Firefox TOT

In message snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com, Jonathan snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

I run FF on a W10/64 PC with a number of plugins, and FF on a W10/32 Virtual Machine with no plugins enabled. There are some sites which will not play nicely with the plugins on, but are happy with the plugin less browser. Invariably the latest version of FF in each case. My suspicion is that there is something hidden with the plugins that messes certain things up. Not sure if this helps, but it might be worth thinking about.

Adrian

Add to that list National Savings and Investments and Octopus Energy.

B Annoying.

PA

My mum uses Firefox and she has found some websites which do not allow creation of a user account - one is Ovo elec/gas meter site, another is Barclays bank and a third is John Lewis credit card. The typical symptom is that the site appears to allow an account to be created - supply your email address and chosen password - but when you try to log in it gives "bad username or password" errors.

If Google Chrome is used for the creation of the account, Firefox can then be used for logging in to the site after that.

I've not investigate thoroughly, because the object of the exercise has been to create the account, not to investigate why FF isn't allowing the account to be created. I couldn't reproduce the problem on my installation of FF - when I tried to create one of the accounts that my mother wanted, on my PC, it worked. The obvious thing to try if I had chance to "play" would be the total uninstallation of FF, deleting all the FF profile folders, and then reinstall FF and reinstate the bookmarks/favourites and the saved user logins (which auto-populate the username/password fields for commonly-used sites). But it would be a lot of work to get things back to the way they are at present.

For the time being, the workaround is to create website accounts in Chrome, then use the sites in FF.

If I could reproduce the error on *all* installations of FF, I'd contact the site's technical support and report that their site does not work with FF - which is a major compatibility issue, and the sort of thing that financial website designers test for (my wife manages a team that does this sort of compatibility testing for one of the building societies).

My problem is in the opposite direction. I use Vivaldi (based on chromium). Some sites don't work properly so I use FF on them. I've resigned myself to this.

Another Dave

Ok here on win11 and FF 102.15.1 (64-bit)

Are you sure that you haven't got a corrupted copy of the page(s) in the browser cache?

I have no problem with JL and Firefox

Some web pages that require text input misbehave if you don't first click on the accept/manage cookies link. Sometimes this is on a small bar at the top or bottom of the page and sometime not that obvious.

I always use strong passwords and include special characters, such as the dollar sign. The B and Q site used to accept anything you typed in as a password when creating an account but when trying to log in rejected the password as being incorrect. Leave out any special characters in the password and there was no problem

Is she using any form of password manager (firefox's inbuilt, or third party)? Sometimes I've known them to record the wrong field's contents.

In general I don't find the majority of sites are anti-firefox, some sites don't like *my* cookie policy though ...

If it's account creation it is failing at, it could be it is having trouble depositing a token on the browser. Maybe it even involves "cross site something-or-other", which is disallowed on some browsers for security reasons.

If you tried to create the account, in a "privacy tab", it's likely the same thing would happen.

Web sites hardly ever actually "rely" on cookies. Oh, the message on the screen may say "Your cookies are not enabled!". You check, and damn, the cookies ARE enabled. Yet, the diagnostic message is bullshit. Instead, the detailed storage could be going into DOM storage. If you use a search tool in non-regex mode and search for "+++", you will find the DOM storage which is already on the machine.

Another storage area besides "cookies.sqlite", is in the same folder and is "webappsstore.sqlite" . Once "webappsstore.sqlite" hits around 10 megabytes in size, the performance of the browser drops, scrolling is slow. And then it is time to shut down the browser and remove that file. Because normal web site visits and advertising tracking seem to pound on that file, my assumption is it's another form of storage about as pestilent as DOM storage is.

At one time, Firefox depended on the security policy settings of Internet Explorer, for its direction. There were five domains. And hundreds of registry settings. And Firefox design was supposed to behave the same way as Internet Explorer. If you accidentally set Internet Explorer to "High", Firefox would inherit this change to the settings, and you might notice that certain things no longer worked on Firefox.

Firefox could not remove that linkage, unless the prefs.js had inherited a set of entries reproducing the same security effects.

Internet Explorer (like on Win7), has been fitted up by the Microsoft Bomb Squad. If you tried to start Internet Explorer today, you'll notice it explodes and there is no operational shell of it left. Perhaps they are doing this via an ActiveX attack. I don't know but IE no longer is usable on my Win7 machine, and it has Windows Update shut off. It did not acquire this behavior, because I left the updates running. I stopped updates on W7, before the end of support, precisely to stop this sort of bullshit.

If I knew of a way to get a "precise log" out of Firefox, I'd tell ya. Software people are not interested in producing information like that, in the year 2023.

Paul

Barclays bank website is the biggest piece of s**te since....HSBCs!

Good thought. Sometimes clearing all the cache data makes things spring to life

Years ago I also had an issue which required rebooting the router.

The best one is that I created an account with a chinese company using a hyphenated name. One day it didn't work. It saad 'only alpha characters allowed'. I couldnt log in to change the account and when I took the hyphen out to create a new account it said 'name already in use'

I haven't bought anything there since.

Yes, NS&I and several others. My Firefox is loaded down with NoScript, Ghostery etc. and quite a few sites are just quite dead. My preferred alternative is Brave. Chrome with less tracking. Pain in the backside.

But with added adverts?

I have:

Edge Chrome Firefox

all three are loaded with:

DuckDuckGo privacy essentials EFF Privacy Badger Ghostery Ublock Origin Disconnect.

I top of all that I also run my own DNS and the upstream DNS is CLoudflare and I use DoH and DNSSEC.

Mt DNS drops over 50% of all DNS requests which are for adverts and trackers and 3rd party sites like awin, taboola, googleads etc.

Its not often I have to change a setting when a website breaks.

S.

Raise it on bgzilla. As far as I can tell the latest Firefox works everywhere. If a given site won't work on a mainstream browser, boycott them. I have to say that I have an old copy of Edge and Waterfox and Firefox to choose from. This banning of browsers is probably inept coding on the web site. The fact is though that the code in web sites is often so complex, some of them won't let you in if your browser has an add blocker or tracking stopper built in. We are the data they need to make money and anything that stops that happening usually gets prohibited from the site. Brian

Yes they try to stop trackers and adverts. Brian

It is mad to eliminate Javascript if you want to use the modern web.

I use Ublock Origin which simply blocks adware sites. The only time I block javascript is to read the Daily Telegraph as its paywall is a javascript overlay.

This also means I can read comments there, but heck, the DT comments are just a troll farm of lefty refugees from the Guardian.

I dont use any other browser at all than firefox. It is the default Linux Mint offering, and it works OK for me.

Even on Barclays website these days where for years I used a VMed win XP to access it.

Seems overly complex.

Linux Mint by default runs its own DNS 'server' so manipulation by upstream ISPs doesn't screw you.

I only run Ublock origin these days as that seems to handle all the adverts.

Sure I get a ton of spam all the time, but my email address has been out there since the dawn of the UK internet.