10.8 Optimization Notes

[elephunkrobitandsuch]

Not an issue, but 3 optimizations I've had success with on Intel machines running 10.8.5:

1. Sometimes when typing in the address bar or other input fields, the first letter is invisible, and then appears after the second letter is typed. This is fixed by going into about:config and setting "layers.acceleration.disabled" to "TRUE"

2. Printing was causing a crash. This was resolved by changing "print.prefer_system_dialog" to TRUE

3. Gmail web browser has a few oddities, which are resolved by going into about:config and doing a "general.useragent.override" and change the useragent to coincide with your OS. For example, running Mountain Lion I changed it from "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0" to Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0"

**And just an added thank you to i3roly for his amazing work on this project.

[Wowfunhappy]

Gmail web browser has a few oddities, which are resolved by going into about:config and doing a "general.useragent.override" and change the useragent to coincide with your OS. For example, running Mountain Lion I changed it from "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0" to Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0"

Wat.

I wonder what is happening on gmail's side for this to work. There must be some legacy code in gmail from a decade ago which was originally added to workaround a bug in Firefox under Mountain Lion—and apparently when modern Firefox is back-ported to Mountain Lion it still hits that bug! But, Google's workaround is still present in gmail's code, if you activate it by changing the user agent.

I have nothing productive to add, I just think this situation is absolutely wild! Wow!

Note that AIUI all major browsers have frozen the user agent string for privacy reasons, ie if you're using upstream Firefox on any version of macOS (whether newer or older than macOS Catalina), the OS in your user agent string will be "Intel Mac OS X 10.15". So, the right solution is probably not for Firefox Dynasty to break from that policy and list the real operating system. But, maybe there could be a WebCompat add-on. There are already lots of UA overrides built into Firefox: https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/webcompat-addon/blob/main/src/data/ua_overrides.js

[RJVB]

On Thursday November 28 2024 08:32:31 Jonathan wrote: Note that AIUI all major browsers have frozen the user agent string for privacy reasons

Disclosing your OS version is a privacy concern nowadays?

But, maybe there could be a [WebCompat System add-on](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/System_Addon).

There's also https://gitlab.com/ntninja/user-agent-switcher. Doesn't always seem to fool all website but I've mostly used it to pretend I'm using a different browser rather than just a different version of the same engine.

[Wowfunhappy]

Disclosing your OS version is a privacy concern nowadays?

It's fingerprinting related.

I can't seem to find any Firefox-centric announcements but here is one for Chrome, I assume Firefox is going down a similar path here. https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/blog/user-agent-reduction-android-model-and-version