Darvond: So the first one does what now, just checks the security certs? That's something any user can do by clicking that lock ↖️ish. I don't exactly see what this did that you found so important.
Not exactly. It remembers the last certificate seen, and warns if the certificate presented this time is not the certificate presented on the prior visit. So yes, users
can do that with the lock icon, if you don't mind doing it for every single page load and every subresource. That kind of tedium is exactly where automation is a good thing.
Darvond: You're going to have to explain Classic Theme Restorer and why I should care. As it stood, I never found Firefox themes to be that good to begin with and right now I'm just using the default Oxygen stylings.
I find the post-Australis look to be very ugly. I want Firefox to look like it did in the pre-Fx-20 era. No hamburger menu. Top level menu items (File, Edit, View, History, etc.) broken out, named, and always visible.
Darvond: Noscript is there, so moving on.
Yep, mentioned only so I could remark on how it needed extra help to get there. I also skipped several extensions that I was able to replace post-Quantum. These are just the ones that are awkward to replace.
Darvond: So you want to defer loading until you're ready to activate the tab? I'm pretty sure that's a feature in Chrome these days, dunno if Firefox has such ideas on their github or whatever. Is that what Offline Restart did?
I want to load immediately
if the content can be loaded from cache. If it cannot be loaded from cache, I want to defer loading until the user actively chooses to load it. Firefox has a deferred load feature, but their idea of "actively chooses" is "User focused on this tab." I
don't want that, because it causes uncached pages to reload before I've decided I want them again. Worse, I may have decided I'll never want that page, but I can't close that tab without provoking the browser to load it first.
Darvond: Policeman's github page was worthless for information. But I know for sure that Chrome can set it so that cross frames can require a user gesture or similar. (Note: Anything I say applies to any Chromium built browser, be it Vivaldi, Chromium, Brave, or what have you.) I've never bothered with much blocking beyond what Ublock O provides
sooooo…
Yes, Policeman is not unique. Porting years of whitelists to another extension is annoying though.
Darvond: Unless I'm missing something Priv8 just sounds like Incognito Tabs with an extra layer of tinfoil for your head.
Priv8 has a better user interface, but yes, the core functionality is available elsewhere. One thing I like about Priv8 is that, while focused on the tab, I can see a visual indicator telling me which domain it is in. Firefox's built-in Container Tabs have a bizarre rule that the tab decoration is only visible when you are
not focused on the tab. When you focus on it, the colored strip vanishes.
It's not about tinfoil though. I find it useful to be logged in to a site, such as GMail or Github, only in those tabs where I want the logged-in experience. In other tabs, where I might wander to that service through general links, I am logged out. It's also helpful for forums, so that I don't trigger the "Your last visit was on" logic if I want to pop my head in quickly and look around, but leave my "Last visit" time undisturbed for when I can come back and spend time really browsing thoroughly.
Darvond: Well, go on, tell about the tab mixing and why it's a plus.
Cute. Tab Mix Plus provides extensive options for how to manage tabs differently from the default. I like:
- Override where "Open in new window" links actually open
- Choose where "New Tab" puts the newly opened tab in the tab order.
- Lock tabs. (Force every link to pretend it had a target of
_blank, instead of opening in the current tab. Useful if you want to spawn off a lot of new tabs from an index page.)
- Choose which tab-related actions focus a newly created tab versus which ones leave the tab in the background
- Customize the rules for choosing a tab to focus when the current tab closes. I prefer most-recently-viewed, rather than a purely positional setup.
- Customize how undoing a tab closure behaves.
- Customize the appearance of not-yet-read tabs.
- On laptops with bad buttons (or more commonly now, slap-trackpad-to-press pseudo-buttons), focus-follows-cursor saves me a lot of futile tapping when trying to switch tabs. Point at the tab and it becomes focused, no clicking required.
I think that covers most of the Tab Mix Plus options I actually used.