browsers

Blogposts on blog.futtta.be about browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and good ole Internet Explorer).

Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish; about screenshots and Firefox

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Yesterday I had the day off, so I decided to finally upgrade my Thinkpad X13 to Ubuntu 22.04. Jammy Jellyfish (as the release is nicknamed) is nice but the new default display server, Wayland, blocks Shutter and other non-native screenshot apps from making screenshots. This interfering with my support workflow as I use Shutter not only to make the screenshot but also to edit and upload it to imgur. The solution was simple; I logged out and switched back to the Xorg display server on the login screen settings.

Coincidentally or not; making screenshots in Firefox (which can be handy to screenshot an entire page or a node for example) was suddenly disabled as well, so in about:config I had to toggle screenshots.browser.component.enabled back to true.

And lastly, also on the topic of Firefox; it now comes as a snap instead of a deb now and although I’m not dogmatic about deb vs snap, I see no need for Firefox being packaged/ updated by the OS as the in-browser update mechanism is sweet, so I installed the Mozilla-build instead.

Don’t take free & open source for granted; donate to Mozilla!

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Do you ❤️ the free and open web and do you want to ensure a non-profit can continue to play an important role? Do you use Firefox or use MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) to check up on JS or CSS or HTML syntax?
We do too and as from today Optimizing Matters will donate $20 monthly. If you use Autoptimize or Async JavaScript or WP YouTube Lyte then please, pretty please, consider donating at https://donate.mozilla.org too.

(even) more privacy with Firefox Containers

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Being wary of all things tracking by Google & Facebook, both of who’s products I love but data capturing practices I hate, for the last 4 years or so I always logged in into these in “Private browsing” sessions in Firefox (because why trust the worlds biggest advertising platform with your privacy, right?)
Now I just “discovered” that the Mozilla team have rendered that somewhat clumsy procedure -which required me to log in each time I restarted my computer or browser- redundant with their “Firefox Multi-Account Containers” add-on, allowing you to contain entire sessions to one (or more) tabs;


So now I have one browser window with a couple of tabs in the Google container, one tab in a Facebook container and all others in the “default” container where Google & Facebook can’t track me (fingerprinting aside, but there’s an option for that).

Firefox OS dead or just resting?

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So Peter-Paul Koch (Quirksmode) declares Firefox OS dead. I’m afraid he’s right. A pity really, as I loved the idea of an entirely open web-based mobile OS. Mozillians don’t agree, saying they’re just not going offer Firefox OS phones through carriers any more.
Or maybe It’s just resting?

Customer: I wish to complain about this here fox what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Shopkeeper: Oh yes, uh, Firefox OS …What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?
Customer: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!
Shopkeeper: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…it’s resting.
Customer: Look, matey, I know a dead fox when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.
Shopkeeper: No no it’s not dead, it’s restin’! Remarkable software, Firefox OS, idn’it, ay? Beautiful openness!
 

No Google fonts with NoScript

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I’m not only into optimizing the speed of sites with for the benefit of their visitors, but also into speeding up all sites in my browser, to satisfy my own impatience. I already blocked Facebook, Twitter and Google+ widgets using NoScript’s ABE and now added this little snippet in ABE’s user ruleset to stop Google Fonts from being loaded;
# no google fonts
Sites fonts.googleapis.com
Deny INCLUSION(CSS,SCRIPT)
Result: less requests, less to download and faster rendering without that ugly FOUT. Because let’s face it, your fancy fonts slow down the web and they are of no interest to me.

Mobile web vs. Native apps; Forrester’s take

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So web is going away, being replaced by apps? Forrester researched and does not agree;

Based on this data and other findings in the new report, Forrester advises businesses to design their apps only for their best and most loyal or frequent customers – because those are the only one who will bother to download, configure and use the application regularly. For instance, most retailers say their mobile web sales outweigh their app sales, the report says. Meanwhile, outside of these larger players, many customers will use mobile websites instead of a business’ native app.

My biased interpretation; unless you think can compete with Facebook for mobile users’ attention, mobile apps should maybe not be your most important investment. Maybe PPK conceeded victory too soon after all?

Firefox: how to enable the built-in tracking protection

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Just read an article on BBC News that starts of with the AdBlock Plus team winning another case in a German court (yeay) and ended with a report on how Firefox also has built-in tracking protection which -for now- is off by default and is somewhat hidden. To enable it, just open about:config and set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true. I disabled Ghostery for now, let’s see how how things go from here.

User Agent Madness

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Just found this one in my http logfile;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.111 Safari/537.36 OPR/27.0.1689.69

So one User Agent string mentioning 4 browsers (Mozilla, Safari, Chrome and finally Opera 27, which is the actual browser) and 3 rendering engines (Applewebkit, KHTML and Gecko)? There is a lot of web-history in those 127 characters.

What does a webtech addict do when in a Tesla?

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Tesla Model S infotainment panelWell, checking out the browser, off course!
I had the opportunity to ride along with a friend in his brand new Tesla yesterday. Great ride, but you know that already, so I checked out the browser and data connectivity obviously. I visited my own little “ip check” page and saw this in the logfile:

188.207.103.140 – – [05/Feb/2015:12:17:24 +0100] “GET /check_ip.php HTTP/1.1” 200 132 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtCarBrowser Safari/534.34”

Breaking it down:

  • The free mobile data connectivity is provided by KPN (Base) in Belgium (and Holland, probably).
  • As per the useragent the car display runs on Linux (that little OS that could is really everywhere these days)
  • The browser is QtCarBrowser, which would obviously be built with QT and WebKit. Based on the WebKit version, one can deduct that the version of QT uses is 4.8. As such, QTCarBrowser seems very similar to QTWeb and might indeed be based on it. HTML5test.com rates QTWeb with 204/555, but Tesla’s QTCarBrowser result might still be different off couse.
  • The WebKit-version, 534.34, is pretty old and as such dates from mid 2011 (QT 4.8 was released in December 2011). This is close to the version that was used in Safari 5.1 (534.48.3).

I sure hope there are not too many vulnerabilities in those old version of of QT and WebKit, but one does not drive a Tesla to browse the internet, does one? 😉