

I don't have a user.js file and that option doesn't occur in my prefs.js. Is it OK to just put it in?

What I'd really like to know though is what triggers the unwanted behaviour.

EDIT: OK, I found it in about:config and toggled it there. So now it can't happen any more. Thank you.

Click and hold a tab and slide it a little down. Or move it between some other tabs of another firefox window. I use it a lot.