Can’t use Bitwarden or LastPass with Firefox for Android

Ok, I don’t get one thing with Mozilla and this is also the ONLY reason why I’m not using Firefox at the moment and am forced to use Opera whether I like it or not.

I have 3 systems which have to be connected with Sync function. I also have a phone where I want my bookmarks. And for all the countless pages, I also need tons of secure logins. And frankly, I don’t trust Firefox password manager because it’s really badly designed and doesn’t give me the flexibility I need. It’s far from secure. So, I use tools like Bitwarden or LastPass to handle passwords in a secure way.

And on Android, only way for this to work is to allow lets say LastPass to have Accessibility Access to apps so it can detect login fields inside a browser.

Only problem here is, for some monumentally dumb reason, Firefox for Android doesn’t allow Accessibility Access function AT ALL for privacy/security reasons. That’s the single DUMBEST thing I’ve heard and seen, ever. It’s so stupid they don’t even allow users to turn this crap off. Nope, it’s hardlocked into Firefox browser. Only way to get rid of it is to use Firefox Focus. Which is an useless cut down, dumbed down version of regular Firefox for Android. This one, super privacy and security focused one does work with Accessibility Access for some retarded reason. WTF Mozilla?! WHY? Firefox Focus is useless, it doesn’t even have ANY Sync function. What good are countless passwords if I don’t have the god damn bookmarks to even access pages comfortably?!

Add the damn setting to allow Accessibility Access to interact with Firefox for Android. I don’t care if it’s disabled by default, at least give us a god damn option to disable this crap in Firefox settings so we can at least use LastPass, Bitwarden and similar apps. And I don’t care if they support Oreo login thingie. We’ll get old before people actually get any Oreo updates on their phones. We want the old access back damn it.

This is such oxymoron thing, on one end they want to boost security by blocking access to Firefox, but at the same time, preventing you from using an actual secure password management tools. How on Earth does that make any kind of sense!?

Prevent Firefox from closing browser when closing the last tab

If you hate that clicking CLOSE TAB button on last tab in Firefox closes entire browser, do the following:

In URL bar, type about:config, in Search field, copy this string browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab. Switch it to FALSE by double clicking the entry.

After you do this, clicking close button on last available tab will just close the last tab and leave browser available for further use with empty page.

Out of all browsers, only Opera insists on doing the old fashion way where closing last tab only closes that tab and nothing else. Respect to Scandinavians. Good choice. The rest is just copying from Chrome like they don’t have any own identity or design skills… Yeah Mozilla, I’m looking at you. You did it like Opera still until you decided to copy the feature from Chrome. Why, I don’t know… It was a stupid decision.

Mozilla, stop fucking up hardware acceleration in Firefox

Ok, now I have enough of this god damn bullshit with Firefox.

If you are one of those people who has a certain laptop and it isn’t particularly fast, but it was fast enough for browsing, watching videos and using Youtube, but then, all of a sudden, videos in Youtube became unplayable at basically any resolution, making your device pretty much useless for entertainment on the Youtube front.

And we can thank Mozilla for that. Yeah, you fuckers at Mozilla intentionally block hardware hardware acceleration in Firefox on certain graphic cards (GPU) for “safety”. Well, I never had any god damn problem with Firefox or Youtube on my AMD E-450 APU until you fucks started interfering. It always worked perfectly smoothly without a single crash, lockup or anything. But then you fuckers decided to just nonchalantly block my GPU acceleration without any god damn fucking way of disabling fucking retarded GPU blocklist, making laptop pretty much useless for Youtube since it’s all lagging like shit.

But behold, if I play any 1080p video in Windows media players or if I open Microsoft Edge, surf to Youtube and play same videos, they run absolutely perfectly smooth on same god damn motherfucking GPU. No crashes or lockups, just absolutely smooth 1080p video. Even at 60fps! Where in Firefox, it’s fucking lagging and stalling like garbage even on 480p videos. Go fuck yourself Mozilla.

I actually wouldn’t even care if there was at least an easy switch to bypass GPU blocklist thing via about:config. Nooooooooooo, Mozilla had to fucking hardcode this shit into the browser so you can’t do ANYTHING about it. There is some spoofing shit via BAT file, but I just can’t be bothered fiddling with that nonsense…

What the fuck would it cost you Mozilla to allow users to easily disable this GPU blocklist shit eh? If I disable it on my own and there are problems, I’ll fucking know it was because of this, I’m not gonna trash Firefox online for crashing (but I am now for fucking up with my HW acceleration). I’ll know it was that what caused the problems. But you don’t even give me the chance to fucking try it. Maybe it would fucking work fine like it did before. But you just blocked it and never gave any fucks about it afterwards because “reasons”.

It’s stupid, it’s retarded and you all know it. Stop fucking around with my browser and give me back my god damn hardware acceleration. I’ll then decide whether it has problems or not, because I am the one who has the GPU in question in front of me, I very much doubt Mozilla actually tests every god damn GPU out there for this retarded blocklist. They just hear “it has problems” from someone and then they run like little fuckers to block it quickly to protect poor users. Well, I don’t need fucking “protection”, I need hardware acceleration that I had and you took it away from me.

You can have the GPU blocklist enabled by default for all the normies who don’t know any better, but for us advanced users, just give us easy setting in about:config advanced settings to disable this GPU blocklist bullshit and I’ll be happy. And trust me, I wouldn’t be the only one…

Force other Firefox clients to sync current data

Back in the early days of Sync feature in Firefox, we had option to force override data on Sync servers depending on your needs. You could merge the data, force currently used client to be overridden by the server data or current client overriding the server data.

Several updates later, and we have absolutely NO control over sync data. It just syncs up whatever way it feels like it and frankly, in most cases it’s not the way you want it. Things often go bad with Add-ons if you are testing them and you’re adding and removing them before other clients under your sync account receive data from Sync service.

However, I found a way to at least partially regain control in way of “Override other clients with the currently used client data”.

This means, all other Firefox browsers linked to your Sync account will get overridden with data found in client you’re currently using (in which you’ll initiate the override).

How to force re-syncing override

Click 3 horizontal lines menu button (Open Menu) in the top right corner and select Options… Or copy about:preferences#sync into your URL bar…

You’ll see this…

Now click Disconnect button and wait for few seconds, just to be sure server refreshes the state correctly.

Then just reconnect back and Sync service will think you’re hooking up a new client, force re-syncing data from it to all other clients, effectively force refreshing ALL clients connected to your account.

This should fix all the cases when clients aren’t syncing as they should. A lot easier and faster than reinstalling entire browser clean like I used to do it until I found out this does the trick as well.

Hope this helps 🙂

Enable global tracking protection in Firefox

As you may know (or not), Firefox has a tracking protection built in since quite few builds back. However, by default, this feature is limited to Private windows only. Enabling it globally will prevent tracking on all webpages. And from the looks of it, it doesn’t seem to affect browsing quality. You will recognize the active protection via displayed shield in the URL address bar. If there is no shield displayed, it means the webpage is not tracking you.

If you want to enable this globally, you can do this in two ways…

Add-on:

Install this add-on and it’ll enable it for you automatically. Since it’s an add-on, it’ll sync itself with you other Firefox installs on other systems, enabling it globally on all your devices.

Manual setting:

Type about:config in the URL bar and hit ENTER key. Confirm the warning and search for privacy.trackingprotection.enabled and double click it to set it to TRUE.

If value doesn’t exist, right click in empty space, select New and then select Boolean. Name it privacy.trackingprotection.enabled and toggle it to TRUE.

This is useful if you want this enabled on individual systems only or not having to install yet another add-on for a simple tweak within advanced settings. It’s up to you 🙂

Additional settings under Privacy:

Type about:config in the URL bar and hit ENTER key. Confirm the warning and search for privacy.trackingprotection.ui.enabled and double click it to set it to TRUE.

If value doesn’t exist, right click in empty space, select New and then select Boolean. Name it privacy.trackingprotection.ui.enabled and toggle it to TRUE.

You will get additional settings within Firefox with this one under Privacy settings where you can easily enable or disable tracking protection.

You can disable tracking protection for individual webpages by clicking the shield and disabling protection. I have just noticed tracking protection removes “Like” and stars ratings from my blog (this one). You can disable the tracking protection if you want to see the ratings for my blog posts. Same applies for other webpages. Unfortunately, there is no way of selectively enabling just specific “trackers” and leaving others blocked. It’s either fully on or off for a certain webpage.

Improve Firefox HTML5 video playback performance

Main reason why Firefox performs so horrendously bad with H.264 encoded HTML5 video services (Youtube etc) is the integration of Cisco’s OpenH264. Sure it’s free, but apparently it’s also worth as much as it costs. It apparently lacks any kind of hardware acceleration and makes my AMD E-450 APU laptop literally scream and sweat in pain when it tries to play Youtube videos, because it tries to decode everything on weak CPU. The GPU part was just doing nothing and it has a DirectX 11 grade core within the APU. It’s so bad it makes 1080p30 or 720p60 entirely unplayable. Mozilla first bundled this codec with Firefox 33, but I’ve only noticed it when they hit Firefox 37. It’s when Youtube also switched to full HTML5 mode. And that’s when shit started…

I just don’t get it why is it used as primary decoder and not as a fallback if nothing else is found. Stupid logic from Mozilla…

Solution?

Disable this dumb software OpenH264 decoder so that something native from Windows kicks in instead. In my case AMD Video Decoder (most likely), providing me with a proper hardware accelerated decoder which is more efficient and also super fast since it’s using GPU instead of slow CPU.

How to disable integrated Firefox OpenH264 software decoder?

Type about:config into the Firefox URL bar and hit ENTER.

In the Search field above, enter (just copy & paste it there):
media.gmp-provider.enabled

Double click the found entry and it’ll switch itself to FALSE (which means disabled OpenH264 decoder).

Restart the Firefox and try Youtube again. It should play super smoothly now…

Special thanks to JayhawksRock from Mozillazine forums for telling me this secret.

Firefox 35 released!

Nothing super drastic, except maybe the “Share” button which will help you quickly share whatever you browse currently via Twitter, facebook etc. It’s kinda cool feature even if the page you’re viewing doesn’t offer Share buttons. Check the changelog for more info.

Changelog:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/35.0beta/releasenotes/

You can already grab Firefox 35 through their FTP:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/35.0/win32/

Firefox 33 launched!

Some more news from the Firefox front. This time with some really important new performance features.

Two of them are OMTC or Off Main Thread Composition which gives Firefox ability to utilize more CPU threads more efficiently, providing faster webpage rendering and also a lot smoother interface behavior. The second improvement is for the JavaScript engine with faster and slimmer JS strings. There are other features but these two are the most important to me.

You can already grab Firefox 33 through their FTP:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/33.0/win32/

The way how Firefox 33 feels ultra snappy on a 4GHz quad is incredible, I can’t wait to test it on my low end laptop with AMD E-450 which is just a very low power dual core. Should be interesting…

Get rid of the Firefox speed dial tab…

Ok, this speed dial thing on every new “empty” tab that you open was introduced some time ago in Firefox, but i still hate it and I don’t get it why the hell Mozilla doesn’t give us a simple checkbox for it in settings under “Tabs” menu. Not everyone like or want it (it’s a privacy concern for some). It’s a very badly done version of Opera Speed Dial and I hate it. So, if you also hate it, here is how you can get rid of it…

Type about:config into address bar and hit ENTER. Search for browser.newtab.url. Now modify its value from about:newtab into about:blank.

There, every time you’ll open a new tab, it will be empty (blank). It’s not an ideal solution and you’ll have to do it manually after every Firefox install but at least it works. Until Mozilla redesigns it properly…

Mozilla Firefox 24 released!

Another smqaller update and don’t expect anything big for Firefox 25 either. 24 brings few smaller fixes where biggest one is performance improvement with the SVG tiling and resizing. Other than that, nothing drastic. Still a recommended update as always to improve security and kill bugs.

Changelog (may not be updated just yet):
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/notes
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/24.0/releasenotes/

Direct Early Download (EN-US):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/24.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%2024.0.exe

Official download (may not be updated just yet):
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/