SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the better-than-deleting-your-profile dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Mozilla Firefox may reset custom browser preferences when the web browser is updated to a newer version so that the preference is set to its default value.
I was contacted by two Ghacks readers in the past two weeks about Firefox resetting preferences of the web browser during updates.
Jern informed me that Firefox reset the block lists setting of the browser's Tracking Protection feature from strict to basic when the browser was updated to version 50 from Firefox 49.0.2.
Basic protection is the recommended and default value of the setting. It does not block as many trackers as the strict blocking list. I confirmed that the upgrade to Firefox 50 did indeed reset the preference.
Michel told me a week later that a recent Firefox update (to 50.0.1 or 50.0.2) did reset another preference. This time an URL string that Michel modified on Firefox's about:config page.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/12/05/beware-firefox-updates-may-reset-preferences/
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:19PM
You know -- they have done this repeatedly over the years. It's like new people find firefox as an alternative and experience what used to be new people to firefox complained about a few years previously.
Ever since the bloat of netscape navigator 4.x or whatever it was that included just about everything a developer and high powered internet warrior could need -- in the browser being suggested as a suitable replacement for nursing home pc centers and our parents and young children who couldn't be trusted with IE's incredibly poor handling of the security needs of the era -- they have bloated and distended their core functions in order to... improve the product, I suppose.
Firefox came out of the ashes of that. And soon repeated the same successes, but this time it figured out how to appropriately fund itself. As a result, some of the inherent safeguards of learning from past mistakes were dismantled, because the money existed to incorporate bad ideas in a new way--all over again, as you've noticed.
That's not to mention aping Chrome and so on and taking the savvy IT person's browser and turning it into something else, with less control over time... but people keep installing it, proving the model as effective and successful.
Anyway, I suggest you go your seperate way, I left FF a while back (when the 24.5 extended release version was no longer useful). I mentioned in another thread some alternatives to try; I'll repeat them here...
Note that I am not endorsing these because of GPL licensing or any particular enthusiasm for the methods and tactics of the developers--just that I liked the end result of product.
Ice Weasel - on some servers I manage and linux workstations
Sea Monkey - on some VMs I have
Palemoon - my primary browser for day to day use
And of course.. Lynx, the tradtionalist's text based browser.
Also check out the "portable" versions of the browsers. They can run off a USB stick or network share or self contained in their own folder, they don't do an install (meaning, no additional registry entries in Windows) and overall can provide a superior experience to many default browsers integrated into various OSes one might encounter.
The portable versions also generally will work when lacking root/administrator/supervisor rights, and it is far easier to keep a collection of sequential versions of the portable distributions -- it may be some versions work better than others, for whatever reason.
Many of the installs are 30MB or less, which is large to me compared to ye olde days of web surfing, but really small when you think of what bloat means nowadays.
Give some of those a shot, you should be able to adjust pretty easily to one or more of them if you are comfortable with about:config changes and add-ons.
(Score: 2) by dlb on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:53PM
And of course.. Lynx, the tradtionalist's text based browser.
One of my toys is an older Acer laptop running NetBSD, and occasionally I launch Lynx and surf some of my favorite web sites. It is refreshing to have content minus the GUI clutter.
That said, text-based browsers have their frustrations. Most web pages begin with many links usually hidden in drop-down menus, that when expanded, can fill up two or three screens one has to page through before getting to the substance. And until one develops a second nature for key-stroke navigation, getting around is at least a little painful.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:51PM
So what would you recommend for Android, if anything??
I like Pale Moon for Android for the left-hand tab sidebar (I don't know what it's called, so I can't duplicate it in other Firefox variants), but PM4A is no longer developed;
Icecat for Android crashes constantly (seems to have something to do with multiple same-site tabs);
even Firefox for Android lacks some of the basic security/usability extensions I rely on in the desktop version.
Is there anything out there that has the security-with-flexibility that I need from a browser?