Browsers New Automatic Settings Slowing Site Loads Down

Blocking All Social Media Cookies and Trackers Seems To Be Slowing Down Chrome and FireFox

By Strictly-Software

I have had recent automatic updates for Firefox and Chrome to versions

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

and 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36

How these two have got to versions nearing 80 so quickly is funny, when IE just rolls out a new version of it's browser every year or so not every time I try and open Firefox from my taskbar.

However these updates seem to contain some important settings, some may have been around for a while which I just haven't noticed. However it is the slowness of these browsers compared to Opera, that uses a proxy server in it's pretend VPN, so you are actually going through 2 servers to your site compared to the other browsers, that is doing my head in.

I liked Firefox, and Chrome when it first came out for their speed, and add-ons. However either my laptop is either deciding to slow down these 2 browsers for some reason and let Opera hop before loading a faster page or something else is going on.

My version of Opera with this "VPN" is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 OPR/65.0.3467.62

When I open it, it is faster than both Chrome and FireFox despite their VPN which when I check with a geo location website shows I have these details instead of my real ones:

• Your Public IPv6 is: 2001:67c:2660:425:7::dfa
• Your IPv4 is: 77.111.247.105
• Location: Amsterdam, NH NL 
• ISP: Hern Labs AB

I notice they have removed the word Opera and replaced it with OPR now, also nearing it's 70th edition. So not only does it protect my privacy a bit it is faster than Chrome and FireFox at the moment for me.

So today after upgrades to both Chrome (manual due to it's insane slowness) and an automatic update for FireFox that took almost 20 minutes, I noticed major slowdowns.

Chrome seems to always be showing a "resolving host" message in the status bar and loading in remote scripts from the big 3 spyware social networks, Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Of course site builders have put these outbound scripts into their code as they want people to Like, Follow and Tweet whatever crap they are selling and you may like seeing a Twitter scroller on the blog you are following and the ability to share the page to Facebook.

However I watched a video on www.darkpolitricks.com the other night about how many #alttnews sites are moving their videos from YouTube to BitShute. YouTube is broken and Google is an evil company. And it seems they are indeed.

It is all about how these niche news outlets had created YouTube making it the biggest video sharing site online, and although the company claims they are only 1% of all videos watched they still feel the need to de-rank these alternative views and put "authoritative sources" above your searches in their algorithm tweaks. These tweaks were all admitted by a Google employee who described getting those Up Ticks and Likes as a "drug" that ensures people continue with their outpourings of every thing they do in life on Social Media.

Yes we do want to see where Jane is having lunch, who with, where the cafe is located and then everything else she does that day as we follow her goings about on Facebook and Instagram.Well you may want to but I don't. However to do so you need to load in Facebook scripts from their servers.

However it seems if you delve into the privacy and security settings for Firefox you get to see that their default setting is to stop tracking cookies from cross site and social media trackers which obviously means if you are loading a 3rd party script from another location you could see as I did today on one site the "trying to connect to t.co" message appear dozens of times as the page tried to load. All the while the page was hung and unusable.

You can go into the FireFox settings and change your settings under Privacy and Security. The heading is...

Browser Privacy

Enhanced Tracking Protection

Trackers follow you around online to collect information about your browsing habits and interests. Firefox blocks many of these trackers and other malicious scripts.

The default setting will block Social media trackers, Cross-site tracking cookies, Tracking content in Private Windows and Cryptominers.

Obviously the latter few are definitely required but let me know if you have noticed a slow down with the standard setting that supposedly is "Balanced for protection and performance. Pages will load normally.", as they may load normally but they seem very slow to load, and off server scripts like Twitter and Facebook are attempted multiple times before a page is usable.

What happened to just loading the core code first to let the page be usable and load any off server scripts by Ajax in the background. It seems too many sites now use pure JavaScript and Ajax to load the content, probably to prevent content scraper BOTS however it does mean a lot of code has to run and be loaded before the page is usable. Have you had a look at the source HTML of www.google.com lately?

Apart from some META tags after the HTML tag the whole source is JavaScript and probably Ajax to load in the content for what is really nothing more than a white page with a different image every now and then above a text input box for searching.

The links to your Google account and Gmail in the top right corner are just that links. We could shorten the load time and the code to a few lines of HTML in reality. I really think Google have gone overboard with their API Jizz all across their systems as their need to stop scrapers has just caused slow loading pages it seems.

Would you like all 3rd party scripts and cookies blocked, or would you like the site to work and load quickly? It seems a dilemma these browsers are making over complicated especially for non techies who wouldn't know half the words in Firefox's Privacy and Security settings.

The difference between Standard which says "Balanced for protection and security. Pages will load normally" and Strict which says "Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or content to break" seems to only be the addition of:

• Tracking content in all windows - rather than standard mode which only blocks "Tracking content in Private Windows" and
• Fingerprinters (blocking Browser finger printing, logging your add-ons, window size and other ways to identify you from just your browser)

They don't actually explain what a fingerprinter is, and to the average user they would be scratching their head thinking about their latest Samsung phone and the ability to login using your fingerprint. However these two extra blocks seem to be deadly for a working website as they state underneath :

Heads up! Blocking trackers could impact the functionality of some sites. Reload a page with trackers to load all content.

So god knows how someone is supposed to manage the 3rd option which is a custom way of blocking things you don't understand or know why they would break a site.

Of course they have a number of complicated Knowledge Base articles  for you to read and get your head round to try and understand whether they need to use Private Windows for browsing all the time, and why the prevention of loading certain features is going to stop your site loading.

Of course Firefox has a "simple way" to help you understand what is going on by just clicking on the shield in the address bar you can change the mode of protection on or off. 

You can view this site with "Enhanced Tracking Protection is OFF for this site" or ON and if you don't know what the difference is they have helpful little graphs that tell you about their Enhanced Tracking Protection, how many trackers they have blocked over the week and ways to look for data breaches. All very interesting but not very helpful information.

They helpfully clarify the situation by saying "Social networks place trackers on other websites to follow what you do, see, and watch online. This allows social media companies to learn more about you beyond what you share on your social media profiles."

Of course you could just disable 3rd party cookies and JavaScript by default with a web developer toolbar and see if the page loads or not. If it doesn't work turn on JavaScript and try again before white listing the site so it can use JavaScript again.

It seems that as Windows in numptifying the front end of their latest operating systems and making it harder for developers to dig in and get into the back end like Windows 8.1r which I still have - now without Skype support - the browsers are offering their users far too many options they probably don't understand or need to know about.

What I want from a browser is for websites to load quickly, any 3rd party hosted widgets like Facebook or Twitter widgets to load in asynchronously and not prevent the working of the site. I want the browser to do the dirty stuff behind the scenes and I don't want 100's of options to play about with. They should block dangerous content, warn users about dangerous sites and stop anything that may have a dangerous effect on my browsing or privacy.

Yes - Ask me if I want to load this soon to be outdated flash movie or allow notifications but don't give me too much to tweak about with.

The speed of loading a site is the most important factor for most users and also affects the sites SEO. If they want to give us an option for being as private as possible or allowing tracking cookies then just have a single option "Privacy HIGH or OFF" option, and then use their own browsing logic to work out if a page won't load instead of offering the user a whole list of options to try out if a page doesn't load.

What is wrong with just keeping incognito windows that are private as possible, don't allow trackers or fingerprinting and the logging of pages visited with a clear out of cookies automatically when I leave?

It just seems that as Chrome enters the laptop world with it's Chromebooks, that as Operating Systems continually ask for your admin password in Windows 10+ when opening an application. Hiding all the nitty gritty that really slows your PC down behind automated "maintenance jobs". That browsers are trying to become their own little PC within a PC.

Just give me fast loading pages and if I want to hide what I am doing from sites and other users of my laptop then make the incognito windows as private as possible. Stop trackers, fingerprinting, 3rd party cookies, and anything else you are now making a "choice" for the user under the settings.

It is bad enough that as everyone moves to HTTPS we see the TLS handshake message in the taskbar constantly which is obviously slowing down the loading of pages and their content, especially if it's mixed.

Just give me a fast browser. I thought using FireFox today would speed things up as Chrome is just getting unusable and as everyone realises they are actually evil, I don't want to help Google pass on my data from their browser or search engines and analytics trackers to advertisers and god knows who else.

From now on Opera with its extra server hop is going to be my standard browser. The "VPN" offers enough privacy and whilst some pages won't remember certain settings due to my location changing the browser is fast.

Anyone find their settings too complicated nowadays and the speed an issue?

By Strictly-Software

© 2019 Strictly-Software

 

Quickly Grab Generated Source Code With One Click

Quickly Grab Generated Source Code With One Click

By Strictly-Software

Now that my broken arm is getting better I will be doing more code. It still hurts like mad though, the arm bone didn't even look like it belonged anywhere near the shoulder where it was dislocated.

If you want WordPress plugins then go and check out the main site which I need to do some work on. I am also thinking of building an alternative search engine to get round Google's/CIA/NSA's de-ranking and demonetisation.

I used to have a Super Search Engine years ago, that took the top 10 items from Google, BING and Yahoo, however they kept changing the source code until it all became AJAX loaded in on the fly and too hard to scrape.

I think with the push or deletion of alternative news down the rankings, and pro-establishment news gaining viewers they would never had got a year ago due to Facebook's subservience to the USA and Israeli governments. More and more people will move to new decentralised social media platforms and once that happens Facebook and Google, who are already losing out to duckduckgo.com  due to privacy concerns will lose money in their share price as well as many members.                                 

The problem is money of course and too few people click on adverts or donate out the kindness of their heart.

I think, like search.darkpolitriks.com, that has a starting page of core main #altnews websites and podcasts, I could write my own one and charge £10 for a relevant #altnews blog or channel to be added to the SERP, just so that small alternative sites have the same chance of being found in results and sites like CNN and the BBC are weeded out.

Easiest way of creating a SERP. Just ensure the site is relevant and not mainstream.

Anyway I was fixing a bug today when I realised that it was a bookmark with an http source on an https site that prevented the lock from showing.

Sometimes I don't think people realise how dangerous loading third party scripts can be.

Just loading in a CSS stylesheet could cause nightmares.

For example say your site loaded in a stylesheet from www.SomeSiteIDontControl1.com which loads in a background PNG image which in turn loads in another remote 3rd party stylesheet from www.SomeSiteIDontControl2.com.

Then one day the person in control of that site changes that 2nd image to a dangerous .js file or .exe that loads in an XSS attack.

You are so far removed from the actual cause of the problem that with minification and compression you might have no hope in finding the dangerous file.

So one day the 2nd CSS file that you are loading looks something like this:

background:url(http://www.somesiteIdontcontrol2.com/images/background.png) no-repeat 16px 0;

Then one day this site owner changes his background image to be an .js file e.g

background:url(http://www.somesiteIdontcontrol2.com/images/dodgyscript.js) no-repeat 16px 0;

And when the page loads, and after your onDOMLoad event loads in these scripts it hits your user with the JavaScript sites code.

A recursive script might be handy to run every day to check diagnostics by referencing every URL it finds in any style-sheet or JavaScript on your site.

Follow it backwards and check every other URL it finds.

Another way, if you are perfectly happy with your code is to create local versions of the files and images and keep it all on a server you control so no-one could malform the objects being loaded.

This is a bookmarklet script I wrote years ago that shows me the DOM loaded afterwards and not before.

I wanted to see what scripts and files had been added since I pressed the View Source button that shows the HTML and JS/CSS before any code is run on the page.

I use it all the time. I created a bookmarklet and added it to my bookmark bar so it's within easy reach with a URL to www.google.com and save it.

I then edit it and change the location of the JavaScript I want from www.google.com to the code so that it runs. This might not be necessary anymore but I had add a real URL in the old days.

This code basically takes a snapshot of the DOM once all 3rd party objects have modified the code, loaded videos, changed images and anything else sites like to do when onDOMLoad (not onWindowLoad, which only fires once every image and external object has been loaded.

As you are loading the code with a press of a button there is plenty of time for the onDOM onWindow and onFrame load events to fire, plus many others.

javascript:(function()%7b function htmlEscape(s)%7bs=s.replace(/&/g,'&amp;');s=s.replace(/>/g,'&gt;');s=s.replace(/</g,'&lt;');return s;%7d x=window.open(); x.document.write('<pre>' + htmlEscape('<html>\n' + document.documentElement.innerHTML + '\n</html>')); x.document.close(); %7d)();

As the HTML 5 spec still allows for href="javascript: ..... " then a link or button can run JavaScript when it really should be running external document.addEventListener events to each object needing code to fire when hit.

The code just creates a URL encoded function called htmlEscape which replaces brackets and ampersands and opens a new window writing this new code out into the document.documentElement.innerHTML.

Not hard to do but very useful.


By Strictly-Software

© 2018 Strictly-Software

Flash Crash Problems with Firefox 13.0.1 and Adobe Flash 11.3.300.257

Flash Crashing constantly in Firefox 13.0.1

All day I have been experiencing problems with Firefox and Flash.

Flash is notoriously buggy and crashes a lot which is why HTML5 offers so much hope for those of us wanting to watch movies online, on our phones or devices and Youtube style with the VIDEO tag and a wrapper iFrame.

I don't have a fix but I just wanted to put it out there that Flash version 11.3.300.257 is causing constant problems when used with Firefox 13.0.1.

A movie will start playing and then hang or the screen will go black before the "flash crash" message appears.

I am trying to watch some comedy central with another header plugin and up until today I have had no problems at all.

I don't know if this a problem with Flash or Firefox or a combination of both but it is really starting to piss me off. I have re-installed both Firefox and Flash multiple times.

I don't know why Adobe cannot get their act together with Flash as people are working their ass off to accommodate them and their notorious bugs, high CPU and memory leaks on devices whereas before they were just going to ditch Flash altogether and wait for HTML5 to spread.

If anyone else is having the same problem with Flash crashing let me know.

Handling YouTube Videos in Feeds

Reformatting HTML to include YouTube video links

If you use XML feeds to import content into your site or blog you may have experienced the problem that your blogging software or add-on tries to err on the side of caution for security reasons or just messes up the import and in doing so any EMBED or OBJECT tags are stripped in the process.

This is especially annoying when the content is for a blog or news site and the imported content was linking to YouTube videos as it means you have to go through all the posts by hand and reformat the HTML so that the original video is shown.

Luckily even though the actual OBJECT tag gets removed you are usually left with a link to the video on YouTube's site. This can be utilised in a simple regular expression so that you can reformat your content and replace this link with the actual OBJECT HTML.

The regular expression is pretty simple and looks for any anchors pointing to YouTube's site and captures the video ID in a sub group. This sub group is then used in the replace statement as the value for the PARAM and EMBED values that require it.

// use preg_replace to replace anchors with OBJECT/EMBED
// $input is the source HTML

$html = preg_replace("/<a href=\"http:\/\/www\.youtube\.com\/watch\?v=([A-Z1-9]+)\">[\s\S]+?<\/a>/i","<object width=\"425\" height=\"344\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/$1&hl=en_GB&fs=1&\"></param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"></param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"></param><embed src=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/$1&hl=en_GB&fs=1&\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></embed></object>",$input);

I am using PHP as an example here but the regular expression would be the same across all languages.

Either wrap a call to this function in your own import procedure or if you are using an add-on like Wordpresses WP-o-Matic then you should utilise it in the rewrite section when setting up a new feed import.