General chat

[silverwings15]

hey MS, it's mime from reddit 👋 looks like you've been putting some massive work into the proton stuff. i'm still waiting for v89 to hit beta channel before i try it out, so a little more than a month left to go. just checking in on you and saying thanks for the Ctrl W closes pinned tab script, brilliant stuff really. such a simple idea yet a massive improvement over default behavior for me.

[aminomancer]

thanks man sorry I took so long to reply, I didn't realize anyone was using this tab and it sends the email updates to my spam inbox. I still haven't worked out a light mode, been pretty busy just keeping up with the proton changes, but I have converted a lot more color values and other stuff to variables in the process so making a light mode should be easier now

[silverwings15]

haha i didn't know that's the official name, Moz used the term tick in the changelog during rollout so i just went with that. i also didn't make the connection that it uses the same color as the findbar hits, that makes sense. thanks for delivering the message, i will also create a bugzilla account right away lol

[aminomancer]

Hey I think it was you who asked about the collapsing overlay scrollbars? Specifically about how they seem to be invisible sometimes when the page loads, and don't appear until you move your mouse over them? Well it turns out this is due to a pref, layout.css.cached-scrollbar-styles.enabled, it just needs to be set to false and the problem apparently goes away

[silverwings15]

wow nice find, i'll set it to false and test for a while. i feel like it was already happening a lot less since i updated to v88 (placebo?) so the effect won't be as noticeable, but nevertheless am happy to have the issue fully stamped out

[aminomancer]

hmm yeah maybe. I never noticed it happening inside an actual browser window, but I noticed it would happen like 99% of the time when opening a panel in the UI. like for the history toolbar button or all tabs button, when their popups had a scrollbar, it would almost always be invisible until I moused over its general location. I always figured that was some kind of value caching. I think it may also be the reason I ran into problems with my old script that was designed to expand the scrollbar while mousewheel scrolling. I wanted to set it up so that it would expand when hovering it, but also when just scrolling with the mousewheel. but every time I tried it, it'd expand but it'd get stuck in its expanded state until mousing over it. seems like a very similar pattern, which I guess is just firefox caching a whole bunch of CSS values because it doesn't expect them to change — they're normally set in stone. so I'm gonna try reevaluating that soon.

and yeah, it's a very lucky find, as it happens I was just experimenting with some of the weird look and feel scrollbar prefs that aren't publicly documented or discussed anywhere, when it occurred to me I don't think I ever bothered to look at the basic scrollbar stylesheet. and then I saw this which just blew my mind and it suddenly it all made sense lol.

[silverwings15]

haha that's quite fortunate that you'd stumble on it like that

[silverwings15]

your repo is seriously amazing now - i tested everything on a new profile the other week and was seriously impressed. i tried adding some of the scripts in my current profile to it though and it didn't work at all - guess i need to do more than just dropping them into the scripts folder, but i haven't got to figuring that out yet.

also, remember when you said you wanted ideas for scripts a few months back? i just thought of one. you know how there are addons that let you jump back and forth between your most recent tabs by clicking on the tab itself? i always found them quite annoying to use because sometimes you'd just click on the tab unintentionally and you jump off to a tab that's really far away, and since the new tab isn't focused on (at least not on TST), you'd have to scroll quite a bit to search for it so you can click it to get back to the tab you were originally on. however, what if you can accomplish the same thing via a key combo instead? that would eliminate the whole misclicking issue completely

leme know what you think!

[aminomancer]

hmm, which scripts didn't work? I've made some changes to how this stuff fundamentally works, so maybe you need to reinstall fx-autoconfig and other stuff. if you're also using the theme you would also need to replace the resources folder and utils/chrome.manifest. and maybe you need to set some prefs. prefs shouldn't be required for the scripts to work, but I guess you could try downloading the user.js file just in case.

as for a key combo that switches between recently used tabs, you can just set browser.ctrlTab.sortByRecentlyUsed to true and it already does that. or is your idea different? I can't say I've heard of addons that do something like that so idk if it's the same thing. I don't browse addons very often anymore. maybe you can send an example?

edit: I guess ctrl+tab doesn't work on macOS since there's already a system hotkey. seems weird that Firefox doesn't remap it to alt+tab or something on macOS. so if you're using macOS then maybe it would be better to just remap the ctrl+tab system. that might be difficult since it's not exactly a typical hotkey, it's a pretty elaborate system. but it's certainly better than making a new hotkey that can only switch to the most recent tab.

[silverwings15]

wow, all these years and i never knew about Ctrl-Tab.. exactly what i want. so glad you showed me this

the scripts i mentioned are just some of Aris and xiaoxiaoflood's scripts that i'm currently using and wanted to transfer over to your setup by dropping them into the 'script' folder. do i have to add their names to one of the .css files first? also, i just found out that i was using an older version of fx-autoconfig, so i'll make a fresh installation on the weekend and test everything again

[aminomancer]

no, CSS doesn't have anything to do with scripts. I mean some scripts might work in tandem with CSS but that's not a general thing. most likely the scripts are just incompatible with fx-autoconfig. updating fx-autoconfig won't change that since it works in a very different way. the updates just relate to a new utility function that can refresh user stylesheets. I don't know of any scripts that actually use it yet.

most of the scripts for xiaoxiaoflood's loader definitely won't work in fx-autoconfig without significant changes. that's why I have ports of some of those scripts on here, the originals only work with xiaoxiaoflood's loader, for several reasons. not small or easy things to change either. that loader runs scripts before any windows have opened, and then executes some specified function at startup. fx-autoconfig can do that with an optional directive, but in that mode it doesn't have access to any global objects provided by the loader. the xiaoxiaoflood scripts generally rely heavily on this global _UC object. fx-autoconfig has something similar in _ucUtils but it's not global, it's per-window and it's just for utilities. there's a function that can instantiate global objects which can be retrieved from different windows but that too requires significant changes to the xiaoxiaoflood scripts. I don't know about Aris though, I'm not sure what that is.

[silverwings15]

Aris is another guy who does FF customization, you can find his repos here:

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforFx/

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx

the xiaoxiaoflood scripts that i'm using right now all work with fx-autoconfig, or at least the version of it from last year that i currently have, so i feel like compatibility shouldn't be an issue here. will investigate further and let you know

[aminomancer]

Well if you can send me the specific scripts that aren't working I can definitely tell you why. Excluding that, it's anyone's guess. The scripts on the Aris-t2 repo look like they should work fine with fx-autoconfig actually. At least the ones I checked. They should work, though they declare a lot of unscoped variables with the var keyword instead of let or const which isn't great. Could end up redeclaring existing global variables, since some of firefox's older JS components do still use var outside of blocks or modules. Or it could at least get them confused within the script's context.

Aside from compatibility with old browsers (which isn't a factor in what we're doing obviously) there isn't much reason to use var anymore unless you specifically are trying to make the variable unscoped. But there are safer ways of doing that, like properties. That's why I use mostly classes now, it's just the minimal intrusion on Firefox's built-in scripts. So if I was gonna use some of these I'd probably want to refactor them slightly. It's easy enough to replace all the var declarations with let though. There's other stuff too, like wrapping the script in an IIFE and waiting for delayed startup but that's more complicated. So I'd suggest just send me whatever script you can't get to work, these all seem to be pretty short scripts that can be adjusted quickly.

[silverwings15]

aside from some of your scripts that are already part of this repo, i'm using the following:

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforFx/blob/master/scripts/editbookmarkspopup_expanded.uc.js
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforFx/blob/master/scripts/favicon_in_urlbar.uc.js
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforFx/blob/master/scripts/restart_button.uc.js
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomJSforFx/blob/master/scripts/addonbar.uc.js
https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/blob/master/chrome/rebuild_userChrome.uc.js
https://github.com/mimecry/dotfiles/blob/master/persistent_mininal_scrollbar.uc.js (your scrollbar script that you shared some time back which i believe is not part of this repo)

would be awesome to these integrated into your setup, especially the rebuild_userchrome one as it allows quick and simple disabling/reenabling of scripts

[aminomancer]

The scrollbar is still in this repo, it's just in userChrome.ag.css, which gets loaded by userChromeAgentAuthorSheetLoader.uc.js. Just a cleaner way of doing things that don't require dedicated javascript. So you don't need that script anymore. You just need the agent sheet and the loader, plus a pref layout.css.cached-scrollbar-styles.enabled which needs to be false.

The rebuild userChrome script can't work in fx-autoconfig FYI, it's just a fundamental difference between the loaders. fx-autoconfig always requires a restart when scripts are disabled/enabled. Even if it had that feature, it wouldn't work because it all depends on a script. Only reason that feature works is because xiaoxiaoflood puts special behavior for initialization and destruction in every script. None of my scripts have anything like that, so they wouldn't know what to do to disable themselves, and they also rely on startup queues that won't exist when they're re-enabled dynamically. Some of them can only run during startup. It's a limitation but I don't ever disable scripts anyway, if I don't wanna use a script then I just delete it.

I don't see any reason why editbookmarkspopup_expanded.uc.js wouldn't work in fx-autoconfig. Are you sure it works with any loader? It might just be old. Same with the other Aris scripts. They are designed to be loaded by a similar loader to fx-autoconfig. A bit simpler but basically the same fundamental method. So what works for that loader should work for fx-autoconfig. You can see just looking at them what a big difference there is between xiaoxiaoflood's scripts vs mine and Aris-t2's and Alice0775's. There's the window method, which all ours use, and there's the global method, which most of xiaoxiaoflood's scripts use. So I expect all of Alice0775's and Aris-t2's scripts to be compatible with fx-autoconfig.

[silverwings15]

so i figured out that it isn't the scripts i'm adding that aren't working, it's that none of the scripts in the repo work at all. i went back to read the instructions and noticed that you mention it's only confirmed working for Nightly now, so i'll work on getting that set up and then report back

[aminomancer]

Eh, the scripts do work in stable, it's just the theme that might look weird in stable

[aminomancer]

you sure you aren't missing something? do you get the autoconfig startup warning in the console?

[silverwings15]

wow i still can't get your scripts working no matter what i try. this appears on startup so fx-autoconfig seems to be working properly

here is how i added your files, i'm quite sure they're all in the correct locations. this is driving me nuts lol

[aminomancer]

show me what chrome.manifest says

[aminomancer]

show me what chrome.manifest says

[aminomancer]

you sure chrome.manifest is searching in the script folder and not the JS folder? you might need to update the paths in the manifest to match the paths in your folder.

also, maybe it's due to the name of the profile folder. I doubt it, but you should check to make sure the name of the profile folder actually matches the name of the profile in profiles.ini and installs.ini. in the firefox roaming appdata folder. and maybe try making a new profile with a more generic name, let firefox name it that is.

[aminomancer]

if all else fails, try replacing all the content of boot.jsm with this, and replacing all the content of config.js with this

[silverwings15]

oh man you got it, i pulled chrome.manifest from the fx-autoconfig repo and didn't notice he'd made that particular change. playing around with all your scripts now and they're so beautiful...

[aminomancer]

haha thanks, never thought about it that way before. I guess it is content. I have to get back into it, I've been pretty strapped for javascript ideas lately. and I don't think my CSS stuff is very popular, it seems like everyone is obsessed with "one-line" toolbar layouts recently. but I just don't see a way to make that look good without reverting tabs back to proton's button-like appearance. so the repo has been kinda stagnating these past weeks

[silverwings15]

i'm also in the camp of 'more space = more room to display content' so i can defo understand why. even though it is sacrilegious to say here :D, as a TST user, i don't think i can ever go back to a setup that utilizes a horizontal tab bar. that and the color theme aside, i would defo steal your CSS in a heartbeat

[aminomancer]

yeah I figured I'd try making a vertical tab layout since it seems so popular now. put an enormous amount of effort into doing it with autoconfig too, since tab switcher addons look and feel so sketchy to me. especially their context menus. and of course they basically hijack the sidebar feature. after I made it, I tried hiding the horizontal tab bar, since what use is a vertical tab bar if it's not conserving vertical space. but the navbar just felt so barren and unnaturally small. maybe I'm just so used to this layout I can't shake it, but I feel like the overall screen composition, the proportions objectively look off like that. it'd be like if I made the navbar only 10px tall on a 1080p window. I'm an old graphics guy, I guess I have a lot of strong opinions about what constitutes good design.

so in the end although I have it installed, I almost never use my own vertical tabs script lol. I mostly turn it on just to admire it and pat myself on the proverbial back. it's not quite up to par with TST anyway, I guess the main feature of TST is the "tree" part. visible and modifiable tab hierarchies. it's funny, firefox makes it easier for addons to do that than for itself. addons are worse in almost every way and almost never look like a real part of the UI, but for whatever reason the tabs API exposes methods and properties that don't really exist in the tab browser itself. it's still possible to make that happen but it's a lot of time to spend on something I don't even use myself

[silverwings15]

haha yeah the vertical pane looks nice and is super smooth and responsive (especially the tab dragging, fockin love that), but features wise it just can't compete with TST and its army of helper addons.

i know you said not to attempt making a light theme right now, but i'm still gonna try and play around with the hue values, see what happens

[aminomancer]

it should be a lot easier now than it was in the past. almost everything important is integrated with uc-globals.css and uc-low-globals.css. you will have to deal with some of the prefers-color-scheme media queries though. I made those when I was attempting to make a light mode, but in many cases I never added an actual light version. so the rules in those queries don't have any light mode corollary. so you'll have to duplicate them and put them outside and above the media query. it's good though, I don't mind at all and if you come up with anything feel free to make a PR or upload it some other way.

[silverwings15]

so i have this idea that you perhaps can try working into your findbar script. a while back i think i told you about this small bit of code i was using, that hides my floating findbar whenever it goes out of focus

/* Findbar disappears when unfocused */
findbar:not(:focus-within) {
  height: 0 !important;
  overflow: hidden !important;
  transition: height 0.0s ease 0s !important;
}

however, since version 89 it no longer functions correctly. instead of hiding the bar, it just collapses it but not completely, like this

i asked Aris if there was a way to fix it via CSS, and he said

I'm surprised there even was a way to achieve this. The findbar node does not offer any attributes to work with.

so am wondering if it is at all possible to restore this functionality via JS. what do you think?

[aminomancer]

Not sure why javascript would be necessary. :focus-within is all you need, if you used javascript to add an attribute associated with focus state, it would just be functionally equivalent.

And that wouldn't solve the issue anyway. I mean, your selector is clearly working, so you don't need javascript to capture the state. And the properties are applying too. You just don't have all the right properties you need to fully shrink the findbar, I guess because since proton, padding was added to the findbar.

What's the rest of the CSS? I don't know if my findbar is styled quite like yours, can't really tell from the screenshot. I tested the ruleset with my theme and it did work, there was just padding in the findbar spreading its bounding box. So this worked for me

findbar:not(:focus-within) {
    overflow: hidden !important;
    height: 0 !important;
    padding-block: 0 !important;
    transition: height 0.0s ease 0s !important;
}

And idk, maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but it's not surprising at all that it works. That's like saying you need to set an attribute on mouseover/mouseleave to convey hover state to CSS when there's already a :hover pseudo-class.

[silverwings15]

wow, spot on. your mastery of firefox modding is evident, even compared to other knowledgeable people 👍. thanks man

[aminomancer]

Haha oh thanks, so that worked?

[silverwings15]

yep worked perfectly :)

[silverwings15]

had a bit of time to play around with your latest findbar CSS along with the autohide CSS that i asked about previously.. one thing i can't replicate is to get it to respect your current animation settings. i played around with both transition and transition-duration values, but the fade in/fade out animation doesn't trigger no matter what. any idea about this one?

[aminomancer]

That's because you're using properties that are not animatable at all, like overflow. Technically height is animatable but only under certain circumstances, and I don't know what those circumstances are. I have often had problems animating it with some display modes. So I usually just don't use it at all. I also think it looks better to move the element than to squish it down.

But if you were going to animate its squishing down, you don't want to use one like height because that causes a reflow. Like, all the child elements' positions and size need to be recalculated formally because their container's height has changed. If you imagine changing the height of just a <p> element full of text, you can imagine how the flow of the text needs to change in accordance somehow. Or it needs to overflow off the element. So that's a reflow, a recalculation of the positions and sizes of elements. Whereas if you used transform: scaleY(50%) or something, you could get the same effect but it would not reflow.

Idk the technical details of how that works, but at the very least it's as if a frame buffer was taken and the frame buffer was squished down. So the positions and orientations of the child elements don't change. They all remain the same in relation to each other, only the proportional size of the whole thing changes. As if you took a screenshot of the findbar and then squished its height down. So that's generally gonna be a lot better for most animations.

I did that in the urlbar results, albeit very very slightly. Scale animations on big, complex objects with lots of children are often kind of ugly if they're too extreme. So that one's scale only changes to like 99.99% or something. But in this case the object is small enough I don't think that effect would look good or even be noticeable. So I just use transform: translateY(-2em) which, paired with opacity: 0 is good enough.

I figured your use of height and overflow as the means of hiding the findbar meant you wanted it to have no animations. If you're using my stylesheet uc-findbar.css then you should just get rid of the ruleset you originally posted, with the height and overflow rules, and replace the fourth ruleset in uc-findbar.css...

findbar[hidden] {
    margin-bottom: auto !important;
    visibility: visible !important;
    transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s !important;
    pointer-events: none;
    transform: translateY(-2em);
}

with this:

findbar[hidden],
findbar:not(:focus-within) {
    margin-bottom: auto !important;
    visibility: visible !important;
    transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s !important;
    pointer-events: none;
    transform: translateY(-2em);
	opacity: 0;
}

Like I mentioned before, you could also use javascript to actually set the hidden attribute on receiving a blur event. That would sort of be cleaner in theory, since firefox already uses the hidden property to hide the findbar. But in practice it's basically the same thing as using :not(:focus-within)

[silverwings15]

you're spot on as always, especially the part about reflow which i encountered myself while messing around with the values. amazing!

[silverwings15]

noticed that you merged findbarmatcheslabel.uc.js into findbarmods.uc.js (along with the autohide setting, yay) so i'm playing around with it and uc-findbar.css now in a blank profile, pretty fun. i found this redundant comment in uc-findbar.css, line 71 that mentions findbarMatchesLabel.uc.js, just a headsup

[silverwings15]

no no, i completely understood. i was simply mentioning my workaround for your 'previous' version of the findbar which i'm still currently using, as i haven't gotten around to updating it yet 😅

[aminomancer]

oh gotcha. yeah it's a lot of updates to keep up with. I wish I knew a better way of distributing this stuff. I'm sure it would be easy to create a simple installer/updater for picking and choosing the files and keeping them up to date automatically, but I don't know much about any OS scripting languages. if it were feasible I would simply write it as a firefox extension, or even an autoconfig script for installing other autoconfig scripts haha.

actually, maybe that is possible. do you think that would actually be worthwhile? it seems like, if I could make it work for my own scripts, I could probably make it function as a kind of script store in general. I know someone was doing that with CSS stylesheets recently, with a lot of hype, but seems like development just abruptly stopped a couple months ago.

[silverwings15]

hmm definitely feasible for (some of) the scripts, but wouldn't it get too complicated to make the CSS components modular to the point where they can seamlessly be plugged into any setup? especially those with preexisting CSS. plus, your repo is best used in its entirety anyway, i would too if i could figure out the hundreds of color values you used in uc-globals.css and convert those to a light theme 😄. i tried messing around with that for half an hour before giving up entirely lol

i updated the findbar stuff, and it works just fine on a new profile, but in my current profile, the label still disappears when the case sensitivity button is hidden. then i tried copying the CSS in my profile (which includes some modifications i made for compatibility) over to the new profile, and it still works on there. not sure what the issue is, but i'll enjoy getting to the bottom of this when i have time in the next day or two

[aminomancer]

Did you clear your startup cache? In what way are you hiding the button? display or visibility? Both of them are working fine for me, though it looks better with a few px margin-right when the case sensitivity button is hidden. I guess because the entire-word button has less empty space. I would try setting the CSS the way you want it and then restart firefox while clearing the startup cache. If you're using my appMenuMods script you can just right click the "restart" button in the app menu. Or shift click or ctrl click. Restarting shouldn't technically be necessary, as long as you open and close the findbar after modifying the CSS. But if you update the script, clearing the startup cache is always necessary, and sometimes doesn't work the first time.

[silverwings15]

oh duh, clearing startup cache did the trick.. thanks man, completely forgot about that 😬. i also added 6px margin-right per your suggestion, looks perfect now!

[KleinByte]

Hey I just wanted to let you know, I absolutely apprecate the work you put into this. Thank-you for also spending dozens of hours in writing up the entire readme that explains everything. Even your damn scripts you wrote have extensive descriptions in the code.

This project is absolutely a masterpiece.

I really hope you never stop maintaining this, and I say that out of the upmost respect and not from entitlement.
After getting everything setup, I cant see myself using anything else.

Truly from the bottom of my heart, as much as words can express, I apprecate all the work you've done.

Also you 100% should setup donations for this project. Time is money as they say, and I'd love to repay your time with some money.
Hopefully after Im more experienced(still in college), I could even help fix future issues that may arise.

[aminomancer]

Thanks man I appreciate it a lot. You're studying computer science then?

[aminomancer]

@KleinByte let me know if you can see the pink "Sponsor" button on the right side of the repo main page. I just followed the instructions verbatim, figured this was the simplest method

[KleinByte]

Done. Its working, got a monthly donation set up. Cheers.

[aminomancer]

Thanks! I added you to the readme.

[silverwings15]

@aminomancer so very glad to see this project still going strong almost 3 years on. much love