That could rival “A directory of mostly wonderful things”.
1 Like
What? Someone uses Chrome instead of Firefox? That’s dumb.
Ironically, it was a Firefox plugin called Firebug that started the whole dev tools revolution. And that built upon an idea first implemented in Opera.
I still prefer Firebug over Firefox’s native tools, though the 3D representation of the DOM is also kind of neat.
2 Likes
Kill it with fire.
The government is still using software written in cobol from the 60s. If ancient software is good enough for them, it’s good enough for us.
The only downsides for Mozilla is that it’s not currently being updated or maintained. Also that your email archive resides locally instead of in the cloud (my f-i-l sees that as a feature, not a bug), but it requires you to keep it backed up. We also ran into issues when we tried moving his old email to a fresh install on a new machine, but that may well have been operator error.
2 Likes
development definitely slowed down, and it was in danger of being dropped, but thunderbird is still getting updates. In fact: Stable release: 52.2.0 (June 14, 2017; 7 days ago)
For me, I still keep my email ‘in the cloud’, but find it way easier to manage a bunch of busy accounts through a real mail client, rather than some web interface.
3 Likes
It actually is an image. It’s not code that loads a picture, it’s the picture encoded as a string. That’s why it can’t be blocked, because it’s part of the HTML you can’t load the HTML without loading it. It’s not executing anything and can’t be used to load a script.
4 Likes
Managing a local email database can be a giant pain in the ass. I used Eudora and then Thunderbird for years and the mailbox go so unwieldy (even after compression) especially when moving between computers. It’s also a real pain when you want to access your email from multiple computers or locations. Obviously with IMAP you can leave mail up on the server but if your point is that your archive is local then you’re not leaving it there forever.
1 Like
That string is. Another one might not be. If browsers are so dumb as to just serve an image from a string without blinking who’s to say someone won’t use the protocol to serve malicious code? A few months out of date, but here:
1 Like
What about iCab?
3 Likes
I never thought I’d say it, but yes. IE was so bad for years that I was delighted Chrome caught up and overtook it, but now it’s becoming so dominant that we’re in danger of returning to the bad old days. I don’t use it but it seems Edge is on a par with Chrome/FF.
I suspect there are features in both that are missing in the other but I prefer Firefox’s developer tools. Ultimately they’re very similar, but one of the more useful features in FF is being able to see what javascript events are attached to an element in the inspector.
Also, +1 for Thunderbird.
1 Like
My mistake. I was under the impression that it was abandonware.
The developer tools for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge are incredibly similar. There are some things that one does better than the other (Chrome’s better for quickly getting details about the loaded TLS certificate, for instance), but I don’t think any of these would make one browser massively superior over the other. I personally switch back and forth between Chrome, Edge, and Firefox and generally I don’t notice a massive difference between the three. On older systems Chrome seems to be a little better, though.
2 Likes
I have a friend who found handing years worth of old email inside of Eudora a pain, so he moved the majority of it to a dedicated mail storage database called Mailstore. And when I was going through a paranoid spell, I decided I didn’t like the idea of Google being able to mine the content of my online email archive for marketing wisdom about me, so I moved all of the old emails off of the cloud and into a Mailstore database, and deleted the archive up on the cloud. It’s very fast at searching through a decade’s worth of old email, even though it would have been easier to just leave it up there and squash my fears about Google.
1 Like
I’m honestly curious, why would anyone want to have forty tabs open at once? I don’t recall ever having more than 8-10 tabs open unless I forgot to close some I’m no longer using.
1 Like
I’ve been meaning to try out Vivaldi.
Downloading it now.
There should definitely be a picture of a sexy bear holding the globe to accompany this.
1 Like
Why is this impossible to block? Why not just strip out any elements that mention “base64”? Or actually decode it and see what it contains before passing it on to the web browser?
I admit I don’t know much about the mechanisms involved but I feel like nothing’s out of reach as long as you get access to the content before the web browser does. So a proxy filter should be able to handle this (if one still exists – anyone else remember Proxomitron as fondly as I do?). And I think NoScript could but I don’t know if it does.
“I don’t have time to read this now, let me save it for later” basically. It piles up quickly depending on how you browse. Right now my computer has about six tabs open that are just search pages for songs I heard on Radio Dead Air last Monday. I haven’t had the time to re-listen to them and decide if I want to record my desire to own them in a more permanent format yet, so they just sit there for now. Other stuff like that as well. Articles I haven’t read yet, etc. Also TweetDeck is more or less permanently open in a tab, now that there’s no longer a desktop client for it.
2 Likes
To add onto that as a web developer, it’s a bummer because javascript has become so much better at doing robust, efficient web applications. I would love to use React.js with everything I do because it solves so many architectural problems, but unless I have a Node backend capable of rendering pages on the server-side, it’s a complete no-go if anyone needs to have javascript disabled.
Someday I think Node will become the standard though, so that frustration is temporary.
