I’m not very familiar with that codebase, but the only occurence of the google advertising id I can find is for it to be hashed and uploaded so that Mozilla can count the number of unique ids (modulo folks who regularly reset their advertising id)
Looks like that’s the easiest way to count installations and give people the power to opt-out and reset identifiers. I’m not a mobile engineer, but probably better than using a hardware identifier?
I’m still completely astonished by this. You’re saying that Mozilla chose to depend on proprietary components from the world’s largest ad company, a company well-known for tracking users, just to effectively generate a uuid? Am I the only one who thinks that’s absurd? And if I am, why is that not absurd?
If it’s feasible to host your own server, running authoritative DNS is pretty easy. Otherwise I use the free DNS provided by NameCheap which has been rock solid, or their paid solution is $5 or $10/yr.
First time hearing of he.net. (Edit: Apparently I’ve had them bookmarked since 2014.) Have been wanting to switch from Namecheap DNS as their API isn’t free. Found a few options to cut out the PowerDNS middle man:
lexicon supports he.net, which is great since I can use that with the ACME client I already use, dehydrated.
A couple certbot hooks: one written in Python and one in BASH.
The original text of the ToS e-mail, and the follow-up comments on this issue (“No current changes. We are not adding telemetry services to EE at this time.”, “we will not activate user level product usage tracking on … GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan”) does not engender confidence that GitLab’s corporate interests are aligned with our interest as a customer. So far, all of these comments have had a subtext of “here’s what we need to do before we go ahead and turn on telemetry anyway.” If GitLab’s stance is “we’re not going to activate tracking yet,” then my reaction is not “problem solved!,” but “I probably have a window of a few months to start doing an analysis of alternatives and plan my migration to another vendor before this issue comes up again.”
A 3-2-1 strategy means having at least 3 total copies of your data, 2 of which are local but on different mediums (read: devices), and at least 1 copy offsite.
Secure your data from just $2/month or $.005/GB/month
Unlimited free trial (5 GB and 2 repos) after signing up. Custom plans available. No API or data charges.
My backups take up only ~7 GB so far with BorgBackup, so IIUC I would be fine with their free trial, and start out paying ~1 cent/mo.? No transfer fees, compared to B2.
I would love something akin to qalc in Rust. Do you have anything like that planned? I’d like to be able to do stuff like “20% + 100” and “200 USD to EUR”.
The resistance to have it enabled by default kind-of defeats the point of including it in the standard Vim runtime files, IMHO. Installing a plugin is just as much effort as enabling a default one (one line) and the downside of shipping it by default is that VIm’s development practices are … somewhat annoying.
I understand some of the objections, but I abandoned the discussion and that issue after someone became far too toxic (I opened that issue). I don’t feel like dealing what that shit.
The company that bought userstyles.org and Stylish is shady, yes, but if you’re implying they’re tampering with style downloads, I’ve never heard this. Stylus was forked form Stylish shortly after the acquisition.
Also, several applications only support HTTP/2 over HTTPS. From a security point of view, this is great. However, it complicates development and debugging inside secure networks that don’t need or want TLS between different components. It means you need to manage a CA and certificates for localhost for local development, log session secrets in order to inspect HTTP/2 requests with Wireshark or similar tools, and may require additional compute resources for encryption.
For a second I thought it supported the new prefers-color-scheme: dark media query. Unfortunately, it does not. The page uses some JS to switch between the dark and light themes instead of letting the browser handle it. :(
It is only supported on Firefox and Safari right now though, so that’s understandable.
Did you actually test this in Chrome? Because I did (on MacOS), and neither the latest stable version of Chrome nor the latest nightly Canary build seems to work with prefers-color-scheme. I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of this Chromium bug report or when we can expect the functionality to appear in Chrome, but it doesn’t seem to be there yet.
My testing shows that the situation is as currently stated on https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme. Stable Firefox doesn’t work, but latest nightly does. Current version of Safari works.
Thank you for putting this in AUR and making it easier for Arch folks to install! I was trying to use it with the shell companion example in the readme, and it as really slow indexing(?) things and displaying them. (e.g. sometimes 1-2 seconds per keystroke). I use zsh as my shell, and the disk is a really fast nvme.
There’s a nice gallery for light Emacs themes here: https://pawelbx.github.io/emacs-theme-gallery/ (my goto light theme is whiteboard as its the first one I stumbled upon and is also preinstalled).
On Vim, I liked using the light version of Gruvbox https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox. Tried solarized light but it didn’t stick with me - felt like there wasn’t enough contrast IMO.
The real question is why browsers don’t build this in as a default feature. Slide it into the developer tools, we can ALREADY change css in there we just can’t save it for next time.
I always found that not to be user friendly though. Step 1: google where that file is stored. Step 2: Hunt for it. Then, all the features Stylish has like importing/exporting for different sites, toggle the custom styles with a couple clicks, etc, is missing.
I always found that not to be user friendly though. Step 1: google where that file is stored. Step 2: Hunt for it. Step 3: Write the code, and do 5-6 save code/restart-the-browser cycles to figure out why it’s not working.
Then, all the features Stylish has like importing/exporting for different sites, toggle the custom styles with a couple clicks, etc, is missing.
Question for the group. If you use Stylus (or used to use Stylish), what do you use it for?
I headed over the the userstyles.org site and most of the styles seem to be “dark themes” or other cosmetic changes like changing the background of a site. Are there more practical uses of the extension? Can it modify HTML or Javascript (where the real power would be), or is it CSS only?
I use it to tweak the layout of some of the sites I use, like moving a fixed top navbar to the side, and making it smaller. Or making narrow columns wider. Small stuff like that, which make the browsing experience much more bearable. I rarely use the social or sharing aspects of it. I haven’t found anything useful there, and I’m not sharing my tweaks either, because they’re very personal anyway.
I rarely use it to hide things, my adblocker can do that more conveniently indeed.
I apply a style of body { max-width: 800px; } on a few blogs that weren’t designed with wide browser windows in mind—they spill text across the entire width of the screen, which makes them really hard to read. (You could use your browser’s “reading mode” to fix this, too, but this CSS change usually does the job without breaking any layouts.)
Now that I’ve started using Dark Reader, I use Stylus for well-made, site-specific dark themes. Previously I was using the Gruvbox Dark Everywhere userstyle, but its shotgun approach leaves much to be desired. Beware: Dark Reader has some major performance issues on Firefox.
Edit: My installed themes (which I enable along with Dark Reader after sunset): https://ptpb.pw/nUrG.png
Edit 2: Also I enable the Firefox and Tree Style Tabs dark themes. This really needs to get more streamlined.
Edit 3: And then I get to enable dark/night mode on sites that support it natively, one-by-one as I visit them. Sigh.
Funny that you mention this. I don’t often long for the days when I had a CSS styling addon installed, but exactly this Dark Reader page made me bob my head back 20cm. That page seems to be made for a mobile phone or tablet screen, not a 27” monitor. Wow.
I like to use it to remove ads in core apps I use. I’d like to share the styles I create with others who use those apps.
I use the free version of toggl, and they have a persistent, animated thing in the bottom-right corner that tells me the benefits of “going pro”. I just made a stylish thing to display: none the element which matches that rule. It’s great.
I used to use Stylish - and a predecessor the name of which has slipped my mind - to reduce the size of the UI in Firefox - smaller tabs, less wasted space -> more space for page content.
i’m considering using it to shrink the gmail sidebar label font - they recently increased it from the same size as email body text to a size bigger, and it’s very annoying.
I just started using this again after forgetting that it existed.
Another forum I visit regularly now is ad free and doesn’t waste a bunch of whitespace where these were removed.
I created an ironic one for hiding the ads for stylish for android on userstyles.org… :D
Also, my day job involves using a console that has a lot of useless (to me) menu items - bye bye.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/02/update-on-extension-support-in-the-new-firefox-for-android/
It’s really unfortunate that Fenix is not available on f-droid.. The only way you can run it today is with all the google tracking crap in it.
Seems kind of silly this post has the ‘privacy’ tag on it, given that fact.
I’d be surprised to find Google tracking. We have our own telemetry system, which is privacy preserving and there’s a way to opt-out.
Care to clarify?
Surprise:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/blob/75e0baf59cb4c9b82c12ac91cb5292b2d36d5690/buildSrc/src/main/java/Dependencies.kt#L211
Ah yes. I thought you meant “behavioural tracking for advertising”, but having looked further into the code it seems with tracking you meant “counting installs”. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/blob/64a4a7f422b692c77fdd7957b7b80357ff02b348/docs/metrics.md#activation
I’m not very familiar with that codebase, but the only occurence of the google advertising id I can find is for it to be hashed and uploaded so that Mozilla can count the number of unique ids (modulo folks who regularly reset their advertising id)
Wait, you depend on proprietary google gms libraries in order to basically generate a uuid? That seems like overkill.
Looks like that’s the easiest way to count installations and give people the power to opt-out and reset identifiers. I’m not a mobile engineer, but probably better than using a hardware identifier?
I’m still completely astonished by this. You’re saying that Mozilla chose to depend on proprietary components from the world’s largest ad company, a company well-known for tracking users, just to effectively generate a uuid? Am I the only one who thinks that’s absurd? And if I am, why is that not absurd?
The app also depends on the operating system from that same large ad company. I understand you’d draw the line someplace else than we apparently have.
But as a non-android developer, I don’t have an informed opinion about pros and cons and whether there were any alternatives.
No, to a certain extent.. AOSP is still a thing and there are distros that use it..
There’s an unofficial f-droid repo for it here.
That’s cool. Does Signal from this repository work with the official Signal servers?
I haven’t installed it yet but the “About” info mentions “the Signal servers” so presumably they’re the official ones.
Is it not apparent that the privacy tag is for uBlock?
You cannot have ‘privacy’ if the thing that ublock depends on is itself compromised.
If it’s feasible to host your own server, running authoritative DNS is pretty easy. Otherwise I use the free DNS provided by NameCheap which has been rock solid, or their paid solution is $5 or $10/yr.
Have been using NameCheap DNS as well. Only problem is that the API isn’t free.
check out he.net, free and rock solid DNS I think for up to 100 domains. I’ve been with them for years now and quite happy.
+1 for he.net. I run a PowerDNS master with he.net as a slave so that I can still use things like dnsupdate for certbot challenges.
Exact same setup here. I have been using HE for… two decades I think (and their website hasn’t changed in that time, hah).
First time hearing of he.net.(Edit: Apparently I’ve had them bookmarked since 2014.) Have been wanting to switch from Namecheap DNS as their API isn’t free. Found a few options to cut out the PowerDNS middle man:lexicon supports he.net, which is great since I can use that with the ACME client I already use, dehydrated.
A couple certbot hooks: one written in Python and one in BASH.
This comment stood out to me: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672#note_236161957
+1 for Backblaze B2.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
A USB drive, a home NAS and a storage VPS from Time4VPS (60€/1TB/y). All the backups are handled with BorgBackup
BorgBase also seems like a great option:
My backups take up only ~7 GB so far with BorgBackup, so IIUC I would be fine with their free trial, and start out paying ~1 cent/mo.? No transfer fees, compared to B2.
I think that you have to subscribe to one of their plans such as the $25/100GB/year and every additional GB will cost you 1 cent/mo
Yeah, I’m not sure. Haven’t yet found a way to contact someone there.
You may want to keep an eye on GitLab federation progress.
The point is to not require user registration for bug filing, or am I missing something?
This looks very cool though, I hadn’t heard about it!
That should be a part of it, but the details are still in the discussion phase.
That’s great :)
I would love something akin to qalc in Rust. Do you have anything like that planned? I’d like to be able to do stuff like “20% + 100” and “200 USD to EUR”.
https://github.com/tiffany352/rink-rs Unit conversion tool and library written in rust
https://github.com/jedmao/eclint
Validate or fix code that doesn’t adhere to EditorConfig settings or infer settings from existing code
Seems to be catching on, comparing to the last time it was discussed: http://editorconfig.org/
There are now 22 editors bundling
.editorconfigsupport, including VisualStudio and Kakoune, as compared to 7 last time around.https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/2286
The resistance to have it enabled by default kind-of defeats the point of including it in the standard Vim runtime files, IMHO. Installing a plugin is just as much effort as enabling a default one (one line) and the downside of shipping it by default is that VIm’s development practices are … somewhat annoying.
I understand some of the objections, but I abandoned the discussion and that issue after someone became far too toxic (I opened that issue). I don’t feel like dealing what that shit.
you can do it with dark reader https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh
I prefer pre-made styles when there’s a good one available: https://userstyles.org/styles/136068/neo-dark-lobsters
userstyles was found to be malicious wasn’t it?
The company that bought userstyles.org and Stylish is shady, yes, but if you’re implying they’re tampering with style downloads, I’ve never heard this. Stylus was forked form Stylish shortly after the acquisition.
UserCSS is becoming increasingly popular, and almost half of my installed styles are installed straight from their Git repos, eg.:
https://gitlab.com/maxigaz/gitlab-dark#install-with-stylus
See also https://openusercss.org/.
Thanks for this (and to @rain1); I’ve documented this on the about page.
Stylus still uses the userstyles site though, and the devs were hostile went i asked about this. It’s suspicious.
UserCSS looks like it might better, thanks for the rec.
it is also possible to do your own custom themes in dark reader, less convenient than extensions designed for that but just letting people know.
See also Dark Background and Light Text for Firefox. Works on mobile, too. I edit the background color to be #000000 across the web.
Browser shouldn’t require a certificate for localhost as localhost is considered a Secure Context
https://mkcert.dev
A simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates with any names you’d like.
Looks like it was deleted.
the “cached” version still works
:(
https://archive.is/ly67p
For a second I thought it supported the new prefers-color-scheme: dark media query. Unfortunately, it does not. The page uses some JS to switch between the dark and light themes instead of letting the browser handle it. :(
It is only supported on Firefox and Safari right now though, so that’s understandable.
I think you mean “Chrome and Safari”?
MDN says Firefox and Safari but it might be out of date? If you know that Chrome supports this, you might want to update that page.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=850098https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/pull/3781https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/pull/4858I don’t even use Chrome, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.Did you actually test this in Chrome? Because I did (on MacOS), and neither the latest stable version of Chrome nor the latest nightly Canary build seems to work with prefers-color-scheme. I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of this Chromium bug report or when we can expect the functionality to appear in Chrome, but it doesn’t seem to be there yet.
My testing shows that the situation is as currently stated on https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme. Stable Firefox doesn’t work, but latest nightly does. Current version of Safari works.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=889087 might be a more informative bug, it’s the one caniuse is tracking.
You’re absolutely right. The bug I pasted is to do with the theme of Chrome itself. Mistakenly thought it covered prefers-color-scheme as well.
Open an issue or submit a pull request! :-)
Author here. I’m here to answer any question regarding features or implementation.
Thank you for putting this in AUR and making it easier for Arch folks to install! I was trying to use it with the shell companion example in the readme, and it as really slow indexing(?) things and displaying them. (e.g. sometimes 1-2 seconds per keystroke). I use zsh as my shell, and the disk is a really fast nvme.
Actually the AUR package was made by me after finding the project through this post. :p
Ah, well thank you! (Sorry I missed that, I didn’t look too closely to see who submitted it!)
So, why did you name your program dick? It makes me nervous about using it.
Well… One has to have some fun… That was by far the proposal which got most votes when I proposed it on my chat where most users are French speaking…
But I’ll remove the “pronounced b-root” part and let people pronounce it as they feel it.
broute though means browse, so it seemed quite fitting. I didn’t even think of the old fashioned “biroute” when I read “broot”.
Well, the author edited it out of the Readme, and the command line help too. A Good Thing, because it’s a cool project.😎
There’s a nice gallery for light Emacs themes here: https://pawelbx.github.io/emacs-theme-gallery/ (my goto light theme is whiteboard as its the first one I stumbled upon and is also preinstalled).
On Vim, I liked using the light version of Gruvbox https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox. Tried solarized light but it didn’t stick with me - felt like there wasn’t enough contrast IMO.
I’ve been using Gruvbox for over 3 years now. Wish the author would find some time for it, and/or add a maintainer or two. ^^
Started out with Molokai, and then Solarized. Any Solarized users should give Gruvbox a look.
The real question is why browsers don’t build this in as a default feature. Slide it into the developer tools, we can ALREADY change css in there we just can’t save it for next time.
You can do this in Firefox by creating chrome/userContent.css in your profile. http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css
Safari supports this too (and has for at least a decade). Just pick the style sheet you want in Preferences… → Advanced.
I always found that not to be user friendly though. Step 1: google where that file is stored. Step 2: Hunt for it. Then, all the features Stylish has like importing/exporting for different sites, toggle the custom styles with a couple clicks, etc, is missing.
Thank you for posting this! I was a longtime Stylish/Stylus user but now I’m just going to use the built-in thing.
Two stumbling blocks I ran into when I was trying to get this set up:
layout.css.moz-document.content.enabledtotrue.I always found that not to be user friendly though. Step 1: google where that file is stored. Step 2: Hunt for it. Step 3: Write the code, and do 5-6 save code/restart-the-browser cycles to figure out why it’s not working.
Then, all the features Stylish has like importing/exporting for different sites, toggle the custom styles with a couple clicks, etc, is missing.
That is only useful if you want the same styles on every single website.
The same stylesheet is used on every website, yes, but you can use a (currently Mozilla-specific) selector to apply certain styles to certain sites:
There’s more documentation of
@document/@-moz-documenton MDN.https://drafts.csswg.org/mediaqueries-5/#prefers-color-scheme
Question for the group. If you use Stylus (or used to use Stylish), what do you use it for?
I headed over the the userstyles.org site and most of the styles seem to be “dark themes” or other cosmetic changes like changing the background of a site. Are there more practical uses of the extension? Can it modify HTML or Javascript (where the real power would be), or is it CSS only?
You call it cosmetic changes, other people call it accessibility.
I use it to tweak the layout of some of the sites I use, like moving a fixed top navbar to the side, and making it smaller. Or making narrow columns wider. Small stuff like that, which make the browsing experience much more bearable. I rarely use the social or sharing aspects of it. I haven’t found anything useful there, and I’m not sharing my tweaks either, because they’re very personal anyway.
I rarely use it to hide things, my adblocker can do that more conveniently indeed.
I apply a style of
body { max-width: 800px; }on a few blogs that weren’t designed with wide browser windows in mind—they spill text across the entire width of the screen, which makes them really hard to read. (You could use your browser’s “reading mode” to fix this, too, but this CSS change usually does the job without breaking any layouts.)Now that I’ve started using Dark Reader, I use Stylus for well-made, site-specific dark themes. Previously I was using the Gruvbox Dark Everywhere userstyle, but its shotgun approach leaves much to be desired. Beware: Dark Reader has some major performance issues on Firefox.
Edit: My installed themes (which I enable along with Dark Reader after sunset): https://ptpb.pw/nUrG.png
Edit 2: Also I enable the Firefox and Tree Style Tabs dark themes. This really needs to get more streamlined.
Edit 3: And then I get to enable dark/night mode on sites that support it natively, one-by-one as I visit them. Sigh.
Man, Dark Reader is great. Thanks for bringing my attention to that.
Funny that you mention this. I don’t often long for the days when I had a CSS styling addon installed, but exactly this Dark Reader page made me bob my head back 20cm. That page seems to be made for a mobile phone or tablet screen, not a 27” monitor. Wow.
Fixing fonts on the most obnoxious websites.
I like to use it to remove ads in core apps I use. I’d like to share the styles I create with others who use those apps. I use the free version of toggl, and they have a persistent, animated thing in the bottom-right corner that tells me the benefits of “going pro”. I just made a stylish thing to
display: nonethe element which matches that rule. It’s great.Is there an advantage to that over the “block element” feature that exist in most ad blockers?
I use brave and Firefox which have some built in blocking. I haven’t thought of that, but I’ll take a look!
I used to use Stylish - and a predecessor the name of which has slipped my mind - to reduce the size of the UI in Firefox - smaller tabs, less wasted space -> more space for page content.
i’m considering using it to shrink the gmail sidebar label font - they recently increased it from the same size as email body text to a size bigger, and it’s very annoying.
I sometimes use it to tweak interfaces, like get rid of annoying panels or adding bold to certain elements
I just started using this again after forgetting that it existed. Another forum I visit regularly now is ad free and doesn’t waste a bunch of whitespace where these were removed. I created an ironic one for hiding the ads for stylish for android on userstyles.org… :D Also, my day job involves using a console that has a lot of useless (to me) menu items - bye bye.
There are two sites I frequent that have awful stylesheets that I can’t stand so I have custom stylesheets that make them look better.
Is it possible for extensions to request access only to modify CSS?
CSS can still exfiltrate sensitive page content (albeit attacks are harder to write).
If you write your own CSS this is no longer a problem :P.
That’s good to know. I’m going to do some reading on this, but do you have anything you recommend?