Oct 14, 2026, 5:08 PMAlso, as long as I'm now highly customizing my browser instead of simply accepting whatever slop Mozilla gives me… what I *want*, what I *really want*, is to remove the "V", put the "drawer"/"Firefox View" on the *right* side where the V is, and have clicking the button auto-select the text entry box in either "recent browsing" or "open tabs"? To replicate the old Chrome mid-2023 behavior?
Could I do this fancy thing with… "User Chrome"? or "XUL"? Or "ZOOL"?
Oct 14, 2026, 5:08 PMBack in the 00s I wrote a bunch of "XUL". The "XUL" called out to a web service I operated using "XML-RPC". I thought this was so cool. I thought this was the future of technology.
Oct 14, 2026, 5:12 PMRE: https://social.erambert.me/@eramdam/117440354252413751
Yes… ha ha ha… yes!!!
This is a Firefox feature! This has nothing to do with LibreWolf! I could've been doing this all along! I assumed "configure toolbar" only configured the toolbar and not the stuff above the toolbar! Oh, more fool I!
Oct 14, 2026, 5:14 PMMore things I wonder but I think I know the answer to
1. Does "Add tab to taskbar" add the tab to… the *Windows* taskbar?
2. Container groups are still a plugin, published by Firefox. Does that mean if I install the container groups plugin on LibreWolf, I'm still gonna be getting ads for Firefox's VPN service or whatever even in LibreWolf?
3. Librewolf doesn't make "Profiles" any easier to use then their (wildly impractical) state in baseline Firefox 140esr, does it?
Oct 14, 2026, 5:11 PM@mcc XML RPC was so hot in the 00s. I made a prototype of a browser based MMO with it in 2010.
@mcc 1. Yes. I'm not sure if it's exactly the same as PWAs. I think it's like "install PWA" if there is a PWA, but otherwise just makes the tab into its own window/taskbar item that you can pin to the taskbar if you want.
2. If you get it from a.m.o, probably. I assume you can get a build from outside of a.m.o without that. I'm not sure.
3. AFAIK no. I find Profiles largely useless except for testing how things would behave in a completely vulnerable browser, and for that just running with $HOME pointed to something else (and a suitable sandbox since it's wide open) works better for me than Profiles. Container tabs and First-party Isolate meet my needs better for everything else.
Oct 14, 2026, 5:19 PM@dalias i didn't know about. First Party Isolate. I think I'm going to have to do a certain amount of reading to understand how it's different from regular firefox isolation
@mcc First-party isolate makes it so all cookies/storage for embedded third-party resources are scoped under the domain in the URL bar. It was developed by/for Tor Browser and upstreamed in Firefox. The Mozilla folks don't much like that it exists, and have developed their own much weaker heuristic 3p tracking protections that it replaces.
The canonical example is that embedded social media widgets can never see your logged-in state on their own site. Basically, embeds for tracking don't work at all.
Oct 14, 2026, 5:25 PM@dalias To your knowledge, how different is this from "Strict" tracking protection in Librewolf?
Also, I want to have the option to share data across domains, for example if a bank or something has spread a webapp across multiple domains for valid engineering reasons, I assume this can still be opted into?
@mcc There's no way to disable 1p-isolate on a per-site basis or anything. It's global.
I have not run into anything that seems to be broken by it. Normal SSO-type workflows nowadays know they have to pass data thru redirects and stuff rather than relying on being able to access cross-domain cookie state.
But if you're concerned, using a weaker tracking protection that can be turned off per-site might be a better choice for you. You cannot switch later without losing all your saved cookies (because of how the re-scoping works; actually I think the scoped ones are still there, but scoped in a way they'll never get used unless you switch 1p-isolate back to how it was set before).
Oct 14, 2026, 5:32 PM@dalias Well, the reason I'm asking is Librewolf has this big box for a "strict" mode, and opt-outs to a "strict" mode, and this is unique UI not in base firefox, and I know this corresponds to SOMETHING that is either an option in Base Firefox or actively on in Base Firefox but I'm still a little confused about what.
@mcc Then I'm confused, because upstream Firefox has a "Strict" setting for "Enhanced Tracking Protection" too. Sorry, I don't want to speculate more about details I don't know about.
Oct 14, 2026, 5:35 PM@dalias I think that's because it's confusing.
@mcc Firefox letting you put toolbar buttons in the tab bar has been a thing for well over a decade and a hundred releases, I think they called that redesign "Australis"? Pretty neat thing if you insist on having maximum space for the address bar
@mcc in a way it was (electron), just not XUL itself.
Oct 14, 2026, 5:15 PM@ChartreuseK yes, and XML-RPC failed but XmlHTTPRequest+JSON succeeded
@mcc not sure it was really for the best, but the paradigm did succeed
Oct 14, 2026, 5:34 PM@ChartreuseK Yeah
@mcc yeah, I also thought XUL was cool. But even being an xslt and xml schema junky of yore, I inevitably learned XUL IS CRUEL.
Oct 14, 2026, 6:43 PM@mcc You reminded me that I wrote a command-line XML-RPC caller in 2005. It probably still works.
Oh god, looking at the code it uses XSLT to format the results. I just got XML-PTSD.
@mcc misspelled "Zuul".
There is only Zuul.
@mcc It seems like "Firefox View" is just an item you can add/remove/move with Customize Toolbar, so I think you can put it on the right of the tab bar, or on the main toolbar.
Oct 14, 2026, 5:15 PM@dalias extremely loud correct buzzer