The Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

Last night Windows 10 updated itself ... and my Firefox windows shrank down to a speck on the screen. It was literally a few pixels wide by a few pixels high. I knocked myself out to the point that I could open a postage stamp sized window, then enlarge it, but it would disappear as soon as I tried to do anything with it.

That's bizarre. I have Win10 Pro here. It got the Creators Update, and the Fall Creators Update.

Firefox was completely unaffected.

Which Win10 version do you have, and which Firefox release?
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Dennis

[cromag]

I think I have the same version of Windows: Windows 10, version 1709. One thing that has caused some problems for Firefox in the past was my video card, an Nvidia GT 750. It was causing previous versions of Firefox to go black until I disabled hardware acceleration.

Long story short, I was able to get it working tonight. Skipping over the obvious first steps (that didn't work), I finally ran Firefox in Safe Mode (held the Shift key down while starting the program). When I did that it opened in the postage stamp window, but I could drag the borders to a usable size. After I did that I was able to use the browser normally without having it disappear.

I went into the Add-ons menu. I only had two add-ons since the Quantum conversion, and they were disabled in Safe Mode. I manually disabled them, confirmed the browser still worked, and exited.

I then opened the browser normally. it opened in the postage stamp window again, but I could drag the borders to a usable size. After I did that I was able to use the browser normally without having it disappear. I then went back to the Add-ons menu and re-enabled the two add-ons. The browser continued to work, and so far all looks good.


Except ... I made Chrome my default browser for the duration of the problem. Now I'm trying to make Firefox my default browser again. But, when I'm in the Windows Settings window, Windows isn't presenting Firefox as an option. I tried a quick re-install of Firefox, but that didn't fix it.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I mean...WTF is wrong with people???? I have HAD IT.

They're entitled and whiny, because our society has become so politically correct that everything is possible, and everybody is shpesjial.

A few days ago my sister called me. She had a new phone (don't know if she bought it or got it with a new subscription). She wanted me to tell her, on top of my head, how to install her e-mail and banking app. So I tell her I can't; I don't know that stuff right off the bat. Told her to come over here and bring all her data.

"What data?'
- "e-mailaddress you want set up, username, password, etc..."
"I don't know any of that."

So I told her it would need to be reset, and she started whining "why all of this was even necessary, and why people in the store wouldn't install her phone and transfer all her data and set up her e-mail and banking app and... and.... WHY do I have to do everything MYSELF? Why do I need to know all of this?"

Maybe... because it's _your_ phone, and _your_ data?

I _almost_ told her to go and ********. Instead I said I'd take a look at it, and reset passwords where necessary, and that's it. I'm not going to jack around trying 50 user/pass combinations for each app.

It's always the same with people trying to install a new computer/phone/tablet. I don't even mind doing it for them. I understand not everybody is that tech savvy, and it's little trouble for me, *IF THEY HAVE ALL THE DATA*, and they never have. NEVER.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

Except ... I made Chrome my default browser for the duration of the problem. Now I'm trying to make Firefox my default browser again. But, when I'm in the Windows Settings window, Windows isn't presenting Firefox as an option. I tried a quick re-install of Firefox, but that didn't fix it.

Win10 is annoying about that. It has a bad habit of trying to impose its defaults. I've had to tell it several times, for instance, that I want to use the Irfanview graphics viewer for all graphic file types it supports

Tell Firefox to assert itself as default browser.

Click the icon with three horizontal bars at the top right. Select Options from the drop-down menu. Select General in options. The first entry should have a line to the effect that Firefox is not your default browser, and an option to tell it to set itself as default.

Do that, and see if it fixes your problem.
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Dennis

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

They're entitled and whiny, because our society has become so politically correct that everything is possible, and everybody is shpesjial.

A few days ago my sister called me. She had a new phone (don't know if she bought it or got it with a new subscription). She wanted me to tell her, on top of my head, how to install her e-mail and banking app. So I tell her I can't; I don't know that stuff right off the bat. Told her to come over here and bring all her data.

"What data?'
- "e-mailaddress you want set up, username, password, etc..."
"I don't know any of that."

So I told her it would need to be reset, and she started whining "why all of this was even necessary, and why people in the store wouldn't install her phone and transfer all her data and set up her e-mail and banking app and... and.... WHY do I have to do everything MYSELF? Why do I need to know all of this?"

Maybe... because it's _your_ phone, and _your_ data?

I _almost_ told her to go and ********. Instead I said I'd take a look at it, and reset passwords where necessary, and that's it. I'm not going to jack around trying 50 user/pass combinations for each app.

It's always the same with people trying to install a new computer/phone/tablet. I don't even mind doing it for them. I understand not everybody is that tech savvy, and it's little trouble for me, *IF THEY HAVE ALL THE DATA*, and they never have. NEVER.

Actual question asked "Why did I lose Atlas Shrugged when I changed accounts? "
Simple answer: because it is not on your account.
Note: The device in question was a Nook.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Actual question asked "Why did I lose Atlas Shrugged when I changed accounts? "
Simple answer: because it is not on your account.
Note: The device in question was a Nook.

And that sort of thing is why I keep local copies of books, managed by Calibre. I don't need them stored in the cloud and vulnerable to account issues.
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Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That's bizarre. I have Win10 Pro here. It got the Creators Update, and the Fall Creators Update.

Firefox was completely unaffected.

Which Win10 version do you have, and which Firefox release?
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Dennis

I doubt that this is related in any way--not being a Steely-eyed coder, like you dudes--but I have a similar b*tch with Chrome and Win 8.1. On my laptop. For reasons I don't "get," my Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga will suddenly shrink Chrome down to some infinitesimal size, and worse, moves it nearly off-screen--I have to go hunt for it. Then I have to play "catch the pixel" to grab some piece of it and manually resize it.

Drives me NUTS. FWIW, it seems to happen a lot when I've had the laptop running for a few days, but I've had it happen for no apparent reason upon a cold boot, too.

grrrrrrrr.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I doubt that this is related in any way--not being a Steely-eyed coder, like you dudes--

I suspect it is related, and it's a Windows thing, not specific to the browser you're running.

And I'm not really a Steely-eyed coder. I'm the steely-eyed sysadmin who has had to sort out such problems for end-users. (Doing it when they are in the same facility and I can walk over and see the problem and lay hands on the machine is painful enough. Doing it over the phone when they are remote and utterly without a clue makes you question your choice of career.)

but I have a similar b*tch with Chrome and Win 8.1. On my laptop. For reasons I don't "get," my Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga will suddenly shrink Chrome down to some infinitesimal size, and worse, moves it nearly off-screen--I have to go hunt for it. Then I have to play "catch the pixel" to grab some piece of it and manually resize it.

Drives me NUTS. FWIW, it seems to happen a lot when I've had the laptop running for a few days, but I've had it happen for no apparent reason upon a cold boot, too.

I've had it happen once or twice here in Firefox. I normally open everything in tabs, but occasionally find it useful to open things in a new window. The new window has sometimes gone walkabout, and taken fiddling to find and make usable again.

Just as a precaution, visit the Lenovo site and make sure you have the latest drivers. Graphics drivers are very common sources of problems you might think wouldn't be graphics related.

grrrrrrrr.

Yep.
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Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I suspect it is related, and it's a Windows thing, not specific to the browser you're running.

OK, so, I kinda thought it might be, obviously, which is why I brought it up, but it's so odd...although, lately, I have so many weirdo things happening in my computer...y'know, what's One More Thing?

I still have that godd*mned weirdness with the cursor and system sloooooooooooowing down. I mean, this 'puter has enough horsepower to probably run the Mars landing. I've stopped using my AHK, for the moment, to see if that might be it. It's obviously some intersection of sets--when this, that, and this NEXT THING are all running, it occurs. Maybe.

And I'm not really a Steely-eyed coder. I'm the steely-eyed sysadmin who has had to sort out such problems for end-users. (Doing it when they are in the same facility and I can walk over and see the problem and lay hands on the machine is painful enough. Doing it over the phone when they are remote and utterly without a clue makes you question your choice of career.)

Dude, I have that thought DAILY. I recently acquired this cool little program called StepShot--it's an app in which you turn it on, start clicking, and it creates screenshots, as you go, highlighting where you've clicked. You then just annotate the "slides" (it reminds me of Powerpoint, in appearance/functionality, in a way), and send the resulting PDF to the client/person. While I can do the EXACT same thing, with Snagit, Camtasia Studio, HyperSnap, etc., honestly, this thing makes it uber-easy. I'm loving it. (Nope, no affiliation with them, just happy with it. I got a deal on AppSumo, and I'm glad I did.)

I've had it happen once or twice here in Firefox. I normally open everything in tabs, but occasionally find it useful to open things in a new window. The new window has sometimes gone walkabout, and taken fiddling to find and make usable again.

Ahah. Well, then, maybe it IS Win10/8/whichever. I hate the walkabout, most of all. The scrunching I could live with, but the walkabout on my Yoga...uuuuggg.

Just as a precaution, visit the Lenovo site and make sure you have the latest drivers. Graphics drivers are very common sources of problems you might think wouldn't be graphics related.

I will, thanks. I have not done that recently, so it's probably woefully overdue.

THANKS, D!!

Hitch

[BetterRed]

I avoid driver updates unless I know it will fix a specific problem I am specifically experiencing, especially video drivers.

Device drivers get updated to handle the latest features on new model devices. Manufacturers will insist you need the latest drivers that can deliver the new-fangled triple twisting, double somersault in the inverted pike position off the 1 metre board, with fries on the side -- even though your $25 video card can't do much more than put a toe in the water.

Nir Sofer's GUI Properties tool can help deal with Windows that have gone awry, amongst other things - you can min, max, and centre them, unfortunately you can't resize them. Can be useful when one modal dialogue box hides behind another one.

BR

[cromag]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Win10 is annoying about that. It has a bad habit of trying to impose its defaults. I've had to tell it several times, for instance, that I want to use the Irfanview graphics viewer for all graphic file types it supports

Tell Firefox to assert itself as default browser.

Click the icon with three horizontal bars at the top right. Select Options from the drop-down menu. Select General in options. The first entry should have a line to the effect that Firefox is not your default browser, and an option to tell it to set itself as default.

Do that, and see if it fixes your problem.
______
Dennis

That just got me to Windows' "Settings" page, but I cursored all the way down to "choose default apps by file type" and was able to change each appropriate file type to Firefox -- so, all good now. (Just a minor pain in the butt.)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I avoid driver updates unless I know it will fix a specific problem I am specifically experiencing, especially video drivers.

Device drivers get updated to handle the latest features on new model devices. Manufacturers will insist you need the latest drivers that can deliver the new-fangled triple twisting, double somersault in the inverted pike position off the 1 metre board, with fries on the side -- even though your $25 video card can't do much more than put a toe in the water.

I do prefer to keep current on drivers.

My HP desktop uses Intel HD 2000 built-in graphics, and I made sure I had Intel's current driver. (I had originally installed the low profile AMD-ATI graphics card from my failed desktop, but discovered the built-in Intel graphics were actually better.)

The problem with video drivers is that the MS certified drivers available from Windows Update are known-to-work, but often lack stuff from newer vendor versions. (This is more likely to bite if you are a heavy gamer.)

Many problems I've encountered were solved by having the latest driver from the vendor of the peripheral. If you have no problems with the current driver versions, splendid, and proceed. If you do have problems, more recent drivers may be the solution.

Nir Sofer's GUI Properties tool can help deal with Windows that have gone awry, amongst other things - you can min, max, and centre them, unfortunately you can't resize them. Can be useful when one modal dialogue box hides behind another one.

Noted, and thanks. I have several of Nir's other utilities here.

What you refer to is what's known as Z-order, and how big a PITA it is depends upon the program you run. A worst offender here is 7-zip, my standard archive utility. I handles most archive formats I encounter, and can create archives in most forms save RAR. I never need to create RAR files, and 7-zip can open those I get, so no matter.

But 7-zip isn't good about asserting Z-order, and guaranteed, an existing instance will wind up buried under other windows and force me to dig for it.

Another of Nir's utilities I just installed is a work around for a Firefox 57 lack. Under earlier versions, an extension called Password Exporter would let you dump the FF password file in a human readable form. Have enough logins on enough sites, and recalling just what your password was could be a challenge, especially if the site wanted you to create a new one but wanted the old one too. A dump from Password Exporter would solve the problem.

There is no WebEx version of Password Exporter, but Nir has a FirefoxPassword utility that can generate a plain text dump. I had to set it to open in the Firefox profile I was using (because I don't keep FF profiles in the default location - I use FF Profile Manager to specify where to put the profile when I create one. (Here, that's under \Mozilla\Profiles\Firefox\<profile name>, for ease of digging down and fiddlings.

I just went through an exercise where I downloaded and installed Firefox ESR on my SO's laptop because she was having too many problems with FF 57, but she had to recreate her desired configuration from scratch. She relied on Firefox to remember stored passwords, and had forgotten the one she used for Gmail. I was able to get her set up, but it was a PITA. Once she was set up, I did an export of her password database for safekeeping.

(My Google password is one carefully engraved in my memory and stored elsewhere. The others can be recreated. If I lose access to my Google account, I'm in trouble.)

If I create a new FF profile, I can add my existing passwords simply by copying over the keys.db file from an existing one, but Nir's utility will be useful if I ever need to know what they are.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

That just got me to Windows' "Settings" page, but I cursored all the way down to "choose default apps by file type" and was able to change each appropriate file type to Firefox -- so, all good now. (Just a minor pain in the butt.)

I think we were talking past each other. What I posted was meant to be done in Firefox, to get you to the Options dialog where you could tell Firefox to set itself as default browser. I'm not sure how you got to Windows settings.

But if it solved your problem, I'll leave well enough alone.

(I do hope that at some point, MS will unify settings and have all controlled from one place. As it is, I must either fiddle in PC Settings or Control Panel, and recall which place holds the setting I need to fiddle with.)
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

As mentioned previously, I use Firefox ESR (based on v52.5) as my production browser, because I have a large number of extensions that no longer work in FF 57.

But I created a test profile I use with Firefox Developer edition (currently based on FF 58 beta) that uses only WebEx extensions to track progress. I imported my bookmarks and other things, and it mostly duplicates the production setup.

Things are getting better.

FF 57 is faster. Firefox ESR loads from SSD and come up in about 4 seconds. FDE comes up in about 3 seconds. Page access and rendering are faster, though I haven't tried to benchmark them. As a rule, you are as fast as your Internet pipe and what you are trying to access. I have fairly fast broadband, with a 100mbit/second download speed, but folks still on something like DSL or a satellite dish will have a rather different experience.

FF 57 is at a point where I can more or less use it. There are still a number of extensions that no longer work and likely won't be replaced, but enough is there to blunt the worst of the problems.

Tab Mix Plus is gone and won't return. But workarounds exist. One is that Mozilla finally has a preference reachable in about:config to let you force bookmarks to be opened in tabs, which was a feature of TMP. Go to about:config, check the "I'll be good" box that warns you what you are doing is dangerous, and search for "loadBookmarksInTabs" Set browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs and (if desired) browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground to True.

The Mozilla Addons site has a new one called FoxyTabs that adds a dialog box for tab operations, and one is "Close tabs the the left".

And an extension called Undo Closed Tabs Button (revived) provides a configurable way to reopen closed tabs, with a settable number of tabs to remember, which was another TMP feature.

I run uBlock Origin here, and that now has a WebEx version. The author had a back and forth with Firefox devs about stuff not in the WebEx API he needed for his extension to work, and they got added. The new one looks and acts like the old one.

I note there is now a WebEx version of NoScript, too, but passed. I was running uBlock Origin and NoScript, but maintenance became oppressive. Major commercial sites might source content from 30 or more external sources, and figuring out what had to be whitelisted in uBlock and NoScript so things would still work just became more trouble than it was worth. I dropped NoScript and just use uBlock. I am not paranoid about scripting, and Firefox uses a Google sourced blacklist of site that might be problems and throws up a warning is you visit one. (I also use OpenDNS instead of my ISP's DNS sever, and OpenDNS also maintains a blocklist. It's DNS servers are plugged into my router, so all of my devices are covered.) And I'm not fanatical about blocking ads. I just want sites cleaned up enough to be readable.

I ran Flagfox, which placed an icon in the URL bar when a site was visited. The icon was the flag of the country where the site was hosted, and clicking it yielded further information about the site. There is a new extension called Country Flags and IP WHOIS that seems to be a decent replacement. (It thinks MR's server is in Kasel, Germany, which is quite possible.)

I used Josip Del Rio's Speed Dial to provide a configurable home page with sites I visited, and it used a tabbed interface to define other tab groups. A new extension called https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...up Speed Dials is a good start on replicating the functionality, and as a major win, can import settings exported from Del Rio's Speed Dial to be the base of its own configuration. It's a work in progress, but what's there is a good start.

Another part of my standard kit was Session Manager, which stored info on previous sessions, and could be used to restore them. It was handy if Firefox (or Windows itself) crashed. Restart the browser, and Session Manager would activate and let me restart from where I left off. A new WebEx extension called MySessions attempts to replicate the functionality.

And another must have was Stylish. Stylish let me apply custom CSS called UserStyles to pages I visited without having the restart the browser. Under older Gecko based versions of Firefox, it could style style the browser, too. That's not possible in Quantum, and you must edit the userchrome.css in the Firefox profile to do that, but you can still style pages. Stylish itself got a rewrite, and there's another WebEx extension called Stylus that does the same thing, and loads and runs styles from userstyles.org, the canonical source for such things.

The ones I still really miss are "Is's All Text", which could open what you were typing into a text box on a site in the editor of your choice, and whan you saved the editor content, it got input to the text box, and Dict, which would let you look up a highlighted word in a Dict server and return a definition.
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Dennis

[orlok]

Just finished repairing (some of) the damage the latest Windows 10 Fall Creators Update had wreaked on my PC. Mail and Store, to name but two of the apps, had disappeared from my start menu and task bar. I tried going to the MS Store via a browser to reinstall Mail, but it said it was already installed. I also couldn't get into the WindowsApps folder because of access permissions not being granted (was hoping to create a new shortcut).

In the end, after several hours of searching, I found some Windows Powershell commands online that restored the Mail icon to my start menu. Nicely done. Microsoft...