Follow-up edit of firefox.js v3. #1820
Conversation
- Hopefully get rid of all remaining telemetry. - Hard-disable sponsored content and Pocket on the New Tab Page. - Remove language pack download URL. - Change regional search defaults and remove related URL. - Removed several mobile-related URLs. Some other findings @MrAlex94, as of Waterfox G3.0.0 Preview, please take a look, some of them are serious: - Upon startup, Waterfox connects to the following domains: firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com and content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net ... According to the following article, the former can't be disabled with a pref: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections - So we probably have to stop it at the code level somehow. Waterfox should not connect to Mozilla aside from DetectPortal, extension updates, updates for the blocklist and updates for the tracking protection. - Waterfox still advertises Mozilla services under about:protections (scroll down to the bottom of the page) - The hint at non-existant mobile versions under about:preferences#sync could potentially be removed. - Under about:license you should state "Waterfox Ltd." instead of just "Waterfox". Minor ramblings: - The megabar still exists, and I hate it. There is no reason for the address bar to swell to such a size. Perhaps you think it looks cool, but the criticism it already suffered should tell you otherwise. Please reconsider. - Opening a new tab for every search is excessive and leads to tab clutter very quickly. This shouldn't be the default, IMHO. I am very happy with the release so far, but these issues should be looked at. Thank you for your attention.
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Appreciate the combing through, but this isn't the correct way to disable most of those preferences. They have already been disabled here. Also, I'm going to leave Edit: I will double check about |
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@MrAlex94 Ah, I see. OK. I am replying though because I've found further information on content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net, seems like this is beneficial for users: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/hlq14j/automatic_connection_to/fx3638b/ firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com seems to be related to Firefox Experiments, and is probably not desirable for us: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android/Switchboard So perhaps it would be prudent to limit your effort to blocking firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com somehow... |
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Further findings:
Thanks for listening, I hope all the issues I mentioned here so far are being looked at. |
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@MrAlex94, are you looking at those problems? I realize that other things like a working transition Waterfox Current --> Waterfox G3 are more important at the moment, but some kind of short reply would be nice, so that I can be convinced that I do not write this stuff in vain. "I am looking at it." would suffice already. Anyway, I've found an additional conncetion that Waterfox establishes on a regular basis: aus5.mozilla.org |
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I have seen, but a lot of your commits have a mix of personal preferences and settings that don't need to be changed. Still, there are useful changes and I will merge when I can. Also I believe that aus5 connection is for OpenH264 and Widevine download. |
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No, I didn't mean my proposed about:config changes at all. I meant the following things:
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Regarding firefox.settings.services.mozilla.org I have also found this, may yield useful info, also regarding the location of the responsible code: |
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@hawkeye116477 may also be interested in these things. |
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I think I've stopped calls to |
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That's good to hear. Kind of freaks me out that there is no about:config setting to turn this off, when this should be standard in Firefox. This has me very worried regarding what we will have to deal with once Firefox 91 ESR comes around. We shall see, I guess. Any progress regarding this cosmetic issue?
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I am not sure anymore whether content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net is necessary, either. This Tor issue seems to indicate that we could do away with it, as well: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/31575 The comment of Alex Catarineu in this thread seems relevant to me. EDIT: Might also be relevant info: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/issues/966 |
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We should also consider the following:
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"Firefox Monitor" is useful although may remove Firefox Send. I can't find any reference to |
While I agree that Firefox Monitor is useful, it's not built in. The only thing the shortcut does is to link to https://monitor.firefox.com/ ... I think we shouldn't advertise Mozilla services like that, except when they are built in like Sync is. Linking to their products in Waterfox is not that great.
about:networking still shows it as a connection after some time. Disclaimer: New Waterfox G3 profile, I didn't update from Waterfox Current. |
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Bad news @MrAlex94, it seems like Waterfox G3.0.2 still connects to firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com... |
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So, in summary, this is what IMHO still needs some fixing:
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In case of Big Sur, this might be also useful => https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/k9nnd5/no_sound_for_wf_classic_202012_in_bigsur_while/gf5km9q/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 |
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Hi @MrAlex94, some initial findings in Waterfox 3.1.0 (great release so far!):
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Whatever you did to UXP to make it run on macOS 11.0 Big Sur has clearly worked, I am using your White Star unofficial build of Pale Moon on that OS. However, Waterfox Classic seems to miss your patches. It reproducibly crashes when I hit the green "Maximize" button on ANY window. Is there a possibility of porting those patches you wrote for UXP to Waterfox Classic? Thank you for your attention. Waterfox Classic 2021.03, macOS 11.2.3 in my case. |
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I'll check it out when I get some time, might be a week before I can get to it though... in the middle of some Android code right now. If you don't hear from me in a week or two send me a message to make sure it didn't slip my mind. |
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Thank you! Since you seem to be accustomed to macOS and since you have already written related patches (which might be easily applicable here), I thought I might just approach you with this, because the crashes drive me crazy. :) Glad that you keep up the macOS builds of Pale Moon despite the way you were treated in their forums, for no visible reason. They should have thanked you for your efforts, but no... Rest assured that what you do is appreciated by people like me and I am sure many others as well! :) |
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You said that I should remind you of the issue I mentioned re. Waterfox Classic on macOS Big Sur, I am doing that with this post. :-) Next to the crash that occurs when trying to use WF Classic in fullscreen mode, I found two other issues:
Thank you in advance, you seem to have a certain macOS expertise and you are my only hope. |
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Ah, yeah I guess Waterfox Classic also needs the versioning changes.... It had only been able to store versions 0 to 15 so 10.16 will loop back to 0. Now that I got my White Star fork of Pale Moon out I can take a look at the full screen crash.... |
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@adamp01 this is also for you, please fix this critical bug on macOS Big Sur. |
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Sorry I started to look at it, but I ran out of space on my Big Sur Mac.. and wasn't able to do a build... I have a 2012 MacBook Pro which is running Big Sur unofficially... and I have a 2017 MacBook Air and both are out of space... I can probably replace the SSD in the 2012 MacBook Pro pretty easily... just haven't had a chance to do it yet. |
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@dbsoft No problem, I merely asked you because you already had comparable patches done for Pale Moon, so that seemed to be the route to a quick fix. I don't blame anyone for not fixing this issue except for the devs @MrAlex94 and @adamp01, who clearly have a machine running macOS Big Sur (I know it because I saw it under about:buildconfig), yet don't seem to care to fix this critical bug of Waterfox Classic. I even linked to someone (you, @dbsoft) who has already provided patches, and still nothing coming from them. Only the main devs are to blame, they are responsible for the project. |
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I intend to work on it and see about getting patches into it, just ran into that snag... figured I'd get a replacement SSD and upgrade the system (it is full due to the work I've been doing with iOS and Android and the emulators... and it has been my primary system for that work and after checking out the WaterFox source and starting the build I completely ran out of space) .... but you know how life is... I just haven't gotten around to it... I got the new White Star build done early yesterday (I do White Star builds on an original MacPro running 10.11)... so going to run to the store and see about getting a big SSD for that MacBook Pro today... so if all goes well I might have some news later in the week. Update: Ok scratch that apparently my model has a proprietary internal connector and I just bought an SSD I can't install into the Mac. Update 2: I bought an external drive instead and used WinClone to copy my Windows partition to the external drive... allowing me to reclaim 100GB on the internal SSD... just started a build... a bit busy this week but I'll be able to look at stuff at some point. Update 3: I have successfully built Waterfox Classic and I see what the issue is, trying to figure out the fix now. |
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Great to hear! I get the hunch that if you don't fix it, nobody will. |
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Question: Didn't you already have Pale Moon patches ready? Shouldn't those be applicable to Waterfox Classic 1:1? |
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@Peacock365 The issue with fullscreen, if it is the same one I am seeing... is not a problem I saw in Pale Moon, and quite frankly it is a bit perplexing. When entering full screen in Waterfox Classic, it hits an undefined selector error... deep inside AppKit... which is quite perplexing, since it isn't actually directly in any Waterfox code. Been trying various things to prevent it from hitting that code path without success, and have been comparing the code to the code in my White Star... but the code is actually almost identical... so I am a bit perplexed at this point... but that is how it is, until you figure it out. ;) I have patches for the versioning changes... which I'll include too, but trying to figure out the fullscreen issue. |
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Thank you so much for all the time and effort you put into this, you are the only hope for Mac users seeing how the main devs don't care. @hawkeye116477 never ever tests for Mac, but rather only Linux, so Mac issues are never tackled by him. I have identified four bugs on macOS 11.0 Big Sur so far:
I found the latter two bugs at a later stage, but the crashing issue when trying to go into fullscreen mode is the most glaring issue. Again, thank you for all your effort, I am just reporting here what I have found using Waterfox Classic on Big Sur. |
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@Peacock365 I think I may have narrowed down the problem. I think it has to do with the use of NSTexturedBackgroundWindowMask and not using titlebarAppearsTransparent=YES in the ToolBarWindow. Waterfox Classic is using the old method of drawing in the entire frame.... White Star (Pale Moon) does the same thing, but we disabled this behavior, so we don't actually use this, which explains why this isn't affecting our browsers. The problem is that the code to fix this is only available on 10.10 and later, thus it will take some creative conditional coding to get the browser to continue to work on 10.7-10.9 and fix the bug on 11.0. |
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Thanks for putting in the effort to identify the issue. Thumbs up for that! This bothers me a lot because I like portable devices (notebooks with 13" screens), but at the same time, due to the limited screen space, I would like to run the browser maximized, but currently can't (crash). Do you have any idea what causes the "video - e10s bug", and can you confirm the issue I described for the tab bar? Thanks in advance. Your White Star build has none of these issues, and I like it, but I keep Waterfox Classic around because a mixture of legacy add-ons + WebExtensions seems optimal for me. |
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You seem to have identified the issue, which is great. Any progress on a fix? This issue is really annoying and you are the only hope for Mac users, literally. |
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@Peacock365 I do have a fix for it, but it breaks other stuff... and it only works on 10.12 and later. There may be other workarounds for it... that are less... invasive... because the fix that will work on Big Sur and all the old versions (10.7 to 10.11) will be messy... so kind of trying to find other fixes before investing time on the big messy fix. The current fix involves switching to the new APIs introduced in 10.12 that the new versions of Firefox are using... but it is a lot of changes and getting it to also work on the old version will have just tons of runtime checks with different code paths. Ideally, I would like to just have it avoid the broken code path on Big Sur.. .and keep everything the same on older versions.... but since it seems to be baked into the AppKit code when triggering fullscreen mode without hitting any Waterfox code, I might have to do the big ugly fix. |
Some other findings @MrAlex94, as of Waterfox G3.0.0 Preview, please take a look, some of them are serious:
Minor ramblings:
I am very happy with the release so far, but these issues should be looked at. Thank you for your attention.