Impressive achievement

Thanks for @PonySlaystation for coming up with this idea!

Wrote my first ever Firefox extension. It loads a json list from a server containing domains which, according to the snowden leaks of 2013, are integrated within a US powered mass surveillance network.

If it finds any urls on the page being loaded, it puts a fullscreen red background with a warning text and the links which match the surveillance criteria.

There's no way to continue to the web page yet, will try to add that later on.

Disclaimer: I can't 'officially' verify this.

I've been using Firefox as main browser with about 5 addons for added privacy for ages now. When googles (fucking) reCaptcha takes more than a few minutes on Firefox (about 90 percent of the time, I'm estimating), I switch to Chromium (with the same amount of (similar) privacy addons) so I can go on with my stuff.

Now, I recently thought 'why not try to do user agent spoofing on Firefox to see if reCaptcha would start working 'normally'?

So, I installed a user agent spoofing addon on Firefox/Chromium, results:

Without spoofing:

Firefox reCaptcha success rate: 10 percent approx. (mostly 2+ minutes)
Chromium: 90 percent. (mostly instant)

With spoofing:
Firefox: 90 percent approx.
Chromium: 10-20 percent approx.

Again, I can't prove any of this yet but mother of fucking god, whenever using Chromium or spoofing Chromium on Firefox the succession rate skyrockets.

Google, what the fuck are you up to?

Seems my add-on is a little haywire, or Firefox is just at it again.

Had a laugh nonetheless.

Irony: A robot that clicks for me on the "I'm not a robot" buttons.

(Firefox Addon by prowebmasters)

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

I'd love to finish a few projects I'm currently working on:

- An add-on which gives a middle finger to websites which use services/products ran by companies which are known to be integrated within the biggest mass surveillance system ever created (US powered). Not because just fuck those websites but because I think (@PonySlaystation came up with this idea) that its only fair that people get to know which websites 'sell them out'. Oh and "but not everyone cares about that" - you don't HAVE to install the addon.
(will be open sourced)

- Notes service with a fun thing.

- PHP based server/website/whateverthefuckyouwant monitoring system which is pretty much module based and works with json files as configuration. (kinda works but still loads of bugs to solve and gotta improve the module system a lot).
(will be open sourced)

- PHP based pihole alternative which suits my needs (will be open sourced)

- Forgot one 😅

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

!Rant But after seeing this I laughed like hell I need to share this to all my dev folks.

Client: “Our next requirement, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only.
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

At the Offshore Development Centre :
BA – Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development! Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client, and the client faints

Addon to this, testers completed their test case as above

20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.

I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.

Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.

After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...

“Corporate group accounting?”

After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.

This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.

In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).

We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”

Hello devRant, this is going to be my first time posting on the site.

I work for a gaming community on the side, and today one of the managers asked me to implement a blacklist system into the chat and reactivate the previously existing one temporarily. This shouldn't have had any issues and should've been implemented within minutes. Once it was done and tested, I pushed it to the main server. This is the moment I found out the previous developer apparently decided it would be the best idea to use the internal function that verifies that the sender isn't blacklisted or using any blacklisted words as a logger for the server/panel, even though there is another internal function that does all the logging plus it's more detailed than the verification one he used. But the panel he designed to access and log all of this, always expects the response to be true, so if it returns false it would break the addon used to send details to the panel which would break the server. The only way to get around it is by removing the entire panel, but then they lose access to the details not logged to the server.

May not have explained this the best, but the way it is designed is just completely screwed up and just really needs a full redo, but the managers don't want to redo do it since apparently, this is the best way it can be done.

Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.

1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.

Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.

Me: meh.

No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?

Started development on a Firefox addon again:

Adding an onclick HTML tag/property (however you call that) - doesn't fire at all.

Adding an event listener - says no elements with the class I'm using (checked, it's correct) exist, doesn't fire.

Well, fucking great 😐

When people think you're addicted to gaming, but you're just really keen on developing that next feature. People just don't understand the underappreciated life of an add-on developer. We're shit on by the game developer, and users alike.

Addon for converting number digits into words with multi-language support.

Each time I try firefox after somebody mentions it again or it's in my rss feed, it still seems to never actually advance

It's stuck and either gets worse or goes back to its stable non improving level again, how come do they still not have a proper mobile responsive tester, why are even the upgraded addons still suffering the same container and rendering bugs

how is it more important getting bad image by implementing mr robot malware, than getting on an actual competitive level

why is it default bloated with random pocket addon bullshit, why did it begin to lag, ..

I remember when I was using firefox for a good portion of my life and laughed at how google chrome is laggy, but nowadays theres simply no competition to chrome, its stability and developer tools

I wish there was competition, the grid tools were a great start, but then nothing followed and they just went back to their never improving flatline

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

Mozilla really knows how to nudge one to not use email encryption by default.
Since Thunderbird has native support for OpenPGP encryption, i can only chose to encrypt all or no messages by default. There is no opportunistic mode and there are no per-reciepient encryption preferences. The Enigmail addon had both.
So i obviously have gone for encrypt-by-default.

But since then, whenever i want to send a message to the majority of my contacts, i have to manually disable the encryption or get annoyed by the no-key-found dialog.
I thought, i would get the muscle memory to just disable encryption for recipients for wich i don't expect to have a key.
But they also made the GUI so i have to open a dropdown and then click on the right item to do that. All the items basically look the same, as there is no color coding or specific icon for them. The item labels are also too long for unconscious pattern recognition.
So i didn't got that muscle memory.

I now have turned off encryption by default and will probably forget to enable it for some emails wich i actually could send encrypted...

FUCKING MOZILLA!
>Quantum
>over9999 times faster
-Ughm, okay, but what is the trick?..
-THE TRICK IS THAT NONE OF YOUR FAVORITE ADDONS WILL WORK!!!

Seriously this is fucking insane! Several of my addons which were essential for me to stay sane is gone and I don't even know how to live without them. And all this bullshit is happening because these idiots in Mozilla decided to enforce use of WebExtensions. For ones who unaware, WebExtensions is much, much poorer framework and many cool addons simply unable to work under WebExtensions because of its limitations.

Are you the one who loved the speed and joy of using mouse gestures? GUESS WHAT ­— IT'S GONE.
Maybe you made your browsing activity super efficient with use of the “Tab Groups” addon that used to allow you to group your browser sessions? SAY BYE-BYE TO IT!
And many more!

Most importantly, I cannot understand why would a company enforce use of a framework that will decrease functionality of a product.
Anyway, it seems like Firefox is not a browser for addon enthusiasts like me anymore; got to find a new one, any recommendations?

Can we stop that trend of only showing the username field and then show the password field after filling the username clicking next? It messes with my Keepass browser addon.
Apart from that, it messes with human workflow as well. Enter Username -> TAB -> Enter Password -> ENTER. With that stupid UI you have to either focus the next button with Tab and hope hitting Enter does not already submit the login form or switch to mouse and click the Next button.

Rant/collab proposal
The sheer fucking amount of popups on websites that ask this really pisses me off.

"Do you want out pathetic, groveling push notifications"

Option 1: Fuck yes, spam me right now!

Option 2: Later, because who can resist our spam

I propose a chrome addon that replaces the second option on every notification request popup, which is usually "Later" with "Fuck off"

NodeJS C++ add-on is one of the best and worst thing ever to exist in NodeJS.

Writing a native add-on is such a fucking pain. It's full of inconsistent API. They are trying to fix that by the introduction of N-API. But that shit is still in experimental mode.

I want to use nan but I know that that is also going to be deprecated once the N-API gets stable.

fml

I was in dependency hell for two days.
Im a junior working in a team creating an ember app. Suddenly a main component refuses to work since an addon threw "EmberObject undefined"... Nobody could reproduce it and we where out of ideas, so I tried fixing it for 2days (7h total). I finally got it working after updating yarn :D
It never felt so good working again :)

recently, after the Firefox addon controversy, many Firefox users have switched to another browser for a few days or permanently. If you've also switched from Firefox to something else, please let me know why did you choose that browser & if not what is holding you back to Firefox.
For me, I've been using brave since the addon controversy. Brave is okay but still needs a lot of things to improve. I'm also missing the separate address bar and search bar of Firefox and some keyboard shortcuts. what about you? Please comment your opinion. Thanks.

Firefox Quantum not coupling with Selenium IDE addon

So I reverse engineered the
protocol of QONQR: World in Play and made a mitmproxy addon running locally inside termux that can see when I launch in the game and uses Termux:API to notify me when my ingame resources are replenished.
I direct the traffic through mitmproxy using Drony. I configured it so that by default Drony passes traffic directly to the internet except if it comes from the QONQR app.
The problem is that while Drony is running, there is a chance of network traffic being corrupted so I often get spammed by connection and ssl errors.
So I have to either continue sacrificimg my network integrity or stop getting assistance ppaying QONQR :-/

Does anyone know an alternative to Drony (basically an app that can connect you to a proxy without root using the android vpn api, if possible with filtering by app or ip)?
Also does anyone else have problems with drony on Android 9 or other versions? I don't really have an opportunity to test it.

Edit: It only took 4 tries to post this yay

Client: Can you put all the add on products we sell into the MDSL (Master Daily Sales Log)

Why aren't you adding them to the new console system? It allows you to add them and tracks all actions on the sale.

Client: The Health Agents don't know how to do that, and I think the manger hasn't added them into the system....yup he didn't add them.

Me: So how are you tracking the addon products you are selling?

Client: I don't know. Can you just add them to the MDSL.

Me: I wrote the console system to replace the MDSL, why are you using the spaghetti code system I wrote 8 years ago?

Client: They like it better because of this one report they use.

Me: I rewrote that report for the new system and it even gives more info.

Client: But the owner doesn't trust it, because it shows conversions and sales instead of just sales.

Me: ...

I wanted to install Firefox developer edition mainly because of multiprocessing
Now as I activated syncing, it synced my addons, after I restarted multiprocessing was disabled and greyed out
So i began to test which addon it was, deleting the contents of its profile each time

After half an hour I finally tried restarting without any addons, it was fucking disabled

Just using Firefox disables multiprocessing? Wtf?!

!rant

Finally (kinda) done with the nicknames addon. I wanted to hook into the sites actual modal menus for the UI, but I don't know JQuery and I somehow doubt modifying the existing javascript of a site from a plugin is possible, so we're stuck with knockoffs for now. But it works, it saves and loads nicknames correctly and displays them everywhere except on the notifications because I didn't add an onload listener to them.

You know it's bad when you've planned a word addon thats sole purpose is to do mail merges.

I've done guides and shown people how to do them. Still comes to me the bloke in IT to do a simple mail merge because googling it is too complex.

It's going to be epic it will hold their hands let them know they are bestest cupcake out of the whole batch.

The progress bar will be a rainbow and each button will sparkle. Because If I get taken of my dev work to do another fucking mail merge I'll probably quit on the spot.

And I do not have the savings readily available to hold me over until I got a new job.

Knob sockets the lot of em.

I'm trying to update my addon-list, what are (firefox-)addons you say are a must have? (My focus is on privacy, anti-tracking and shitloads of open tabs)

As of now my addons are:
Adblock plus
DDG privacy essentials
Greasemonkey
Https everywhere
Noscript
Onetab
Privacy badger
Self destroying cookies
Tab suspender

Hey, privacy guys, I've recently decided to switch to DDG, and I just came across this DDG browser addon. It promises things like
"block all the hidden trackers", which is what AdBlock can also do, "force sites to use an encrypted connection", which makes no sense since most websites using https will redirect to https automatically, "Search Privately", which is already supported by them without installing the add-on, and "Decode Privacy Policies" which is the only feature that seems to be useful. Should I use it?

Gotta love when smartass clients claim that the feature you are selling them should've been part of the package you sold them intead of an addon.

Yeah. Like they never heard of a software updates before.

Developing a 2D animation addon for Blender.

Weird idea i had while in the shower: Make a browser (or even better an addon for commonly used browsers) and find some reasons why people would download and install it. The addon blocks all the ads on the websites and replces them with your own adds. People who don't use adblocker probably don't care whether the website or the browser itself shows the ad. This would be somewhat unethical but apart from that I don't see why this wouldn't work.

If you actually go ahead and do this, feel free to do so but give me 10% or something.

I love it when the bower_component/addon-name/addon-name.js ~ is what I expect it should be, but I still have to open a finder window and check every time to make sure. : /

"Ultimate beginner" guides that leave you hanging, because it isn't a beginners guide!

Trying Firebase (coming from vanilla JS) and it works fine in local enviroment. Tries it on server: nope. That environment is different, with different paths and multiple "roots" (addon domains).

Google that? Sure. Nobody has had this issue. Stackoverflow doesn't seem to know (or care).

"Ultimate beginner" guides that leave you hanging, because it isn't a beginners guide..

I'm growing tired of having to wait sometimes minutes to make searches in large text files (about 5 MB), especially with regex...

Any tips on good addon for Sublime Text or other text editor?

Fuck Hotsar.
Shit like this is why piracy exists.
(I acknowledge presence of other reasons as well.)

Also any good Firefox addon that can help me get past such douchebaggery?

Guys, how frequent do you face distraction while working? Like while coding, I'm always distracted with my phone. I know i can just throw it far away, but I do this habit on browser as well by suddenly opening a new tab to browse fb, for example.

One way to get around this is by using Pomodoro technique. But that only works if I'm not reluctant to do so. Another one is by limiting tabs opened in firefox by using an addon.

ITT: How do you deal with distraction?

Fucking hell, writing browser addons is annoying.

I just wanted some small addon for myself. But first did it in tampermonkey. It was supposed to take a screenshot of the website and upload it together with the link of the website to my server. First used html2canvas. Terrible performance. But addons can take direct screenshots.

Reason, when I listen to something or watch something while holding my little daughter, I cannot copy links over. But I can quickly slap a key combination and save for later what I just saw.

Anyway. Addons are terrible. The error messages makes no sense. Missing permission active_tab... Fucking hell, it was missing host permissions. Permissions has to be one of. Documentation sucks on MDN.

And then, you can not even install unsigned addons. I do not want to share my addon with mozilla. You have to install Firefox Dev or ESR for it. Switched to Firefox Dev.

But I feel sorry for everyone having to write browser addons professionally.

Can anybody make Firefox Add-on for dark "DevRant" theme?