@
wicknix &
z970mp (& al.) Hopefully you're all getting bored locked in your
prison cells cosy homes, so I can get hold of some of your attention with more weird stuff.
1. On
this site , the video at the top only appears, and the inline links to footnotes and the Sources and References menu at the bottom are only active if "Firefox/" in the User Agent string is set no higher than "/53.9". I worked this out starting from AF's Default UA: setting it to "/54" or higher inhibits these features. Is there a way to tweak things so that sites like this one accept the pretence of a higher version? I had normally been using "Fx 60.9 / NT 6.3", as once recommended by wicknix I believe. The idea is to avoid ending up having to keep a database of which sites work with which UAs. Btw., this same site doesn't care which Mac OS X version is set in the string, so I've set it to 10.12.
2. Size of the Profile's places.sqlite file. I've mentioned some time back how at some point it had been growing and shrinking between 31.5Mb and 49.1Mb. A few days ago, it went back to 49.1Mb —
literally in front of my eyes. When I saw it happen, I quit AF, replaced the Profile folder with a fresh back-up from only two minutes earlier, relaunched AF, and
within seconds, the file's size went again from 31.5 to 41.9. Repeated the operation several times, then deleted a few Bookmarks and the History over 6 months, but this didn't change anything: it has stubbornly remained the same 41.9Mb. Which doesn't seem to hurt, I now see, but it's still mind-boggling to watch it grow without any action on my part, always by the same 10.4Mb increment (filled with what?) Any explanation?
3. More observations re: AF crashes & videos, in the wake of
the exchanges you were both having a little while back. There's no way around it, the two are definitely connected: lately, I have still been experiencing about one crash a day, but not one that wasn't video-related.
Stating the obvious: there are videos that
A. “belong” to the site they appear on, or
B. are embedded from external providers (say, Vimeo). Either way, some videos
a. start playing without being asked to;
b. only play when you press the Play button;
c. don't play, but “churn” (i.e. give you a revolving wheel or something similar); or
d. don't play and stay put — apparently.
B+c seems to be the worse case in terms of hijacking CPU power and not releasing it when you press the Stop button, or even after closing the tab. This practically always leads to AF crashing when quitting it, seemingly because it's unable to clear up that excess CPU use.
Case in point. A couple of days ago I opened two separate tabs following links in an article. Both of them had embedded
Twitter videos. The first one played the video, so when that was done and I had closed the tab, I could watch CPU use go back down to the lower 1 or 2-digit values that are normal when AF is “at rest”. The second one did not play, did not even show the wheel, so I gave up after pressing back and forth a couple of times to try to get it working. But CPU use remained above 100% as per the scenario above, granting me the expected crash.
There are other cases and a variety of combinations, but these ones, with Twitter, were quite exemplary. I could also add a subdivision according to what can be visualized in DownThemAll, between
I. sites where the video consists of one single downloadable file, and
II. sites where it consists of a bunch of small segments which, I guess, are chained to each other during playback, but are useless when you download them. How this particularity entwines with a/b/c/d above, I cannot tell, but possibly II. is more likely to refuse to start playing.
YouTube is a bit of a different case. Just as I usually open all external links I'm interested in in an article before looking into the single tabs (instead of going back and forth), I open all the links to the videos from a YouTube channel that I wish to see before downloading them from their respective pages. But, as explained a few posts ago, loading too many of them in one go was causing AF to crash, so I have tried to avoid doing that.
Up to now, I wasn't getting the users' comments, just a churning wheel instead. I don't have a Google account, it wouldn't have mattered if it hadn't been distinctly slowing down the single page's loading. Using one cookie extension to replacing "Cookies denied…" with the default "1st party allowed etc." while “self-destructing YouTube's cookies after closing its tabs” with another extension, has taken care of this, so now the comments load immediately.
Not that it's foolproof: I still have had one case since of patiently loading one by one 6 or 7 YouTube tabs… and having AF crash after they were all done.
Happy (self-) isolation!
