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I upgraded to the new hush-hush Firefox yesterday - oh dear, security is so tight, it wouldn't even allow me in.
It took all of five minutes to process even a single click once it had opened the BC login page or any page for that matter. So eventually I tried 'Explorer,'and experienced no real problems and was back in business - oh no I wasn't. After all these years I had forgotten my password so couldn't log-in.
I went through my secret coded note book to find the login-in password - nothing, I had forgotten to put it down but then it is me so instead of looking for Frances or Top Hat, this morning I opened my secret book and there under B was Big Closet, so I'm back inbusiness - oh no I wasn't!
BC refused to have anything to do with my entry and after several attempts and a great deal of gnashing of teeth (my own), I got the password correct so here I am again but for some reason, Firefox sending everything out under https rather than the less secure http seems to upset the computers at BC or it may have something to do with President Trump taking exception to my threats to Invade America via Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac and deciding to fight back.
If any of you, particularly the British girls experience unreasonable delays via Firefox, try an alternative, Explorer works but if like me, you click the 'RememberMe' button you will need to enter your user name and password again.
Loud Explosion as I point my Colt 105 at my temple ready to blow my brains out and of course I miss.
Comments
I use a range of browsers
But for BC, I find Chrome works very sympathetically. My other ( more general ) web browsings use Firefox or Internet Explorer (even with Windows 10), and believe it or not I don't use Edge which I resist because of the way Microsoft are promoting it!. I have no evidence one way or another about Edge, beyond my prejudices.
Despite the claims, Edge is quite slow.
And on some pages it is incredibly slow. But its built in PDF viewer is not bad.
It is better, then IE, but not as good as Opera or Chrome. Chrome eats RAM like crazy, Opera is not so "hungry", but still it is a good idea to restart them couple of times a week.
Only useful feature I found in Edge is a way to "slide" useful pages' tabs to the left, so they don't clutter tab bar while they are open and not in the "favorites".
My pet peeve with MS is what they done with Word and Office in general... When correction of a single letter in a document can break formatting of a table some 10 pages lower in different section... They destroyed search and replace functions. Now you can have some elements in the document that are not visible in the standard views but are printed (but not on all printers) and sometimes are visible in web-page view... When 20 years ago Word was one of the best text processors, now it is a struggle to compose a short memo!
Online Passwords
If, like me, you are a victim of many websites that insist you 'have an account' before you can do anything worthwhile, you really, really need to have a backup strategy for when things go pear shaped.
My system is a card index: yes, I know, but it sits in Mission Control and never goes anywhere else. Safe enough, unless I'm burgled, and even then most of what they'll get will have little consequence. Not going to disappear from a dead battery, an obsolete app or a head crash. Always there, always readable with a Mk I eyeball (Ok, Mk 1.1 with glasses).
Each card has a reference name at the top, then a website address, then the email address they asked for (because I have several) and a user name if the email address isn't being used as one. Following that is the password. Everything is in pencil so I can adjust as things change.
I've just counted; I currently have 56 cards used, although some of those have my partner's details. Many of the others are little used, but may come in useful one day. It's only a piece of card, after all.
Penny
PS I feel your pain with Firefox. It even tells me that my firewall is untrustworthy.
Don't trust the new firefox
Go with your gut instinct.
If they say the firewall is untrustworthy, odds are they want you to use a "newer one" that has security holes for the gov and its insidious Alphabet sub agencies to peek through into your pc. Use tried and true if possible, and if you are a programmer at all, even sweeter! Lock down the registry and block it from updating automatically.
The entire reason for this change is so they are compliant with signed agreements with the CIA,NSA and FBI for backdoors. With the old add-ons it made it somewhat difficult for them to break in and read. Not impossible, just slowed them down. They wanted easy access to everyone's pc and browsing habits. Some of the means included their malware plants to open your pc up to them (See Edward Snowden's leaks and other report releases from a hacker group that recently released all the tools that the NSA used to spy on you - complete tool access with instruction guides on how to use.)
Hence the new build.
All of this was discussed in hellish length on the mozilla forums for the past 11 months which I perused and understood what was happening and prepared ahead of time for this day. A lot of that thread's posts were removed recently so even if you went back now to see it, they took it down :(
(AhhH! Maybe the Internet wayback machine can show it still!! - at least until they scrub it clean from their saves.)
Sephrena
Firewall
(Off topic!)
My firewall is a self-build 1U box running pfSense, which is based on FreeBSD. I also have a stand-alone machine which runs Wireshark that I can plug in anywhere on my network to see what's happening. The only Windows box in our house is owned by my son and runs on its own, untrusted, subnet. All the rest are self-build Debian boxes.
Don't worry, Sephrena, I have been there and done that.
Penny
The new Firefox browser
Curiously enough, the new Firefox browser is supposed to be a lot faster. I downloaded it two days ago. I found it took a long time (30 seconds?) to open a page. I was not impressed.
My housemate, on the other hand, downloaded the beta version onto Linux about 2 weeks ago. He had 300 tabs open at once and said it was running awesomely well.
So now I'm thinking my slowness may be due to Windows 10 and Avast Antivirus.
Avast is the problem
it's an insane resource hog, pulled it off my various PCs and they all run far faster, my nearly 9 year old netbook went from so slow as to be worthless to entirely fit for purpose (at least until it overheats or the battery runs out... they're at about the same average time)
Thanks.
I just discovered that I am no longer running Comodo Dragon as my firewall. I vaguely remember switching back to Windows firewall "temporarily" to speed things up when I upgraded to Windows 10. I'll try switching to another anti-virus. Thanks.
Avast is Criminal
When they switched over to a format of automatically charging your credit card for renewal, I took exception to that. I immediately then removed the software and stopped my credit card and changed it. The first thing that began happening to me is that Avast left some piece of itself in my computer and was being used by someone in their organization to access my hard drive. I do not have 100% proof, however that and the several phone calls after uninstalling Avast saying they were from Microsoft and that they needed to fix my pc (like rigggghhht!) and the threatening emails from both of Avast's California and European offices, made me suspect it was a piece of spyware built right inside of Avast. I sent those emails to the FBI and the credit card company. In short, I had to reformat the hard drive several times before reinstalling windows 7.
The lesson: Never EVER use any software that auto renews. The only way out is through a credit card change to stop billing. Even the ones that say they have an easy opt out process can and do make it a PITA! You have to stop and think: Why would they revert to a stupidally invasive effort to auto renew in the first place?
Sephrena
Which Firefox to use?
PErsonally and after a lot of grief in the past with the mainstream browser, I use the ESR stream.
ESR == Extended Service Release.
It isn't as cutting edge as the main one.
This new version of Firefox is important as it retires a lot of extensions. For example, NoScript is not yet available for the new one.
I don't recommend to anyone other than a real IT Geek to use the main release stream of Firefox especially with the changes introduced in this one. The changes under the skin in this release are pretty fundamental. As such, I'll let the dust settle and the inevitable bugs get ironed out before upgrading.
The ESR release I'm using is 52.4.1 but there is an update waiting for me to restart the browser to load it.
Samantha
I use Firefox 51
and clamped it down so that it can not be updated. Even in the windows registry I turned off its ability to update. I take exception to Mozilla's newer piece of crap they designed for windows 10 with all its backdoors for the NSA and whatever else wants to peek inside your pc (As if the 32 backdoors and design of windows 10 wasn't bad enough...)
If i ever have to reinstall it, Ill reinstall it offline and lock the registry and settings ahead of time and replace the 7 anti malware and anti ad add-ons ahead of time also. (Always backup and save every location of the install on the c:\drive, \x86 programs or \programs and in the AppData user files under your user name in local, local low, and roaming directories.)
Sephrena
Arrrggggghhhh!
Thanks Sephrena. You just reminded me of another of my pet hates of Windows.
i.e. Microsoft's insistence in putting vital user stuff in hidden directories.
The AppData directory tree on standard windows systems is hidden by default.
Did you know that some so called Windows Backup programs don't back up hidden directories?
You can make the tree visible by using the command line.
attrib -s -h AppData
Then you can see where all your disk space has gone!
Gladly, I stopped using Windows a year ago. It is MacOS or Linux for me for now on.
As for the NSA backdoors in the new FireFox... Thanks for that. I'm probably going to switch to PaleMoon in the next week so the matter will be moot for a while.
Am I rare in not caring if the government spies on my computer?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's RIGHT, nor do I WANT them to. That said... I don't do anything on my PC I'd be scared of the gubmint finding out about. We maintain basic security protocols on our home network, but I dunno. I see the slippery slope, but using the latest Firefox (which, for me, does seem faster and a bit less RAM intensive) hardly feels like its the beginning of a slide down, and if I'm going to fight the NSA and government abuse of power I'd rather do it in a way that aims to protect the future of our rights rather than just mine for the moment.
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough. *shrug*
Melanie E.
Firefox 57.0
I had to restart yesterday and Firefox updated itself from 56.2 to 57.1. It is so slow as to be useless. Not only does it take several times longer now to display a page, and anywhere from five to ten seconds to respond to a "page down" when reading a story, but it frequently locks up completely for several minutes at a time. I'm using Windows 10 (not wonderful, in my opinion) 64-bit on an Intel i7 cpu with 8 GB of RAM, so resources aren't the problem. Up until now, I was very happy with Firefox, but now I'm forced to switch to Edge until they fix that piece of s---, assuming they ever do.
I do automatic updates
As a result, Firefox updated on it's own. Can't say as I like the new arrangement of of the address bar/tab display or the icons to access the features such as the bookmark menu icon missing and must be added. It took a bit of poking around to find out how to do that.
That said, I was following a link from a blog post and experienced the same problem you speak of on the first link in the post, but the second link had no problem. This in spite of the fact that both of the links had http: in the link, the first link looked for https: and the second was happy to use the former. As far as my bookmarks, I've not had a problem with any of them.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt