Senior Web Engineer. Open web / music. Remote DJ. Tall Dutch guy. #3million
I've released Fresh Cookies 0.3, my browser extension for limiting the lifetime of browser cookies to a maximum of 15 days.
It is now a web extension and can be manually installed in Firefox (it also works in Chrome). I'm looking for feedback before I'm ready to submit it any extension directories.
I had the issue where it was not possible to launch Google Chrome. It would bounce in the dock forever without actually starting. Trashing the application and associated files (with Hazel) did not work.
Other people had the same problem:
The following instructions will help get Chrome back up and running.
The solution to this issue is to remove all application settings. Start a terminal:
cd "/Users/`whoami`/Library/Application Support/Google"
mv Chrome Chrome.old
mkdir Chrome
open "/Users/`whoami`/Library/Application Support/Google"
Now start Chrome. If it starts correctly, trash the Chrome.old folder.
If the fix did not work in your case, use the following commands to restore the original folder.
rm -rf Chrome
mv Chrome.old Chrome
Good luck!
If you visit this site you will know what browser cookies are and that they are used to store information about you across visits to that website. A typical website will store a few to a few hundred cookies on your computer.
Each cookie has an expiry date for when they are no longer valid and then automatically deleted by the browser. Did you know the lifetime of some of these cookies are several decades in the future and that they are routinely used by data brokers and analytics companies to gather data on you?
That's why I've recommended installing a plugin like PrivacyBadger, to prevent these tracking cookies from being passed back to websites that track you across websites.
But you can also override the maximum lifespan of these cookies. I've experimented and 10-14 days seems to be a good medium between having to login to all your websites all the time and maintaining privacy.
Update: 2019-08-29 - the following no longer works on recent Firefox releases:
On Firefox, open about:config and search for network.cookie.lifetime, you will find network.cookie.lifetime.days (set this to 14) and network.cookie.lifetimePolicy (set this to 3 to override the default behaviour or letting the website decide).
On Chrome or Vivaldi (update: and now Firefox) browsers it's possible to set these values by installing my FreshCookies addon, which does not contain any tracking itself.
I'm working on a side project where I am broadcasting an OGG Vorbis stream using Icecast. Google Chrome played the stream, and so did VLC, but WinAmp was unable to. It connected to the stream with an HTTP 200 status but could not interpret it.
As it turns out WinAmp requires the mount point to have a file extension for it to detect the stream correctly, so updating the mount point to stream.ogg instead of stream in the icecast configuration did the job.
Google Chrome is too dominating, this is not good for the web. So I'm switching back to Firefox, but it can be pretty ugly by default in places.
I like to apply the following tweaks to make it pretty again:
Edit userChrome.css to make style changes to the Firefox UI. My Profile is located at %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Gibberish>, use the previous link to find the location on your system. Inside your profile create a chrome folder and inside that create a userChrome.css. Add the following line:
#urlbar { font-size: 13px; }
The possibilities are endless but this does the trick for me. Restart Firefox after saving the file.
Right click on any of the toolbar buttons > Customize... to bring up the Customize Firefox screen. Remove unused buttons and the search box (search via the address bar instead) by dragging them to the Additional Tools and Features panel -- or the hamburger menu panel to access them with a click.
Firefox tabs have this rounded look to them, which I find displeasing: install the Squared Australis Tabs addon to add square corners instead.
Did you know you can access the menu bar by pressing the Alt key on your keyboard? The menu bar is visible by default but it is not frequently accessed, so press Alt+V or bring up the View menu bar menu and untick the Menu Bar and optionally the Bookmark Toolbar items.
You can blank out the Name of a bookmark to have it display just the icon in the toolbar, which tidies up those frequently accessed sites.
If you use both VisualSvn + Trac (or another flavour of Subversion and Trac), and tried to integrate them with Fogbugz , you will have tried the TracFogbugzPlugin.
Trying to get this to work isn’t straightforward as it’s not compatible with Trac 0.11. You will come across the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\trac\web\api.py", line 339, in
send_error
'text/html')
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\trac\web\chrome.py", line 684, in
render_template
data = self.populate_data(req, data)
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\trac\web\chrome.py", line 592, in
populate_data
d['chrome'].update(req.chrome)
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\trac\web\api.py", line 168, in
__getattr__
value = self.callbacks[name](self)
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\trac\web\chrome.py", line 460, in
prepare_request
for category, name, text in contributor.get_navigation_items(req):
File
"c:\Python25\lib\site-packages\tracfogbugzplugin-0.9u-py2.5.egg\fogbugz\fogb
ugz.py", line 22, in get_navigation_items
yield 'mainnav', 'fogbugz', Markup('<a href="%s">FogBuz</a>',
self.baseurl)
LookupError: unknown encoding: >/">https://<<myurl>>/
To fix this line 22 needs changed, to read:
yield 'mainnav', 'fogbugz', Markup('<a href="%s">FogBuz</a>'%self.baseurl)
Or download the file below and use it as part of the installation instructions (if this is your first Python Egg you want to read about installing Trac plugins. ;)
Now it is loading but the plugin doesn't seem to work, haha.
Download: Patched tracfogbugzplugin-09u-py25