#I switched to firefox and you can too! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

deer-butch · 2 years

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hey instead of bullying or scaring you into switching to firefox, let me tell you why i LOVE firefox and how my online life has improved significantly since installing it

- the setup process is easy, and even fun! if you’re using tumblr rn, you can handle it, and if you’re the kind of tumblr user who likes customizing your blog or tinkering with xkit, you can have a lot of fun personalizing really granular settings and picking themes and extensions and everything, it’s very customizable and i happily spent like 2 hours getting everything perfect.

- you can use a command line entry tool to change specific settings right from the search bar! i did this to make firefox stop auto filling my email information since i use a different password locker (which you should too! try bitwarden!), and it was easier than digging through a bunch of submenus for a setting i wasn’t sure existed. you can just turn shit off!

- there’s a preset theme called aurora that’s purple and VERY pretty

- once you get ublock origin and as many other blockers as you’d like set up, no ads, anywhere, ever! streaming sites, youtube, all the basics, totally no stress and no compatibility issues for me

- in browser screenshot and picture in picture functions!! holy shit i use these every day, the PiP is especially helpful, it replaced an extension i used to use on chrome and it’s leagues better and works on all video content pretty much

- overall better downloads management imo, it’s a lot easier to get to your downloads and find them later

- better bookmark system, with the ability to organize your bookmarks with searchable tags and assign them a shortcut you can type into the search bar to go to

- containers! you can have two accounts to the same website open in two different tabs and switch between them without having to switch accounts. also gives firefox the ability to contain facebook and their trackers, so you can click that party invite link without feeling like you just let mark zuckerberg into your house

these were just off the top of my head, i love firefox a lot and actively enjoy using it, which i never felt with chrome! please download firefox!! you will not regret it!!! where’s your fucking rage!!!!!! go!!!!!!!!!

#buck speaks #firefox #i’m also going to make an extensions starter pack post because with like #10 extensions firefox becomes the best browser ever #i constantly just forget that ads exist #and get confused and annoyed when i have to look at them on other peoples computers #HALF OF YOUTUBES HOMEPAGE IS ADS?#crazy #anyway i’d get the firefox logo tatted i love her sm

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the960writers · 1 month

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Alternatives to google docs

For various reasons, this is now a hot topic. I'm putting my favorites here, please add more in your reblogs. I'm not pointing to Microsoft Word because I hate it.

Local on your computer:

LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/), Win, Linux, Mac.

Looks like early 2000 Word, works great, imports all formats. Saves in OpenDocumentFormat. Combine with something like Dropbox for Cloud Backup.

FocusWriter (https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/) Win, Linux.

Super customizable to make it look pretty, all toolbars hide to be as non-distracting as possible. Can make typewriter sounds as you type, and you can set daily wordcount goals. Saves in OpenDocumentFormat. Combine with something like Dropbox for Cloud Backup.

Scrivener (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview) Win, Mac, iOS

The lovechild of so many writers. Too many things to fiddle with for me, but I'm sure someone else can sing its praises. You can put the database folder into a Dropbox folder for cloud saving (but make sure to always close the program before shutting down).

Web-based:

Reedsy bookeditor (https://reedsy.com/write-a-book) Browser based, works on Firefox on Android. Be aware that they also have a TOS that forbids pornography on publicly shared documents.

My current writing program. Just enough features to be helpful, not so many that I start fiddling. Writing is chapter based, exports to docx, epub, pdf. You can share chapters (for beta reading) with other people registered at Reedsy.

Novelpad (https://novelpad.co/) Browser based.

Looks very promising, there's a youtuber with really informative videos about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHN8TnwjG1g). I wanted to love it, but the editor didn't work on Firefox on my phone. It might now, but I'm reluctant to switch again.

------

So, this is my list. Please add more suggestions in reblogs.

#writing software #writing tools #gdocs #gdocs alternatives #google docs #libreoffice #focuswriter #scrivener #reedsy editor #novelpad

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wip · 7 months

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Hello! Would you ever consider bringing back different post types, especially audio? I appreciate that audio posts now display the artist, song title, and album name, but unfortunately newer audio posts don’t play in Tumblr-based music players like egoisticalgoat.de or robinpx.github.io/boombox because they’re read as text posts. Thank you for reading!

Answer: Hey there, @stepintomusic!

Sadly, the answer here is no. We’ve been moving away from legacy post types and towards the Neue Post Format—a format that allows multiple types of media in the same post—for many years. The new features available in NPF basically guarantee that we won’t ever switch back to the legacy format.

(If you’re interested in peeking behind the scenes here, there are a few posts about NPF over at @engineering.)

Now, to get into the meat of the issue. While it would be amazing if we could support every third-party tool forever, the reality is that we can’t. We’re a surprisingly small team to begin with, and even if we weren’t, that support would come at a cost.

To start, there’s the development tax. Now, would it have been cool to ensure all third-party tools (and all custom themes) worked 100% perfectly with posts stored as NPF before releasing NPF to the public? Yeah, it would have been… for third-party tools and custom themes. For us, it would have meant delaying NPF (and all the features it brings with it) for months, possibly years. Imagine a 2023 where Tumblr still doesn’t have polls: that’s the alternate future we’re talking about here.

And then, there’s our maintenance tax. The engine that powers Tumblr themes is already incredibly complicated—complicated to the point that we’re already finding it difficult to maintain and add things like, as you mentioned, NPF audio metadata. If, every time we found some third-party tool that doesn’t play nice with the latest changes, we tried to make an affordance for it… the engine would just become even more complex. And it would do so quickly, and complex to the point of being impossible to keep up with as a maintainer.

There’s a great article here by a former Mozilla developer about the pitfalls of prioritizing a third-party ecosystem over your own software. Did you know that Firefox was essentially a single-threaded application until 2018? This meant it would still visually lock up when saving files to disk, or collecting crash data. Chrome launched in 2008 and was multiprocess from the start. But it took Firefox ten years to catch up because supporting all existing third-party add-ons was seen as necessary. (Spoiler alert: in the end, they had to drop support for those add-ons anyway.)

My own recommendation around third-party software like this is: get in contact with its developer! If something in their software isn’t working, there’s nobody more qualified to update it. (Or, if they’ve abandoned the project but had made it open-source, maybe someone else could step up to maintain it. Maybe you! You never know until you try.)

I talked about the maintenance tax from the first-party side, but let’s talk about it from the third-party side, too. As a theme author and add-on developer myself, I have long accepted that the cost of maintaining these things can never be zero. When your software interacts with an online service, and that online service is being actively maintained, your software also needs to be maintained.

I hope all this has been enlightening! Thanks for your question, and please, have a great day.

—April

#feature #posting #audio #backend #your suggestions

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inficetegodwottery · 6 months

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A call for aid from Firefox Users

I have absolutely no fucking idea how to solve these problems, and there are asks with no answers all over the internet elsewhere that are years old.

There is a weirdly hostile atmosphere on Reddit's Firefox boards to asking questions about features Firefox doesn't seem to have. And obviously, official support forums are about as helpful as they ever are. Given that I've seen and reblogged countless extremely informative posts about Firefox stuff on Tumblr, I just have to hope one of you guys knows answers to some of these issues.

Because I want to move away from Chrome. I really, really do. It is a constant source of stress and fear at this point. Google is an insanely evil fucking company and I despise them, and admire Firefox's stances on privacy and commitment to user security. But I cannot use a browser that lacks so many of the organizational elements I'm used to using in order to deal with my extreme neurodivergence and inability to process information all at once combined with my tendency towards flitting from one train of thought to another constantly.

Using Firefox (I've tried to switch five times over six or seven years) in the past has been overwhelming and stressful and completely devoid of certain features I could use to control those feelings on browsers like Chrome, Opera, and even Safari.

So if anyone has any solutions or suggestions for the specific issues I describe below, it would be an enormous weight off my shoulders, and help me feel a lot safer than I do now.

I'll admit that my tab fever is insane, and I've regularly racked up 2000+ tabs on Chrome. But I can sleep/unload just about all of those tabs constantly, making it so I can keep my trains of thought completely paused without the slightest impact on my computer's performance while I work on something else, and come right back to them without having to dig through the Bookmark system. And the way I generally keep that insane number of bookmarks organized is with separate windows and TAB GROUPING. Bless tab grouping, the saviour of my sanity. With that feature, I can have a completely organized tab tree with color coding, searchable groups, easily group and ungroup tabs or move them to different windows, and I can manage all of them from the same UI I'm managing ungrouped tabs from.

This is a feature which Firefox appears to fundamentally lack, despite apparently having had it implemented fully at some point.

I will say that I tried several addons before making this post, specifically Simple Tab Groups, which was atrocious, and Panorama View actually looks fantastic, but also.... Firefox has placed a security warning on that one. Great.

So if anyone knows of a hidden browser settings option, an overlooked tab grouping addon, or some other way to implement that feature on Firefox, I would be eternally in your debt. I just do not have the ability to process or work on a browser that I can only have like forty tabs open without losing track of everything I'm doing because they're all on a single ribbon. Or completely overloading my RAM.

On that note, is there any setting to make the browser use less memory? I've had the core process run up to almost a dozen gigs of RAM with only twenty tabs open, and there's absolutely no way it needed all that processing power for four YouTube tabs and a bunch of settings pages.

Lastly, there are a number of times while I was using Firefox that I lost power or the program crashed (and it crashed a LOT) and I lost everything. Every tab, every bit of work I was doing at the time, with no way to recover them. I've had that happen with Chrome too, but WAY less often, and when it recovers all my tabs it does so while PRESERVING MY TAB GROUPS, and it also doesn't load every tab in until I actually move to that tab. Firefox loads every tab it's recovering all at once, which usually completely locks up my computer.

At this point I'm pretty much only using Firefox to watch YouTube videos past the adblock, despite desperately wanting to transfer literally everything over to a browser that I KNOW is the safer and better option. But every time I've tried, the total inability to organize like I used to, losing all my progress and being unable to regain it whatsoever, or just using up four times the amount of resources that my browsing would on another platform has drive me away. I don't want to be driven away. I want to solve this, but I've had to accept that I can't do that alone.

I greatly appreciate any help or advice anyone can give. Even if just only one of these questions gets answered or only one of these problems gets solved, that's a win in my books. And thank you for reading, even if you don't have any of the answers I'm looking for.

#firefox #mozilla firefox #mozilla #browser wars #chrome #browsers #accessibility #browser accessibility

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joyflameball · 8 months

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Making my own post abt this actually, since there is a more popular version running around that has shitty advice and I sure as hell ain't gonna manage to hijack that

Switching to Firefox: What do?

Now a lot of us are neurodivergent and have FAR too many tabs for our own good, and I can understand if you're nervous about switching because of that, since that's a LOT of tabs and you don't wanna lose them. Trust me, I relate to that immensely. I have FAR too many tabs open for my own good.

So what you should do in that case is save your tabs. I personally saved my tabs in a private Discord server, since that let me open the tabs again easily, and make categories for each type of tab, but you can use something like Notepad to save them as well. So, you copy-paste all your tabs over to wherever you're saving them (and additionally, copy-pasting all of them will allow you to see tabs you don't need and delete them, since they're no longer buried).

Once you're into Firefox and signed in, head to Settings. You should see in the general tab the button that says "Import Browser Data." You'll see a dropdown arrow that will let you pick whatever browser you wanna import your data from.

That easy! From there, pull up ALL your tabs and you're good to go!

Simplified explanation:

Save all your previous tabs, maybe in Notepad (I personally used a private Discord server, for the reasons I explained).

Once in Firefox, head to Settings and import your Chrome data.

Pull up your tabs that you saved, and you're in!

Settings

So, you're in the general tab with your data from Chrome imported. Now, keep going through the Settings, because there's a LOT more you can do, and Firefox's settings are fairly simple to navigate. I can't give you any advice for the general tab, that's all for you to handle.

Head to Home, and this is where you'll need to start changing some stuff. I recommend disabling "Recommended By Pocket" for the safest experience, not just because it's better for privacy, but also because the Pocket stuff is annoying. Also disable "Snippets" at the bottom.

Head to Search. From here, you'll be able to disable Google as the default browser, which is good for everyone. You CAN use DuckDuckGo, which allegedly is safest, but I'm personally suspicious of that (look up "duckduckgo safety issues"). However, it is 100% safer than Google, so if you just wanna use that, go ahead.

If you wanna use a different search engine from what is shown, it's gonna be a bit more complicated to set up. In the Search tab of settings, set it so there's a search bar in the toolbar.

Go to the address of whatever new search engine you wanna use (I'm personally using ecosia.org, as it helps w the environment by planting trees, AND it's got a really good privacy policy). Let's use as example: youtube.com .

You'll see a magnifying glass with a plus sign in the smaller search bar. When you click it, you'll be shown a dropdown that says "This time, search with: [all the search engines]." Click the YouTube icon that has a plus sign next to it (again, YouTube as example).

I'm explaining this somewhat confusingly- Mozilla's website has a much better explanation.

Head back to the Firefox settings, and set your default search engine to the new site. Bam.

(Additionally: to disable ever searching with Google, scroll down to Search Shortcuts, and remove the check mark next to Google.)

Simplified explanation:

Set it so there's two search bars.

Go to the address of whatever search engine you wanna use.

Click the magnifying glass, then the icon of the new search engine.

Head back to the Search settings, and switch to the new engine.

Privacy and Security

THIS is what you're here for. Firefox has LOADS of settings to make you more secure. My personal recommendations are:

Set enhanced tracking protections to Strict, or if you wanna customize it yourself, Custom. This will allow you to block cryptominers, trackers, cookies, and fingerprinters.

Set it to clear history when Firefox is closed.

Set it so that the search bar will not show you suggestions from sponsors, and don't allow Mozilla to process your search queries.

Under Permissions > Location, set it to block all requests to access your location. You can do the same for whatever other permissions you'd like, but especially block Location.

Block Firefox from making personalized extension recommendations, at the very least. If you don't want Firefox to use telemetry data, set it so Firefox won't send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.

Block dangerous downloads, obviously, and set it to HTTPS-Only Mode on all windows.

Enable secure DNS stuff using Max Protection. I'm personally using NextDNS (recommended by r/piracy).

Again, I'm not the arbiter of information here. You do whatever you want with your privacy and security settings. These are just my personal recommendations.

Extensions

A point of contention in the original post was how many fucking addons the OP had that essentially did the same thing, like several different adblockers when just one is enough. This is risky not just because it'll slow your browser down to hell and back, but also because it'll make you MORE traceable.

However, this doesn't mean you should go around with zero extensions. Especially since In Today's Day And Age, you WILL get ambushed with ads wherever you go. So at the very least you'll need an adblocker. However, there are extra extensions you can use to help clean up, for example, YouTube Search.

Here's my personal list of extensions, with ones that I feel you will DEFINITELY need marked in pink. I made sure these aren't redundant, or don't cover settings that Firefox already has.

I could be wrong in places, so if anyone wants to push back on this, I encourage it.

Ublock Origin: GET THIS ONE. Everyone and their mother loves this bad boy. Great adblocker that works REALLY well to clean up the web and make things less... awful. It lets you block specific website elements (so if Tumblr's pulling shit you can block it), and in settings it has a WHOLE lot of privacy/safety settings you can turn on which I won't go over, since this is a post about Firefox. The point is: GET UBLOCK. Everyone loves it, it's great, it's reliable, 10/10.

SponsorBlock: This is a GREAT addon that completely skips sponsored sections in YouTube videos. It feels kinda seamless sometimes. It also lets you skip a lot of extra unnecessary stuff as well.

Youtube Search Fixer: Unclogs YouTube's search so you won't get playlists, shorts, unrelated search results, all that fun stuff, so you can just find what you're looking for.

Youtube Shorts Block: Automatically turns YouTube Shorts into standard YouTube videos so you can get away from the fucking TikTokkification of the Internet.

Return Youtube Dislike: Remember how YouTube inexplicably removed the ability to see dislikes? This addon reverts that. You can see dislikes again.

Shinigami Eyes: Marks anti-trans sites with red, and trans-friendly sites with green (with the ability to change those colors, in case of colorblindness). It works with Tumblr blogs, Youtube, Twitter, a fuck load of sites. Great for knowing FOR SURE if a post is an anti-trans dogwhistle, and for going through gender critical blogs and blocking them on masse. It's INCREDIBLY reliable at catching transphobic sites, and finding trans-friendly ones.

Auto Tab Discard: We're all neurodivergent here and have way too many tabs, and that slows down our fucking computers. Auto Tab Discard basically puts those tabs into sleep mode- not deleting them, but making them go offline for a bit so they aren't taking up as much running time. It also lets you mark specific sites to NOT get put into sleep mode, if you need them up for whatever reason.

XKit Rewritten: Look. We're on Tumblr. We know this site's bullshit and how it's impossible to use. XKit helps fix a LOT of the bullshit on this site and adds on helpful stuff. Seriously, get XKit, they're the ones carrying this whole fucking site.

Again- I could be wrong. And I think the only one you 100% DEFINITELY NEED is uBlock. The others are just for convenience, or in the case of Shinigami Eyes, safety. You don't need to install any of these extensions except uBlock. It's just my personal recommendations.

TLDR

Get Firefox. Save all your tabs from Chrome, sync your data, do all that jazz.

Set your default search engine to anything but Google. You can do DuckDuckGo, or if you're suspicious of DDG like I am, use something like Ecosia (and you can add that as a default browser with the instructions I laid out).

USE FIREFOX'S GREAT SECURITY SETTINGS. You don't need a million extensions to do stuff Firefox already CAN do.

The only extension you 100% need is uBlock Origin, but here's my list of ones I personally recommend to help clean up the web and have a better experience.

Get off of Chrome. Google is currently on trial, brought there by the fucking DOJ, for being an illegal monopoly. The trial started about a week ago, and will last for about three months. Depending on how this goes, this could shake up Google's whole monopoly, and change the future of the entire internet.

Firefox is better in every way than Chrome. Firefox will actually try to protect you and lets you opt out of unnecessary data collection. Firefox is not based on Chromium. Firefox is open source, and its code has been scrutinized and deemed as safe. It's not perfect, no corporation is- and Mozilla is ultimately that, a corporation. But god, it's leaps and bounds ahead of Chrome. Switch to Firefox.

#cassie rambles #switch to firefox #firefox #google #google chrome #mozilla firefox #web browsers #browsers #chrome #browser #fuck google #internet privacy #internet safety #digital privacy #internet security

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autolenaphilia · 11 months

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It's remarkable how easy Linux Mint is to use, compared to Linux's general forbidding reputation. It was really easy to set up for me who has no coding knowledge. I had to fiddle with the boot order in my BIOS a bit but no biggie. Follow the installation guide on the website, and you will be fine. You can boot from an USB too, and test out the OS before installing it and wiping your drive. Transfer data to an external drive before you do.

And you probably won't have much trouble once it is installed either. The default settings are reasonable, and can be changed. It's a very easy to use OS. I have had no problems doing most of the ordinary things I use an OS for. My most used programs on Windows was already things like Firefox, VLC media player and Libreoffice on windows, and they function just as fine on Linux Mint (and are indeed installed by default).

Gaming has given me some trouble, but honestly Lutris has solved most of them. Granted I run mostly so old games on this laptop that Scummvm and dosbox is a solution for many of them. And installing 32 bit libraries has solved others (running the command in this link in the terminal solved so many issues alone). I play very old games, if you can't tell.

Sure, part of how Mint is so user-friendly is that it imitates Windows graphical user interface. But to be honest, it does mean users coming from Windows are already used to the interface. And Mint imitates only the parts of it that work, like the taskbar. And Microsoft has had a bad habit of making the gui look like a phone or a tablet for years now, so Mint does a Windows-like gui better than Windows at this point.

Mint is better than Windows in being a user-friendly operating system in general. Windows being spyware and full of bloatware is well-known and LInux gets away from that bullshit. And just how polite MInt is about updates is a massive improvement. No forced reboots here while an update takes ages to install.

Mint is a long-term support distro, which means it focuses on stability over the latest updates to packages and programs, introducing updates not when they are first released, but after a while when any bugs have been ironed out. And that improves the OS's stability a lot, which I value over getting bleeding edge updates. If you want updates as soon as they happen, and are willing to tinker a bit to fix things, there are other distros which use a rolling-release model.

It is less demanding on the hardware without compromising functionality. Like the majority of Linux distros takes up way less space on the drive and less memory compared to Windows, you can get more life out of an old computer this way.

There are so many older computers that still function fine hardware-wise, but since the specs on that hardware are too weak to switch to a newer more-resource hungry version of Windows, the machines are abandoned because the OS ends up unsupported and unsafe to use. Windows 10 support is going to end in 2025, it might be extended, but the end of w10 support is going to be a blood bath for this very reason. So many computers can't meet the specs for Windows 11 that the switch will be painful. And I would urge you if you are affected by this to upgrade to a LInux distro instead of getting a new computer just for windows 11.

#my writings #more like my ramblings #linux #linux mint #computers

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gallifreyriver · 1 year

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New game: Drop Google Chrome's market share 2023.

Why? Monopolies are bad and that's what's gonna happen if things don't even out a bit.

Why is it bad if Google has a monopoly? Because google already tracks the shit out of you, that's why. They collect and market your data. Yes, even in incognito mode. Just because your search history isn't being saved, doesn't mean google hasn't logged away where you've been or what you've searched for their own purposes. Imagine what more they'll do if the competition snuffs out?

"But I'll use an ad-blocker. I'm good." Not on Chrome you won't, because they're killing off ad-blockers in 2023, literally as soon as January- that's less than two months away. Gee... I wonder why they'd be doing that...

I recommend Firefox.

I switched a couple months ago and it's seriously so good.

It takes literal minutes to switch, you can import your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, and even your open tabs from chrome to firefox.

Oh- and they don't collect and market your data.

And the extensions are amazing:

uBlock Origin blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, etc. Hate those annoying ads before YouTube videos? I haven't had one since installing- and it literally never occurred to me for some reason that ad blockers would work on YouTube too. (It also got rid of the ads on tumblr, which I also didn't expect to happen)

There's Auto Tab Discard for people like me who always have a ton of tabs open. It puts your inactive tabs to sleep (but doesn't close them! important!) to help save memory and battery

Facebook Container keeps Facebook from tracking you around the web. (Includes Insta and Facebook messenger)

There's Image Search Options, for when you want to properly credit an artist, or need to find the source of an image. You just right-click on the image and it gives you a list of 10+ top reverse image search engines to click on, and when you click one it automatically plugs the image into the search!

Youtube Audio saves you bandwidth and battery when you just want audio from YouTube (aka: to use Youtube as a music streaming service or listening to narration videos/podcasts)

Then of course there's XKit Rewritten, which I'm sure you'll already recognize as the thing that enhances the tumblr experience.

And there's so many others!

And I get it if you don't like change, and don't wanna deal if the browser appearance is either different than you're used to, or worse- ugly. I get it, I do. But the good news is if the only thing holding you back is that you've gotten used to how Chrome looks, Firefox Dark theme is literally so similar I didn't even notice the difference when I switched. (And I imagine the same is true of the light theme) There's also literally a whole library of themes if you want a more customized look!

And some of you might be thinking "But I have a google account! GMail, Drive- Everything! Won't I have to stop using all that if I switch?" NOPE. Being logged into Google isn't the same as being logged into Chrome. You can log right into Google on Firefox same as you would on any other browser and your experience with your mail, drive, etc. will be just the same as if you were in Chrome, just without the collecting and marketing of your data. (That reminds me, There's also extensions to prevent google from tracking you as well, like "Don't track me Google" and "Google Container")

But seriously, Firefox is so great. Not only does it not track you and market your data, it's genuinely just a better experience than Chrome.

If you've been putting off switching, consider this your sign to do it.

#firefox #chrome #google chrome #mozilla firefox #browsers #adblock #internet safety #internet #internet privacy #switch to firefox

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theimaginatrix27 · 1 year

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Calling all AO3 users who are visually impaired or blind and have experimented with site skins! And who use Firefox!

This morning, I tried something I had never tried before. I changed the site skin for AO3.

It was something I had been reluctant to do, as I didn't know the effect it would have, but I thought it wouldn't be that big a deal, I could just change it back if I didn't like it, right?

I switched to the Low Vision Default. I didn't like it—I was trying this to see if my screen-reader would detect bold with a non-default skin. In the Low Vision Default, italics disappeared too. So did most of my menu options unless I clicked on "Hi, TheImaginatrix!", at which point they'd open up again, but looked different.

I tried the other two public skins, with no discernible change.

Then I tried switching back to Default.

It didn't work.

I started to freak out, just a little.

I tried refreshing the page. No dice. I tried restarting the browser. Still the same. I logged out (when I had first changed skin, it said it would only apply for that session), but even logged out, I couldn't see italics with my screen-reader!

Now freaking out more than a little, I restarted the computer, then found the AO3 cookies and deleted them. Even with no cookies in my browser, the AO3 pages still looked the same as when I had first switched to the Low Vision Default skin.

I had already sent a frantic feedback/technical issue report to the AO3 team, but I sent an email to the BlindTech list I'm on, and asked for help on a couple Discord servers. By then, though, I'd tried all the advice they had except clearing all my cookies, and I'm not doing that yet because it makes no sense that cookies from another site would be impacting AO3 and AO3 alone. Also, the last time I cleared all my cookies in a moment of desperation, the problem I was trying to solve had nothing to do with me and I had to run around logging back into things, and occasionally having to wait for a verification code to come through so Google or Amazon Prime would let me back in. In short, I was freaking out enough as it was without having to go through all that again with the very real chance I would be disappointed.

So I kept trying things. I noticed the Reader View in the address bar for the first time, and tried it, thinking for a wild fifteen minutes that I'd hit on the solution, because the Low Vision Default skin could have activated a hidden accessibility setting to allow you to listen to a fic being read to you via TTS. Also, when viewed in this mode, the work text had all it's formatting, including bold, visible to NVDA! But alas, this is a default Firefox feature and perfectly normal and has always been there since it was added, whenever that was. I've literally never used it before today.

The most recent thing I tried was going to the Page Styles option in the View submenu in the Menu bar, and switch from "Basic Page Style" to "No Style". This reverted the AO3 page I was on to something resembling Pre-tampering AO3 (all my user options were back, the italics was back, it looked normal again). The problem being, that setting doesn't save across restarts, and in any case, it's set to "basic style" across the board, so that's not necessarily the problem. I can see italics, and bold, on most other sites (the NaNoWriMo site doesn't show them to my screen-reader either, but that's been the case since the 2019 site makeover).

So my current conclusion is, something's gone sideways with AO3's page style specifically, and I'm 85% sure it's on my end, because if it wasn't, it wouldn't happen when I was logged out, and clearing my cookies would have fixed it.

Unless there's a weird glitch going on with AO3 and even without my cookies it recognises my browser, but with the knowledge I currently have, I'm almost sure there's some option in Firefox I have to find and change.

If anyone else has had a similar experience while messing around with site skins using a screen-reader and/or Firefox, please please please help me I don't know what else to try.

#AO3 #AO3 Site Skins #AO3 Skins #Technical Difficulties #Accessibility #Please help me!#I'm at my wit's end!

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warningsine · 4 months

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All right, since I bombarded a poor mutual yesterday...

Privacy is not security and security is not privacy. These terms are not interchangeable, but they are intrinsically linked.

While we're at this, anonymity =/= security either. For example, Tor provides the former, but not necessarily the latter, hence using Https is always essential.

It is impossible to have privacy without security, but you can have security without privacy.

A case in point is administrators being able to view any data they want due to their full-access rights to a system. That being said, there are ethics and policies that usually prevent such behavior.

Some general tips:

Operating System: Switch to Linux. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are widely used for a reason. Fedora too. And don't worry! You can keep your current operating system, apps and data. If you're on a Mac computer, you can easily partition your hard drive or SSD by using Disk Utility. If you're on Windows, you can follow this guide.

You want to go a step further? Go with Whonix or Tails. They're Linux distributions as well, but they're both aiming for security, not beauty so the interface might not be ideal for everyone. Many political activists and journalists use them.

You want anonymity? Then you need to familiarize yourself with Tor. Also, Tor and HTTPS and Tor’s weaknesses. When you're using it, don't log in to sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. and make sure to stay away from Java and Javascript, because those things make you traceable.

Alternatives for dealing with censorship? i2p and Freenet.

Is ^ too much? Welp. All right. Let's see. The first step is to degoogle.

Switch to a user-friendly browser like Firefox (or better yet LibreWolf), Brave or Vivaldi. There are plenty of hardened browsers, but they can be overwhelming for a beginner.

Get an ad blocker like Ublock Origin.

Search Engine? StartPage or Duckduckgo. SearXNG too. Like I said degoogle.

Get a PGP encrypted e-mail. Check Protonmail out.

There's also Tutamail that doesn't cover PGP, but uses hybrid encryption that avoids some of the cons of PGP.

Skiff mail is also a decent option.

Use an e-mail aliasing service such as SimpleLogin or AnonAddy.

Check OpenPGP out. Claws Mail is a good e-mail client for Windows and Linux, Thunderbird for Mac OS.

Gpg4win is free and easy to use for anyone that wants to encrypt/decrypt e-mails.

Instead of Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Telegram etc. use Signal for your encrypted insant messaging, voice and video calls.

Get a metadata cleaner.

Get a firewall like Opensnitch, Portmaster or Netguard which can block Internet for trackers.

Alternatively, go with a private DNS that blocks these trackers. NextDNS is a good paid service. Rethink a good free option.

Replace as many of your applications as you can with FOSS (free and open source) ones. Alternativeto can help you.

Always have automatic updates on. They are annoying af, I know, but they are necessary.

Keep your distance from outdated software.

Always have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled.

Do not use your administrator account for casual stuff. If you're on Linux, you probably know you can be sudo, but not root.

On Linux distributions use AppArmor, but stay away from random antivirus scanners. Other distributions default to SELinux, which is less suited to a beginner.

Never repeat your passwords. If you can't remember them all, use a password manager like KeePass.

Encrypt your drive.

Honestly, VPNs have their uses and ProtonVPN, Mullvad and Windscribe are decent, but eh. If you don't trust your ISP, why would you trust the VPN provider that claims they don't log you when you can't verify such a thing?

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antikosm · 6 days

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Bill 702 was passed in America. Here's what it means

This is what you're gonna do:

You're gonna go to the app store and you're gonna download Cwtch. It's an end to end encryption app that was developed by Tor Browser, aka the Onion Browser

On your computer, you're gonna download Firefox and you're gonna get all the security stuff you can. I recommend Ghostery and Privacy Badger as well as Facebook Container. You're gonna get a cookie auto-deleter and you're going to go to Google Takeout, download all your data, delete ALL of your files and documents, and find somewhere else to put them. A USB drive if they're memories, LibreOffice or a platform like Reedsy if it's creative works that you are actively working on and/or will need to share.

You're going to use DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or Oceanhero. I know there are other alternatives search engines, but these three are the best I've found. Bonus that the latter two use searches to fund planting trees and cleaning the ocean respectfully(?).

You're gonna get sliding covers for your phone AND computer cameras, or at least find a way to cover them that's easily removable for video calls.

You're gonna switch from Gmail to Proton Mail, and Proton has a free VPN too. You're gonna get both of those. You're gonna get Tor Browser browser too because you can never be too careful (it has a built in VPN).

You're gonna get MP3 players and download your music from Spotify and YouTube - which also means you can technically separate art from artist because on MP3, you can listen as many times as you want without financially supporting them.

You're not gonna pay for Netflix or Hulu or Disney+ or anything like that anymore. I'm not saying you should use these but there are websites out there like SFlix that have so many movies and shows FOR FREE and you "TOTALLY SHOULDNT USE THEM WITH A VPN BECAUSE PIRACY IS WrOnG". How dare you steal from exploitative, multi million dollar businesses that don't care about their workers smh..

If you are in support of Palestine, you are going to download the app No Thanks!. It has a regularly updated list of all companies that support Israel and evidence/articles to back it up.

If you get a chance, go watch The Great Hack. It's a fantastic documentary that lets you see inside the world of psychological manipulation through the world of advertisement and influence.

Stay safe out there. Please. Every moment that you are alive and thriving is another moment they are losing.

#fuck the government #fuck america #anticapitalist #bill 702 #internet safety #privacy #government #senate #dont give up #keep fighting #we are winning

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