Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish; about screenshots and Firefox

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!

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

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?

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

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.

Firefox: how to enable the built-in tracking protection

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.

Fixing Firefox’ LessChromeHD to reclaim lost screen real estate

I had been happily auto-hiding the Firefox navigation bar on my small-screen netbook for a couple of years already, until that add-on (LessChromeHD from the Prospector series) stopped working after having upgraded to Firefox 35. So I started Firefox from the command-line and spotted this error:

addons.xpi WARN Error loading bootstrap.js for lessChrome.HD@prospector.labs.mozilla: TypeError: redeclaration of variable event (resource://gre/modules/addons/XPIProvider.jsm -> jar:file:///home/frank/.mozilla/firefox/jy6bws91.default/extensions/lessChrome.HD@prospector.labs.mozilla.xpi!/bootstrap.js:226:8)

A quick look at the source code confirmed “event” was declared twice, once on line 210 and a second time on line 226. The fix, obviously, is simple; on lines 226-228 replace all references to “event” with e.g. “shownEvent”;

let shownEvent = document.createEvent("Event");
shownEvent.initEvent("LessChromeShown", true, false);
trigger.dispatchEvent(shownEvent);

You can do this yourself by unzipping “lessChrome.HD@prospector.labs.mozilla.xpi” in your extenstions-folder, editing boostrap.js and updating the xpi. Or you could wait for the Mozillians to update LessChromeHD.

Thanks for reminding me about AdBlock Plus Google!

So Google removed AdBlock Plus from the Google Play Android store. That is their prerogative, off course, but it does confirm they’re not the cool technology-centric search engine everyone once thought they were. It’s kind of ironic that in December 2011 AdBlock Plus by default enabled the display of “acceptable” ads, a move that seemed to be an attempt to appease (or please) Google.
But whatever way you look at this, Google’s core business (as is Facebook’s) is displaying ads. Sure they try to do that in an intelligent manner. And sure, they have some cool technologies (App Engine, Android, Chrome, …). But at the end of the day they want us to see and click on ads. That makes Google a media company. But whereas traditional media have -at least the notion- of a wall between their editorial and advertising departments, editorial independence does not seem to exist over at Google.
I don’t like particularly like ads, I don’t like widgets snooping on my web-whereabouts and I definitively don’t like Google’s advertising department dictating what applications the editorial team in charge of Google Play should remove. So today I installed AdBlock Plus on all my devices. Maybe you should too?

Introduction to Adblock Plus