Firefox 57
Fri Nov 17 02:49:47 EST 2017
anniemal let Ubuntu install updates tonight. They've just gone to Firefox Version 57.0. It's supposed to be much faster and cleaner, but:Firefox now exclusively supports extensions built using the WebExtension API, and unsupported legacy extensions will no longer work. Learn more about our efforts to improve the performance and security of extensions.
Some extensions (add-ons) have been re-written to work with version 57, but many have not. In particular, Tab Mix Plus has not:It is currently unclear when Tab Mix Plus as a WebExtension will be ready, it will not be ready before Firefox 57 official release.
Annie is bereft of her setup pages and tabs, and feels blindsided by the change.
She said if she'd known this was going to happen she would have made a list of all her tabs. I'm not sure that's really possible, especially if you're going to note all the URLs, which is really what you need. I had mentioned weeks ago that there would be a Firefox update coming which would break all the extensions. She has little idea what functionality is part of Firefox itself, and what comes from extensions.
I may be able to extract a list of her tabs' URLs out of some file in the $HOME/.mozilla cache. I think I did that for myself years ago after some TabMixPlus catastrophe. I'm up much later than I expected to be, after poking around on her machine. (Actually, the kinds of things I want to poke at to find her tabs I should be able to do remotely in ssh windows.) She said this might be a good time to switch to her new laptop (which I still haven't installed Linux on yet), since she's lost everything. Note that this implies that she hasn't saved anything in files on the computer - which isn't the case; there are files that have been copied from computer to computer back to her DOS days. (But I guess she wouldn't miss them now.)
Sun Nov 19 23:26:10 EST 2017
I installed (Ubuntu) Linux on Annie's new laptop this afternoon. (Friday night, all day Saturday, and much of Sunday were taken up by work.) I bought 2 laptops in July, and in one replaced the 500GB disk with 2TB and installed Ubuntu and copied my files over before Pennsic, but I didn't get around to the 2nd computer - long work weekends, exhausted weekends, out-of-town weekends, and often just being pissed-off at anniemal because she's annoying (or worse) when she's drinking.
I've been copying files from her present laptop for hours, and I just popped over to see how it's doing and I see that it's copying openSUSE-13.1-DVD-x86_64.iso - a DVD image. I don' know why she would have an OS DVD image on her computer, and I particularly don't know why it would be a SUSE Linux image when we've been using Ubuntu. (I did use SUSE when I was installing Linux on a dual-boot iBook - back when iBooks were rounded, made in bright colors, and had 6GB disks. Yes, that was a long time ago. Before MacOS was Unix.) The timestamp on her file is Jan 2016, but the Release Notes say Jan 2014. The file is 4.5GB - a significant amount of space, a lot of time in this copy-over, and a lot of space and time on every backup of her laptop (infrequent though they are).
The 16.04 install has put Firefox 47 on the laptop - which means all the extensions that no longer work with FF 57 will work again, and she'll have her reloadable tabs back. Yesterday I also worked out the commands for getting the URLs (and page titles) out of the session.rdf file created by tabmixplus (or does Firefox itself create it?). Unfortunately, it's not just the tabs currently open; it's a history on each tab, so there's a lot of older URLs that she probably won't want. (Or may find interesting. I'm finding some of mine interesting.) But it looks like we'll have to take those lists and pop them all into FF57 one by one to get our saved windows back. Maybe I can find a new extension that makes lists of tabs for a window; those extensions can usually work the other way, and take a list pasted into the clipboard and open a set of URLs.
16.04 is Ubuntu's most recent long=term-support release. That's a yy.mm version number, so there are 19 months worth of updates to apply. (Wow, her present laptop says 14.04.5 LTS. She's going to have some user-interface changes to get used to.)
Tuesday 00:30
I'm still copying anniemal's home directory from her current laptop to the new laptop.
Tuesday 13:12
anniemal's file copy finished overnight.
Firefox has its own restore-previous-session functionality, but we've been using TabMixPlus's instead. I suspect that if she runs the older FF on her new computer, changes the preference setting to use FF's session saver, exits, and lets the upgrades run to install the new FF57, she should have the new FF with her old session preserved. I may try that myself first, since I still need to let FF upgrade on my laptop too.
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/936693.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
anniemal let Ubuntu install updates tonight. They've just gone to Firefox Version 57.0. It's supposed to be much faster and cleaner, but:Firefox now exclusively supports extensions built using the WebExtension API, and unsupported legacy extensions will no longer work. Learn more about our efforts to improve the performance and security of extensions.
Some extensions (add-ons) have been re-written to work with version 57, but many have not. In particular, Tab Mix Plus has not:It is currently unclear when Tab Mix Plus as a WebExtension will be ready, it will not be ready before Firefox 57 official release.
Annie is bereft of her setup pages and tabs, and feels blindsided by the change.
She said if she'd known this was going to happen she would have made a list of all her tabs. I'm not sure that's really possible, especially if you're going to note all the URLs, which is really what you need. I had mentioned weeks ago that there would be a Firefox update coming which would break all the extensions. She has little idea what functionality is part of Firefox itself, and what comes from extensions.
I may be able to extract a list of her tabs' URLs out of some file in the $HOME/.mozilla cache. I think I did that for myself years ago after some TabMixPlus catastrophe. I'm up much later than I expected to be, after poking around on her machine. (Actually, the kinds of things I want to poke at to find her tabs I should be able to do remotely in ssh windows.) She said this might be a good time to switch to her new laptop (which I still haven't installed Linux on yet), since she's lost everything. Note that this implies that she hasn't saved anything in files on the computer - which isn't the case; there are files that have been copied from computer to computer back to her DOS days. (But I guess she wouldn't miss them now.)
Sun Nov 19 23:26:10 EST 2017
I installed (Ubuntu) Linux on Annie's new laptop this afternoon. (Friday night, all day Saturday, and much of Sunday were taken up by work.) I bought 2 laptops in July, and in one replaced the 500GB disk with 2TB and installed Ubuntu and copied my files over before Pennsic, but I didn't get around to the 2nd computer - long work weekends, exhausted weekends, out-of-town weekends, and often just being pissed-off at anniemal because she's annoying (or worse) when she's drinking.
I've been copying files from her present laptop for hours, and I just popped over to see how it's doing and I see that it's copying openSUSE-13.1-DVD-x86_64.iso - a DVD image. I don' know why she would have an OS DVD image on her computer, and I particularly don't know why it would be a SUSE Linux image when we've been using Ubuntu. (I did use SUSE when I was installing Linux on a dual-boot iBook - back when iBooks were rounded, made in bright colors, and had 6GB disks. Yes, that was a long time ago. Before MacOS was Unix.) The timestamp on her file is Jan 2016, but the Release Notes say Jan 2014. The file is 4.5GB - a significant amount of space, a lot of time in this copy-over, and a lot of space and time on every backup of her laptop (infrequent though they are).
The 16.04 install has put Firefox 47 on the laptop - which means all the extensions that no longer work with FF 57 will work again, and she'll have her reloadable tabs back. Yesterday I also worked out the commands for getting the URLs (and page titles) out of the session.rdf file created by tabmixplus (or does Firefox itself create it?). Unfortunately, it's not just the tabs currently open; it's a history on each tab, so there's a lot of older URLs that she probably won't want. (Or may find interesting. I'm finding some of mine interesting.) But it looks like we'll have to take those lists and pop them all into FF57 one by one to get our saved windows back. Maybe I can find a new extension that makes lists of tabs for a window; those extensions can usually work the other way, and take a list pasted into the clipboard and open a set of URLs.
16.04 is Ubuntu's most recent long=term-support release. That's a yy.mm version number, so there are 19 months worth of updates to apply. (Wow, her present laptop says 14.04.5 LTS. She's going to have some user-interface changes to get used to.)
Tuesday 00:30
I'm still copying anniemal's home directory from her current laptop to the new laptop.
Tuesday 13:12
anniemal's file copy finished overnight.
Firefox has its own restore-previous-session functionality, but we've been using TabMixPlus's instead. I suspect that if she runs the older FF on her new computer, changes the preference setting to use FF's session saver, exits, and lets the upgrades run to install the new FF57, she should have the new FF with her old session preserved. I may try that myself first, since I still need to let FF upgrade on my laptop too.
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/936693.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]