extensions

Whoa Nelli

Ah, Christmas eve. It’s quiet as I type this, the temperature has dropped to zero degrees, and a big chill is forecast for the next five days. Environment Canada summed it up thusly:

Wind chill values: below minus 20.
Temperatures: Near record cold temperatures next week.

I have my winter woolies ready!

But tonight, before tucking in, I became annoyed enough at the narrow scroll bar used on outlook.com that I sought a remedy.

This was a terrible mistake.

To elaborate a bit, Firefox normally uses regular width scroll bars on sites, but sites can use thin ones if they choose. They may look sleek but are hard to see and harder to manipulate and really, just dumb.

I did find a remedy quickly, in the form of a Firefox extension that lets you override the browser settings to go with a permanent “wide” scroll bar. Despite the name, it’s just the regular width we’ve all known and loved for the last hundred years. It worked great. I was pleased.

I should have stopped there.

Instead, I noticed–as I was on the Firefox extensions page–that I had a whole slew of updates available for my extensions. most are disabled, but a few of the active ones also had updates, including the speed dial I use for the new tab page, called NelliTab. I have discussed this extension before and quite like it. It wasn’t until later that I noticed the update came out today–December 24th–and that the dedicated developer might have been drunk on spicy eggnog (edit–the update actually came out on December 6th, I misread the install date as the date of release).

Why do I think this? After installing the update, NelliTab stopped working. It would only show a serene blank page. I did all the usual troubleshooting, but nothing worked. I then went with the nuclear option–I removed the extension, then added it back. This reset its settings, but it would not take long to tweak it back to my liking.

This appeared to work–the extension popped back up and all my bookmarks were in place, but without the icons that make them easy to scan. For most sites, NelliTab will grab the site icon after you’ve visited the site once, so over time, all sites will show an icon in NelliTab. Except that wasn’t happening. Again, more troubleshooting. Nothing I did would fix this. Without the icons NelliTab is worse than a list of bookmarks because it is more difficult to scan. I cursed myself for updating.

I decided to go with the even more nuclear option: a restore point. Fortunately, I had one from just two days ago, when I installed the update for DaVinci Resolve. With some trepidation I chose it and waited. I waited for some time. I waited long enough that I became concerned.

But finally, my PC rebooted, and everything looked pretty much the same, as expected. I loaded up Firefox to take in the wonder of my now-un-updated NelliTab page. Except it was the exact same broken page as before. The restore point did nothing except take up time.

So, I’m not sure what to do next. If I do a refresh of Firefox, it’s going to affect everything, which will be a major pain in the patootie. There doesn’t seem to be a way to step back to a previous version of NelliTab, though I haven’t investigated this in detail yet (it’s getting late).

SPECIAL REPORT: I interrupt this post to inform you that a big ass stink bug just started casually strolling across my desk. What the hell. I can’t remember the last time I saw one. I didn’t even know what it was until I looked it up. I know a lot more about stink bugs now.

I put it in a glass covered with plastic wrap. It climbed up the glass and then sat attached upside down, to the plastic wrap. Reading up on them, it seems there are pros and cons to having them around, but mostly cons and so I put it in the freezer, as an entomologist said that’s the best way to get rid of them. I suppose it’s humane, sort of? I still feel bad. But I have this weird feeling that if I just tossed it outside it would make its way in again and breed or something. Something stinky. Anyway, I’m sorry, stink bug!

We now return to the Firefox extension crisis already in progress.

I’m writing this post in Edge because I can’t bear to use Firefox with a broken NelliTab. That almost sounds like a country song. I feel like this is a country song, a sad one. I’ll take another crack at fixing this tomorrow, hopefully imbued with the magical spirit of Christmas to help me.

Remember, kids, if something is working, DON’T UPDATE IT. I have re-learned this harsh lesson once again.

UPDATE: I looked through a pile of new tab/bookmark extensions (and still have oodles more to look through) but found none that really work the way NelliTab does. This makes me sad. I have manually added icons back to the sites I use most often in NelliTab as a band aid solution for now, and also submitted a bug report to the extension's Github page. We'll see how it goes, but for now I'm still using NelliTab.

These are a few of my favorite (browser extension) things

I use Firefox because Google sucks and I have a soft spot for the underdog, which Firefox very much is in this era of Chromium-or-bust browsers. Also, Apple doesn’t make Safari for Windows (anymore) and I’m sorry, Apple, I don’t use your devices all the time! So Firefox it is.

These are the extensions I use regularly and that I find useful. The list is a lot shorter than it used to be, as browsers began integrating a lot of features that previously required extensions.

  • Pocket. Save web stories to read later. Also converts text to a reader view, which makes the layout look nicer (and kills ads as a bonus side effect). Mozilla (makers of Firefox) owns Pocket, so it is integrated into Firefox, though it’s available for other browsers, too.
  • Font Finder (revived). I am always on the lookout for good fonts because a) I am always thinking about what will look good on my blog b) I have a fascination with fonts and typefaces and c) I’m just kind of weird in that I want to know the name of the font I’m looking at. Font Finder lets you reveal a font on a site with a simple click. You can even select a section of text and get it to render in whatever font you want, which is even more of a niche case usage that I’m looking for.
  • Dark Reader. Does its best to intelligently switch any site over to a dark mode. Handy for glaringly bright websites that don’t offer alternative views for those late night sessions. You can customize the color choices it makes, too, if you don’t like what it comes up with.
  • uBlock Origin. Yes, I block ads. Considering how they have become a vector for malware, tracking, slowing down page loading and breaking up page layout into nonsense, I feel no guilt in blocking ads. I pay for a lot of the sites I read regularly–when the option is present. It usually isn’t.
  • LanguageTool. This is the dullest name for a decent grammar and spell-checking extension ever. Similar to Grammarly, it offers to spell-check on the fly and has a nice single-click UI that please me. Like Grammarly and others, it gates some features behind a subscription, but the free version works well for me. My one complaint is it wants to insert commas everywhere.
  • OneNote Web Clipper. I don’t use OneNote that much anymore, but when I did, this extension worked well in letting you easily clip stuff for later use. Think of it as a more interactive version of Pocket.
  • NelliTab. Replacement for the New Tab page. After I found FVD speed dial started bogging down Firefox (it could take 30 seconds to start up) I sought out alternatives and the nice thing about NelliTab is it uses your bookmarks, so if you later decide to stop using NelliTab you still have your bookmarks all neatly organized into folders. The icons it uses look nice, too, and there’s a host of options for layout to help customize it just so. I may find I eventually bog this down, too, but for now it’s fine.