ha!
I’ve been called “Bill” a lot in my life because of my last name.
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Not more computing holy wars 
I got bored of those back in the days of ZX Spectrum vs BBC Micro Vs Commodore 64 Vs Amstrad CPC (I grew out of it when I was about 8 when I decided they were all cool in their own way).
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I think computer holy wars are mostly dead. The vast vast majority of humanity basically has zero fucks to give and they’re heavily outweighing the nerd contingent these days. They just want to use the thing and move on.
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Every time, just about, someone on the net rails on and on about how unperforamnt Firefox is for them, it turns out that they are running a shitty extension (usually five to ten of them) and THAT is what’s causing the performance and stability issues they see.
I have a strobe sensitivity. I have to block flashing and several other kinds of animation to use the web. I also have to wear special sunglasses and an eyepatch to cross the blinking street.
If I could use Firefox without fixing it, I would, but I can’t. I will be using 52 esr with my fixes for the forseeable future. I have tried other browsers, such as Safari, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. but can’t fix them. I can’t download Chrome, because that page isn’t accessible.
I am locked in an arms race against advertisers and web designers and others who think more animation would improve their web page. I still haven’t found any tools to block all the carousel animation, but I’ve been able to disable the blinking blinking cursors in Firefox, disable gifs, disable most ads, and disable a lot of other animation.
Unfortunately, baseline Firefox doesn’t include the tools to make it safe, and testing in “safe mode” would trigger my migraines and could trigger some users’ seizures.
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I’m not sure what that has to do with the part of my comment that you quoted. Could you explain how your comments related to performance and stability of Firefox?
I would suggest that you investigate some of the Linux web browsers. Within six months or so, ESR52 will be unsupported. Eventually, it will be unsafe to use, for security reasons. A lot of the Linux web browsers are less into the current feature set and are a bit minimalistic. I suspect they’re more likely to let you completely tweak their rendering.
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I haven’t been having performance or stability problems, aside from Firefox not blocking enough pain/animation/migraine triggers.
But blaming users because we’re using too many extensions is part of the problem, and cutting off users by removing most extensions is not a solution.
If Firefox came with all necessary accessibility tools, we wouldn’t have to install additional accessibility tools. But it doesn’t, so some of us do.
I’m sick of hunting through browsers. Safari doesn’t let users disable the bleeping blinking cursor, because Apple, and doesn’t have the same range of accessibility tools. Opera, Vivaldi, and Sleipnir punch users with zooming animation. Chrome’s website punches users with its own animation. These migraine triggers can trigger migraines, which hurt, and hurting can hurt.
Eventually, it will be unsafe to use, for security reasons.
And “Refresh Firefox” and “Safe Mode” and Firefox 57+ and most browsers are unsafe to use, or to test, for neurological reasons.
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No one is blaming users. Mozilla is blaming the extensions and how they’re written and integrated. They cause horrible performance issues, can be very usnsafe and unsecure, and a host of other problems. That’s why they’re going away. Maintaining a legacy infrastructure is holding back other improvements, such as speed and reliability, in Firefox.
That said, when there are performance problems, users never blame the extensions. They always just go “Firefox is soooo slow” and then some of them go to Chrome.
Apparently it is because that is what Mozilla is doing for Firefox. I’m running 57 nightly builds right now.
Opera is just Chrome with a different UI and has been for years now. They dumped their own rendering engine years ago.
I understand you’re in a rough situation but you’re also not in the same situation as 99.99% of other users. You should find what is right for you but edge cases are not a reason to maintain a legacy system that makes Firefox noncompetitive in the long run. That’s why I suggested other, smaller, Linux browsers. They tend to cater to a different kind of userbase.
If there are safe browsers, or a safe set of extensions for 57+, how am I supposed to find them, and configure them? Except by trial-and-migraine?
No results found for (“strobe sensitive” OR “strobe sensitivity”) “safe browser”.
No results found for (“Bucha effect” OR “flicker vertigo”) “safe browser”.
No results found for “safe browser” “block animation”.
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I literally have no idea. How did you find Firefox in the first place?
A lot of Firefox under the hood settings can be changed via the about:config options. I suggest starting there. For example, you can turn off animated gifs by setting image.animation_mode to ‘none’ there as mentioned at:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1029412
I suspect you’ll probably need to keep Javascript turned off as well, which is simple to do.
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I was switching between Firefox and Safari as my sensitivity worsened. I wasn’t able to keep up in Safari, but came closer in Firefox. I tried the others out of desperation.
I have 3 about:config fixes, 12 extensions, and 12 user styles to block most animation.
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So I just refurbished my laptop - deep cleaning, replaced the hard drive with a larger solid state drive, and a fresh install of Windows 7 instead of using the factory restore disc. Okay, I actually paid my brother to do it because he does all of that as part of his job and could do it ten times faster than I could.
Anyways, as part of this process I’ve finally upgraded to the latest version of Firefox and can no longer use legacy extensions. That’s fine, I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that I’ll need to use several browsers going forward instead of using a single program. Unfortunately, some of the extensions I used to change Firefox’s appearance no longer work.
My question now is pretty basic: is there anything that can be done so that Firefox doesn’t look so gods-damned ugly?
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Install Waterfox. You may be able to salvage some of your old extensions. Even if you go with Firefox, a backup browser is handy in case something happens to Firefox. (like trying Nightly as a debugging suggestion, and losing all user Styles, and trying to restore from backup, and losing everything including basic safety fixes, keyboard shortcuts, and menus).
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Work out userChrome.css and userContent.css
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Encounter the problem that Mozilla doesn’t address bugs when there are extensions, or user css, to kinda-sorta do the same thing, and doesn’t address bugs in extensions, or user css, because the don’t officially support that.
Do the new tab throbbers give you migraines?
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Sorry, could you be more specific?
The Web page content or the UI itself? Any pet peeves?
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Rest in peace, Chrome. Chrome’s new UI and the active removal of features (Add to Desktop, for one) are hands down the worst thing since…
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Matthew Green isn’t having any of what Chrome’s doing either.
I’ve never been a Chrome user. As unhappy as I’ve been with some of Mozilla’s choices, and as much as FIrefox has had periods of worse performance and better, they’re still the browser that doesn’t spy on you. May it long remain so.
ETA: I guess I’m taking a Windows perspective. Apple’s not in the personal-info-collection biz, right? So Safari would also be a browser not spying on you? I have a Mac but I don’t use it for browsing much, and when I do it’s with Firefox on it, so I don’t know much about Safari.
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I can’t defeat the Chrome website to install Chrome, but making a website hit the user doesn’t make me think the browser won’t hit me. Especially when I know Android also attacks the user and Google Maps attacks the non-users who visit websites which embed their tools, and works around attempts to block Google Maps for safety.
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I’m using Waterfox now. It works well and supports the Firefox legacy extensions, though that isn’t seamless.
Firefox has turned into what you get when a committee makes the rules and doesn’t listen to the users. There are things that can be done with XUL that can’t be done any other way. And the current method of altering the user interface through CSS is ridiculous.
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You can alter the UI using CSS via a deliberately complicated process. It sucks, so I gave up and switched to Waterfox.
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And remember, it’s not officially supported and some suugest it’ll be phased out,-- but basic safety isn’t needed because you can just use user css to mostly kinda-sorta disable some of the unsafe new features!
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That’s on the list. The only legacy extension I still need is DownThemAll, and it’s just as easy to install Waterfox to make it work than to try to get the same functionality out of a standalone program.
Tab throbbers? I’m not sure what you’re referring to. As for migraines, while the default theme and look is so aesthetically unpleasing that I might hyperbolically say “It’s physically painful to look at!”, it doesn’t actually cause me any kind of physical pain.
The UI itself. The default theme is terrible, but changing that did solve the terrible contrast issues between the active and inactive tabs. I’m not fond of the squared-off tabs, the tabs over the address and bookmark bar, and some of the sizing/spacing. From what I’ve read some of this can be solved by screwing around with some CSS files, but it appears Mozilla made customizing Firefox way more difficult than it needed to be with the last major revision.
Plus, I always thought it’d be kind of neat to write an extension that would kill any Wikipedia/ TV Tropes/ other time-wasting website tabs every fifteen minutes or so, but it looks like that kind of control is impossible now.
Yeah, it’s looking more and more like Google is trying to get away with making Chrome just another advertising vector. Fortunately, I only use Chrome for my a couple of browser games and not anything important.
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