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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I run nightly, not exclusively but pretty close, and I must say Firefox’ nightly builds are pretty damn stable in my experience. For sure, there are situations where some feature y is clearly unfinished, but it’s super rare to face a situation where I would even need to think about working around some issue - such game breaking issues just don’t happen too much at all. Usually, if a build is found to be truly broken (like crashes very often etc.) then nightly updates get paused. I can remember maybe two times that I’ve had to revert to previous build in over ten years because the I had received an update before updates were halted.





  • You can hide them with userContent.css - most of the devtools window stuff is styled via userContent.css not userChrome.css.

    But there’s a catch.

    Browser toolbox is essentially a separate instance of Firefox, running in separate profile so your “normal” user css files don’t apply to it. Thus, you need to first enable the toolbox profile to load it’s own user css files and create them just like you do normally (toggle toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets, create files in chrome/ folder etc.). The toolbox profile is stored inside the regular profile - in a directory chrome_debugger_profile.

    To get to about:config of the toolbox profile you need to first open a new main-window for it - one way that works is to click the meatball menu at the top-right of the toolbox window, and select “Documentation…” - that will launch a new window using using the toolbox profile and then you can just open about:config and proceed as usual. Or you can just modify prefs.js of the toolbox profile directly while the toolbox is not running.

    Anyway, after you have set up the toolbox window to load user css files, then just slap this to its userContent.css and restart the toolbox:

    header.chrome-debug-toolbar{
      display: none !important;
    }
    

  • But if you’re using the built-in auto-updater (like people tend to do on Windows and macOS), then it happens automatically in the background, unless you tell the auto-updater to not update automatically.

    Definitely does not work that way on my Windows 10 installation. When update is available, Firefox will have a “Restart to install updates” in menu button notification - but the files are not replaced on disk until you actually close (or restart) Firefox and thus Firefox continues to work normally.

    What can happen though is that if you run another instance (ie. another profile) of Firefox while the first one has “staged” the update then that another instance can trigger the files to actually be replaced on disk but you would very deliberately do that.


  • Firefox shouldn’t force you to restart and update like that unless something else, such as your package manager, has already replaced the executable files on your disk. In such a scenario Firefox doesn’t have any option except to inform you to restart it (well I guess it could choose to crash). But the mechanism that forced the update is the package manager.






  • That’s not necessarily a good solution either, because a service could figure out that the source of random fingerprint data likely comes from the same user. Especially if your ip is not changing. It might perhaps be effective if a substantial amount of people were doing it though.

    But to generate such random fingerprint is difficult because it consists of many parts and services don’t all build fingerprints the aame way. You could easily randomize e.g. canvas data, but the issue is that if you only randomize one data point then that one random data point pretty uniquely identifies you if your other datapoints are stable. So to be effective you would really need to randomize several different datapoints and that may not be such an easy task since websites could build them in all sorts of ways.




  • Indeed. I mean, I’m blocking ads as much the next guy and that’s not going to change in any foreseeable future, but I cannot see how introduction of privacy preserving advertising platform could possibly be seen as anything other than an improvement over the current, completely perverse, situation. It would be better for people who don’t block ads, so if this acquisition would advance uses of privacy-respecting advertising systems and simultaneously get some revenue to Mozilla then this sounds quite like a win-win to me.