I hate change
Nov. 16th, 2017 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pebblerockerUGH, Firefox has changed and everything is in a different place and all my extensions are gone again. Apparently they are using a completely new system for extensions which means they will no longer break every six weeks and won't have to be updated constantly! Which is good! But my gif stopper has gone, not updated to the new architecture, and that has made whole websites impossible to use.
It was such a good gif stopper, it loaded gifs by default but I could freeze them instantly with a hotkey I chose myself. So I could go and look at pages of funny cat gifs without having to right-click on anything or disable the extension, but if someone had an animated icon blinking next to the text I was trying to read I could make it stop just like that. Or I could watch someone's reaction gif loop once, so I knew what they were communicating, and then stop it so I could read the rest of the comments. The only option to replace it is a gif blocker, which is either on or off for the whole browser (not per tab like the old one) and you have to reload the page to get rid of the gifs after turning it on, and you have to right-click each gif individually if you want to unblock them. Ugh. [Edit: the placeholder image for any gif is the full width of the browser page and as high as it is wide. Yes, even if the gif it's replacing is a non-animated 16x16-pixel forum smiley. I think I have to learn to make browser extensions myself from scratch, using my very limited knowledge of BASIC from 1989.]
The other most crucial thing broken is Clearly, which I used to reload stupid pages in a readable format. It let me pick a nice muted background colour and big sans-serif text for comfortable reading, and got rid of all sidebar rubbish. It also often managed to get around websites with stupid lightboxes asking for your email address or telling you not to read any more of their articles this month. I have installed an extension called Reader which appears to do a similar thing. But despite its vaunted selection of 16 million colours, it doesn't appear to offer any way of opening up options to change the colours away from the default stark black-on-white...
It was such a good gif stopper, it loaded gifs by default but I could freeze them instantly with a hotkey I chose myself. So I could go and look at pages of funny cat gifs without having to right-click on anything or disable the extension, but if someone had an animated icon blinking next to the text I was trying to read I could make it stop just like that. Or I could watch someone's reaction gif loop once, so I knew what they were communicating, and then stop it so I could read the rest of the comments. The only option to replace it is a gif blocker, which is either on or off for the whole browser (not per tab like the old one) and you have to reload the page to get rid of the gifs after turning it on, and you have to right-click each gif individually if you want to unblock them. Ugh. [Edit: the placeholder image for any gif is the full width of the browser page and as high as it is wide. Yes, even if the gif it's replacing is a non-animated 16x16-pixel forum smiley. I think I have to learn to make browser extensions myself from scratch, using my very limited knowledge of BASIC from 1989.]
The other most crucial thing broken is Clearly, which I used to reload stupid pages in a readable format. It let me pick a nice muted background colour and big sans-serif text for comfortable reading, and got rid of all sidebar rubbish. It also often managed to get around websites with stupid lightboxes asking for your email address or telling you not to read any more of their articles this month. I have installed an extension called Reader which appears to do a similar thing. But despite its vaunted selection of 16 million colours, it doesn't appear to offer any way of opening up options to change the colours away from the default stark black-on-white...
no subject
Date: 2017-11-17 06:56 pm (UTC)That gif stopper sounds like heaven! It hadn't even occurred to me that there are such things. (But I'm glad I knew nothing about it, because I'd be livid losing it now!)
no subject
Date: 2017-11-20 04:29 am (UTC)