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I’ve never, I mean never, clicked on an ad knowingly.

Part of it is the bug repellant theory: If 99% of a swarm of mosquitos numbering one million is repelled, 10,000 still bite.

Cambridge Analytica distributed personality tests.  People love personality tests and pretty much give away everything about themselves completing the test.  Valuable info to increase efficiency of political targeting.  Interesting how they got access to so many users from FB; back room deals help a lot too, so much for sophistication.

Lots of other uses, companies pay for data that serves their markets vs. the bug repellant method.  Remember cascading popups? OMG, pull the power cord!

Money circling at levels above users that users never see.

I’m fairly useless to advertisers.  I have disparate interests and always score smack dab in the middle of personality tests.

My experience agrees.  Better off to install Pro, which will be a kludged version of Home with stuff grayed out until you input your Pro key, then it’s fine.

I tried the upgrade once and got so infuriated with that old laptop trying to install updates and OEM stuff from 5 years ago, I somehow broke off some of the HDD pins swapping it from here to there.  Oh well, the new SSD was vastly better.  Nothing valuable lost, Pro still works fine today.

We have two Enterprise licenses bought by mistake.  That’s the version you want if you can find it, updates can be stopped forever, just be careful doing that.

Regurgitation to meet a deadline?

One of the challenges of The Information Age is determining whether something is informative or not.  So much stuff out there!

There’s already a Health Check thing in Win 10, Windows Security>Device Performance and Health along with some other similar utilities in Maintenance, Drive Integrity, etc.

What you’re seeing is the Win 11 readiness assessment that was included with some recent updates.  Plenty of info on removal above.

Light mode and dark mode are in Settings>Personalization>Colors.  One for Windows, one for Apps.

I use Open Shell, so I’m not sure if what you’re showing is the Start Menu.  If so, the standard one has a number of right click settings here and there you could try.  Builds do effect some weird changes but different devices with the same build should appear the same.  We have many Dells, laptops and desktops and they’re consistent.

Maybe someone else has some ideas.

Well, that giant link should be easy to find…why did it do that? Argh!

I don’t think Proton allows clients unless you subscribe.  I had them as a free service and had to use the web version, when I subscribed, I could use TBird.  Be aware that Proton will bundle your free email, if you start that way, with your VPN subscription if you get one.  Billing is recurring; if you stop subscribing, your email can be held hostage, read: locked.

I had so many problems with Proton, I’d never use them again.  They were very disorganized 2 or so years ago.  VPN became slow over time, too.

Subscription services have been far better overall for me, although I still use gmail, less and less.  You already know the migration process, kind of a pain but worth it in the end.

Mailbox.org is what I use now.  No complaints at all  for 5? years beyond the cloud storage they give you can be slow.  You get a complete office suite and other stuff with email, can build whatever package you want. Works with TBird and phone clients, I use FairMail on Android.

Here’s a good list, pay attention to whether a particular service supports clients if you want to use TBird:

https://restoreprivacy.com/email/secure/

 

I meant places but you are correct, it’s places.sqlite.

If you remove prefs.js, I’m pretty sure all your about:config changes will go back to default, along with Settings (was Options.)

Those are things I’ve had some luck with but I disable, delete, change a large number of about:config items.  If I want to return someplace regularly, I use bookmarks or shortcuts put in a FF desktop folder.  My home page and new tab page are DDG, I use a userChrome.css file to make the top bars much smaller, lots of stuff.

Also, I’m on 91ESR.  I went to ESR a few years ago after the Release versions were repeatedly butchered by updates resulting in issues similar to yours.  It’s much smoother

Sorry, I don’t have a definitive answer.  You could reinstall FF, a pain I know or go back to an earlier version.  JMO but ESR went from 78 to 91 and will stay at 91 for a year or something so using a slightly older Release version shouldn’t be a security issue.  Here they all are, pick the one that worked!:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

If you reinstall, I’d look for anything Mozilla or Firefox with Explorer search and delete it (be smart) because FF saves backups so your new installation is similar to the old one.

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DKThompson

Google’s Head Cheese once said something like, “You die in our industry without constant innovation, no matter what it is.”

Now I get it!

I bet most of us looked at that pic far longer than we needed to.  I did, weird is attractive?

It’s showing up in TV ads, too.  Weird looking people with mop hair and anime eyes.  Yeah, you’re probably right on mark.

As messed up as “leadership” in most aspects of society is now, when Phone Culture adult children take over, a tin foil hat may seriously be a good idea!  So many of them know absolutely nothing beside how to poke at a phone to buy useless junk, just what Big Tech wants: OBEY!

I do version updates with an ISO on a USB drive. Go here, download the Media Creation Tool and run it. It will get 21H1 and install it as a bootable USB drive. The only thing I would do beside accepting all defaults is pick “for another computer” (you’ll see it) so the USB can be used anywhere.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Then turn off the computer and restart with the USB in place. I’d do the installation offline, let the computer run for a while after installation until the os drive light settles down, then go online. Otherwise Win Update may try to install some bizarre stuff. Your computer will also go to whatever site MC has set up for OEM features, if they have.

Alternatively, on that page, just click the update button on top, much easier. I walked my daughter through that method over a phone a few weeks ago and it worked fine.

Do whichever method you choose soon before 21H2 replaces 21H1 on that page.

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WShstruve

The page gear thing should have a dropdown that may fix that.

Try going into your profile and deleting the places.js folder.  You have to do this with FF closed.  It will be recreated next time you open FF.

Also, try deleting the startup cache :Menu>Help> More troubleshooting information>on top to the right.  This has fixed rough updates for me.

Be sure favicons haven’t been disabled in about:config.

You could try some queries here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-user-data-missing-after-firefox-update#search

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DKThompson

Since there seems to be  negative correlation between the number of new features in a version and reliability, 21H2 should be the most reliable ever!

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Noel Carboni

Can you get Mars Hotel on CD?  Haven’t looked in a while; it used to not be available.

(Very OT)

It might, you’d have to run it out for 90 days to see. If you mean changing the end dates to 2030 or something.  After doing that Advanced Settings in Update will show a huge scroll to the end dates, you can choose one and it will show in “pause until.”

But, installing updates online or hitting 90 days from the initial set date has made our Windows 10 Pro machines demand updates and the registry changes disappear (clock restarts.)  You can start it again by downloading/installing an update from the catalog.

Bottom line, I’m not certain updates can be delayed more than 90 days in Pro.  Home’s banned here, no idea what it will do.  We have three Enterprise licenses that block all updates seemingly forever.

Confusing and I’m sure others have experienced someting different.