Debug your browser

Topic

New Reply

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley It all started the other day when the social media website Twitter moved completely to its new domain, x.com. Before you
[See the full post at: Debug your browser]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

9 users thanked author for this post.

lmacri, Perq, jburk07, fisher75, DLivesInTexas, SueW, windbg, IBM1130, Slowpoke47

Reply | Quote

Replies

Using the Brave browser, videos on the SpaceX website https://www.spacex.com/launches/  don’t work unless the Brave Shields are set to ‘DOWN’.

Reply | Quote

Your insight may help expose the root of an oddball random log-in problem I’m having with a single site on Firefox (but not on Vivaldi). Their techs have struggled to solve it and have admitted defeat. Of course, waiting for a random problem to not happen is the epitome of frustration.

Reply | Quote

On the subject of browsers, on one computer my WordPress blog ceased functioning on Firefox. It also failed on SeaMonkey, where it used to work fine. It continued to work fine in Chrome, but I do not like the way Chrome works.

On two other computers the blog continued to work just fine in Firefox and SeaMonkey.

On the first computer I tried everything I could think of, including removing Firefox, SeaMonkey and Mozilla via regedit and re-installing.

Nothing worked.

Reply | Quote

RE: debug your browser.

No mention was made that the browser should be re-installed. I recently was not able to use my password manager (Bitwarden) extension with my Firefox browser, although it worked with Chrome. I first tried re-installing the Bitwarden extension with no luck. By uninstalling FF and reinstalling it from a copy from their website, the Bitwarden extension suddenly started working – including enhancements added by BW since I initially started using it. The only problem encountered was the fact that I  had to re-install my other extensions  (Adblocker Ultimate, etc.) when I re-installed the browser.

Reply | Quote

There is an extension available which allows custom defeats (turn on/turn off) of all or selected other extensions for site problems called Extensity, which I use regularly in Chrome, Edge, and Brave browsers. Easy to use and has solved a lot of site specific problems for me.

Give it a try – available at the “stores.”

1 user thanked author for this post.

rChaz

Reply | Quote

Can we all agree that “X” and the “x.com” domain name are examples of shockingly bad marketing?

3 users thanked author for this post.

unbob, jburk07, rChaz

Reply | Quote

I’m still going to call it twitter for  a long time.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

Reply | Quote

This is all good stuff (especially the reminder to not rely on a single browser), although I think there are more steps that can be done.

For any browser, if things are misbehaving, I advocate clearing the browser’s cache and cookies. In the days dial-up modems and web pages that were mostly HTML content, browser caches made sense, in reducing the amount of downloaded volume, and not repeating downloads of stuff that had already been seen. In the modern era, of broadband connections, and where browsers are delivering more dynamic content through scripts, I believe that one of the effects of that is that things can get confused. By clearing all the accumulated data, that allows forcing a clean download of all the content.

Sometimes, that’s enough to get things to work properly again. That applies to any browser. And for Susan’s suggestion to use a different browser, although a different browser may behave differently (especially the difference between Chrome and Firefox), but the benefit of an alternate browser may be just getting a completely fresh download of content, and not relying on cache.

As an aside, I think a case can be made for disabling a browser’s cache completely, because a lot of the time, I don’t think the cache often helps performance that much.

[ The remainder of this post is specific to Mozilla browsers. ]

If you’re using a Mozilla browser, one important tool is to check the browser in Troubleshooting mode (Help – > Troubleshooting). That one restarts the browser with all extensions disabled, and helps identify whether any extensions are causing problems. And sometimes, a one-time restart in troubleshooting mode can clear something that may be buried in one of Firefox’s underlying SQLite databases.

A further tool is in starting the browser with a different profile, where all the settings are default, the way that they are set originally by Mozilla. Working with another profile allows me to see if it’s a site that’s causing problems, or if it’s something related to my regular profile — not just extensions, but other user preferences, as well. I frequently work in Seamonkey (with a lot of preference tweaking), and if a site isn’t working for me, using a profile with default settings allows me to quickly deduce whether the problem is that the site doesn’t like Seamonkey, or if problems are happening because of my preference settings.

In Windows, the way to get to the profile manager is via a command line:

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -P

From there, create a new profile, and I suggest using enabling the option to have Firefox always launch with the Profile Manager, to make it easy to select a profile.

It’s also possible to get to the Profile Manager by entering about:profiles in the address bar. In the dialogs there, it’s even possible to launch a second profile without closing out the first one, and where windows from each profile can be displayed side-by-side.

One other consideration — I’m firmly of the opinion that most of the time, doing an uninstall/reinstall of Firefox is a waste of effort, at least in Windows (I have seen reports from Mac users that indicate a reinstall can be useful). The only time a reinstall may be useful is if there is reason to believe that there has been corruption of either program binaries and/or registry entries. And since the release of Win 7, Windows is stable enough that that kind of corruption is unusual.

Thus, if Firefox is uninstalled (and user profiles aren’t deleted), then problems persist, because the issues are most frequently embedded in profiles.

5 users thanked author for this post.

unbob, Perq, SueW, jburk07, windbg

Reply | Quote

I can understand wanting to place a browser in “strict” mode for security reasons. What I found in the past is, a lot of sites didn’t work and hence the frustration level went too high to have it on. It would be good to hear what the current experience is like, from the people who have “strict” on.

 

Reply | Quote

I also went through a version of the “Something went wrong” Twitter Xperience on Firefox the other day, but not Chrome.  Went through the usual clearing of cookies, checking for tracking protection, etc., before solving it by “unblocking” the site for ads, analytics, etc. screened by the extension “Disconnect”.  Definitely helpful to have multiple browsers that use different extensions.

 

Reply | Quote

This is an ideal use for an alternate browser.

I make some use of Edge as an alternate browser, and a couple of days ago, I decided to switch tracking settings from Normal to Strict. A couple of hours later, I went past a site that wasn’t rendering correctly, and remembering that I had set Strict, I changed back to Normal, and the site subsequently rendered correctly.

As much as I like the idea of strict settings for tracking, I think the risk it being disruptive is wide enough that I don’t want to leave enabled in browsers that I use regularly.  I don’t want to have to remember that I’ve done it, or find the control to change.

BTW, I’m not sure that strict handling is really much of a security thing, so much as privacy.

Reply | Quote

Susan Bradley wrote:

I’m still going to call it twitter for  a long time.

Basicly it’s not much more than a beep-beep at McDonalds or so.

* _ ... _ *

Reply | Quote

I am posting this in hope that it helps someone else having the same problem I had – and resolved – with Intel’s Driver & Support Assistant (DSA) refusing to open in Brave browser.

I have used Brave for several years for privacy protection reasons. My computer (Dell XPS17) has an 11th Gen Intel i7-11800H processor. I keep Intel drivers up to date using Intel DSA whenever Intel notifies me by email that a new driver has been released. DSA scans your installed drivers and returns results in your default browser.

Recently, when I try to run a DSA scan, I started getting the error message: “sorry something went wrong while trying to scan”. Reinstalling DSA and clearing the browser cache did not help.

Intel’s online troubleshooter had this comment:

“ensuring the browser being used is Firefox, Chrome, or Edge/ Legacy Edge (version 44.17763/18.17763 or newer).”

To now, Brave has handled Intel DSA without problems. I do have both Edge and Chrome Portable installed as backup browsers. I just tried Intel DSA in both Edge and Chrome, and it works properly. So, the problem seems to an incompatibility between Brave browser and Intel Driver & Support Assistant.

Further, by default, Brave opens a “privacy protection shield” for each site, but this can be turned off site by site. I just turned off the Brave shield for https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/intel-driver-support-assistant.html
and Intel DSA opens in Brave without the error message.

Dell XPS17, 11th Gen Intel I7, 64gb RAM, Windows 11 Home 23H2

1 user thanked author for this post.

Fred

Reply | Quote

Interesting to know what exacty does the Brave-browser do when opening a “privacy protection shield” for each site ??

* _ ... _ *

Reply | Quote

Brave Shields menu.

Dell XPS17, 11th Gen Intel I7, 64gb RAM, Windows 11 Home 23H2

Reply | Quote