The past five years of Firefox have been an uninvited/unwanted fight of Mozilla verses power users. I’m done, Mozilla won: I tapped out yesterday after reading this latest feature removal. Instead of Firefox not establishing 20 TCP connections to various domains upon startup, which would save far more than 20ms, Mozilla instead choose a user hostile method of shaving those 20ms by removing functionality. “Because no one uses it”, userChrome/userContent.css will be extra user.js settings today and gone tomorrow feature. The last few months of using Firefox have destroyed every last ounce of love I once had for it. I’m done, bye FF.
I switched yesterday to the portable version of the Iridium Browser, which is a Chrome Clone. After shutting out google (see below), Iridium is dead silent with zero internet connects; unlike Mozilla’s products which are telemetry sucking / sending beast. The rest of this post is about Iridium, which I have zero connection with but came to it after spending a few hours compiling ungoogled-chromium which was not a simple task, taking 7+ hours. Note, Chrome & its clones are no where near as customizable as Firefox, but the writing is on the wall: Firefox wants to be Chrome and is no longer interested in being Firefox.
* Get Iridium here:
* For windows, you can lock google out of your Iridium business using the below Win7 firewall cmds (you can do near the same with ufw rules in ubuntu). Note, you will not be able to use gmail, youtube, google.com, et al in the iridium browser if you issue the below cmds, but that is the absolute intent of them – to keep your data private from google. The formatting might get hosed in this post due to html/web rules, so lookup how to issue WFW commands and correct all of the quoting. The below rules assume Iridium is here “C:\Program Files\Iridium\” . Delete rules precede the actual rules so you can place them in a cmd file; that way they won’t clutter your fw rules with multiple entries if clicked on more than once. Remove “,80,8080″ if you always use https and never use http.
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”Iridium”
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”GoogleBlock”
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”Iridium” dir=out action=allow program=”C:\Program Files\Iridium\iridium.exe” enable=yes protocol=tcp remoteport=443,80,8080 description=”See also GoogleBlock and IridiumBlock”
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”GoogleBlock” dir=out action=block program=”C:\Program Files\Iridium\iridium.exe” enable=yes remoteip=172.217.0.0-172.217.255.255
* Because of the above firewall rules, we won’t be able to visit google playstore (really, why would we want to). Instead, install addons the more private way from a file. For instance, do the following to install uBlock-Origin.
i. Download uBlock from the link below. Get the latest release version; careful not to choose the dev version unless that is what you want…
ii. Unzip uBlock, remember the location
iii. In Iridium, go to this “web address”
chrome://extensions/
and check the box to allow Developer mode in the top right.
iv. Click the Load unpacked extension button and select the uBlock unzipped folder from step 2 to install it.
* If you don’t want Iridium calling home with its minor telemetry, issue these 2 cmds
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”IridiumBlock”
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”IridiumBlock” dir=out action=block enable=yes remoteip=88.198.85.193
I’ve been using Iridium for the past 2 days now. It is refreshing not to fight a browser, not to have to be an expert at the innards of a browser, and not keeping track of 100s of user.js rules just to do a simple thing: browse.
archived 26 May 2019 01:03:51 UTC
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