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Firefox frontmost window triggers large text .. with some letters


fncll

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I have a strange problem. If Firefox is the active window when I invoke Alfred, then entering the letter p and waiting a fraction of a second causes the large text feature to activate and then get dismissed (along with Alfred). This happens with no other apps running, it happens consistently with Firefox in the foreground, and it happens even with Firefox in "safe mode" with all add-ons, etc. disabled.

 

I am running OS X Mojave 10.14.3, Alfred v3.8 [959] and Firefox 65.0  

 

Any thoughts on how I can troubleshoot this?

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@fncll It's the first time I hear of this kind of issue; It looks like something must be dispatching a Cmd + L key combo (the Large Type combo) or another key combo you may have set for Large Type in workflows.

 

  • Are you saying that the issue specifically only occurs when you type "p", don't press return and wait?
  • Or does it happen when you type any text and wait with Firefox in the foreground?
  • Does it occur with ANY other apps in the foreground?

If you think you've disabled all third-party apps on your Mac that could be interfering, but still see it happening, try creating a secondary user account on your Mac, and testing the same thing there with absolutely nothing else other than Alfred and Firefox running. 

 

The more troubleshooting you can do to find out exactly when it does or doesn't happen, the more likely we can help you. This isn't a known issue or something anyone else has reported, so you'll need to do a bit of digging :)

 

Cheers,
Vero

 

 

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I'll try the 2nd user account test. In the meantime:

 

  • It only happens when Firefox is the active window when I invoke Alfred
  • It only happens when certain text is entered, particularly the letter p or, if type fast enough to get more characters in before large text is triggered, any word starting with p

 

Even stranger, once it happens, the next time I invoke alfred, it seems that *any* text I enter has this happen ... and then the next time I invoke Alfred, all is fine (except the dreaded letter p :)

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Also, even stranger, if I use Karabiner Events viewer, it shows no events differently when this happens with Firefox as the frontmost app than it does when things are normal with any other app frontmost...so whatever is triggering it is not being seen as a keystroke event :)

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I figured out the problem: it is a bug/problem with this Pinboard workflow: http://www.packal.org/workflow/pinboard

 

The description says it works with Firefox but the README, and an issue report on GitHub, indicates a problem with these symptoms...though it appears there should be a workaround, that doesn't seem to be the case currently.

 

All that said, it would be nice to be able to disable Large Text so this keyboard shortcut wasn't monopolized (or have an option to choose another key combo in Alfred)...

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7 hours ago, fncll said:

I figured out the problem: it is a bug/problem with this Pinboard workflow: http://www.packal.org/workflow/pinboard

 

The description says it works with Firefox but the README, and an issue report on GitHub, indicates a problem with these symptoms...though it appears there should be a workaround, that doesn't seem to be the case currently.

 

You’ve stumbled into why most people that build browser automation tools and Workflows do not include Firefox (and also why some people avoid Firefox completely): lack of AppleScript support.

 

Presumably, what that Workflow is doing to support Firefox is automating keystrokes, in this case ⌘L to select the address bar followed by ⌘C to copy its contents. This (and any method that relies on automating key presses) is hacky and should be avoided, though if you really want to keep Firefox, you don’t have much choice.

 

I recommend you go to Mozilla’s bug tracker and be one more voice asking for AppleScript support. Though some of those requests have been open for 17 years, so I wouldn’t be hopeful.

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21 hours ago, vitor said:

You’ve stumbled into why most people that build browser automation tools and Workflows do not include Firefox (and also why some people avoid Firefox completely): lack of AppleScript support.

 

This is really starting to bother me now that Google has gone full-on evil with Chrome and Apple is gutting extension functionality.

 

I can't conceive why the divvies at Mozilla decided to remove AppleScript support instead of improving it.

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On 2/13/2019 at 9:52 PM, deanishe said:

This is really starting to bother me now that Google has gone full-on evil with Chrome and Apple is gutting extension functionality.

 

Same. There’s no browser today that fits my needs:

  • Safari’s content blocking is laughable. The 50k rule limit is less than a third of my uBlock Origin rules. Plus, there’s really no good content blocker I’d trust to be kept up-to-date — the only decent one, 1Blocker X, exists only on iOS and there seem to be no plans to update it to macOS. Plus, Safari has no fine grained control to only allow JavaScript on certain websites. In sum, Apple has a good stance on privacy but their actions are lacklustre.
  • Ungoogled Chromium is a nice effort, but since they are removing code from another project, I don’t trust them to somehow not remove something they should, or not be behind on security features.
  • Opera and Vivaldi drink from the same water as Chrome, and I worry abou their affiliations. In this day and age, I’d rather not trust a closed-source web browser.
  • Brave also drinks from the same water as Chrome. They claim they don’t have to follow their bad practices, but the tune may change when they start to have to maintain their own browser engine fork due to the differences.
  • A bunch of other web browsers that neither support AppleScript nor have enough users/scrutiny for me to trust them.
  • Firefox has no AppleScript support and its performance on macOS is atrocious. I can get past the latter, but not the former.
Edited by vitor
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2 hours ago, vitor said:

Plus, there’s really no good content blocker I’d trust to be kept up-to-date

 

Have you tried blocking at the DNS level? My local DNS server has a blacklist of ~500,000 hosts/domains. As my router pushes its address via DHCP, every device on the network is automatically protected.

 

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I do blocking at the /etc/hosts level, with a list from StevenBlack/hosts. But the typical blocklists such as the ones uBlock Origin uses have further granularity than outright blocking an entire domain.

 

59 minutes ago, deanishe said:

a blacklist of ~500,000 hosts/domains.

 

That is a lot, though. I would consider that to my /etc/hosts file (not to the router as I’m sure that’d break something for other people). Is the list public? And more important, does it receive regular updates?

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1 hour ago, vitor said:

have further granularity than outright blocking an entire domain.

 

That's why I also use uBlock. Thing is, there are a lot of domains where outright blocking is appropriate.

 

1 hour ago, vitor said:

Is the list public? And more important, does it receive regular updates?

 

Kinda and yes. I manage my own list based on 20+ blacklists and my own whitelist.

 

I want to use something like this, which supports both domains and hostnames. I have a lot of entries like this:

+------+---------------------------------+------------+
|  #   |             Domain              | Subdomains |
+------+---------------------------------+------------+
|    1 | 302br.net                       |      17939 |
|    2 | fbcdn.net                       |      13702 |
|    3 | 2o7.net                         |       8175 |
|    4 | facebook.com                    |       4755 |
|    5 | intellitxt.com                  |       2809 |
|    6 | tumblr.com                      |       1683 |
|    7 | hitbox.com                      |       1413 |
|    8 | sbcglobal.net                   |       1363 |
|    9 | 51yes.com                       |       1143 |
|   10 | voluumtrk.com                   |       1019 |

 

With domain support, I can just block the whole lot with one entry instead of several thousand. Waaay more efficient.

 

My current solution does support domain whitelisting (so it will whitelist all subdomains via one entry), but I need to modify it to support domain blacklisting via unbound, the DNS server I use.

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Here's the full list of the blacklists I'm currently using.

+----+------------------------------------------+--------+--------+----------+--------+
| #  |                  Title                   | Total  | Unique | Unique % | Dupes  |
+----+------------------------------------------+--------+--------+----------+--------+
|  1 | Chefkoch - Facebook.txt                  |  18797 |  18649 |     99.2 |    148 |
|  2 | Chefkoch - NSA.txt                       |   8198 |   8054 |     98.2 |    144 |
|  3 | Mandiant.txt                             |   2046 |   1992 |     97.4 |     54 |
|  4 | Samsung Smart.txt                        |     60 |     58 |     96.7 |      2 |
|  5 | Chefkoch - Pinterest.txt                 |    426 |    409 |     96.0 |     17 |
|  6 | quidsup - Trackers.txt                   |  13966 |  12474 |     89.3 |   1492 |
|  7 | Mahakala.txt                             | 255255 | 188112 |     73.7 |  67143 |
|  8 | Chefkoch - Coinminers.txt                |  18605 |  13434 |     72.2 |   5171 |
|  9 | crazy-max - WindowsSpyBlocker Other.txt  |    121 |     83 |     68.6 |     38 |
| 10 | Immortal Domains.txt                     |   3203 |   1994 |     62.3 |   1209 |
| 11 | Chefkoch - CCleaner.txt                  |     17 |     10 |     58.8 |      7 |
| 12 | MalwareDomains.txt                       |  26880 |  14850 |     55.2 |  12030 |
| 13 | crazy-max - WindowsSpyBlocker            |    360 |    197 |     54.7 |    163 |
|    | Telemetry.txt                            |        |        |          |        |
| 14 | Chefkoch - Ads+Trackers.txt              |  66584 |  31194 |     46.8 |  35390 |
| 15 | Chefkoch - Malware.txt                   |  88610 |  40804 |     46.0 |  47806 |
| 16 | crazy-max - WindowsSpyBlocker Update.txt |    493 |    225 |     45.6 |    268 |
| 17 | Prigent - Ads.txt                        |   1084 |    345 |     31.8 |    739 |
| 18 | quidsup - Malware.txt                    |     89 |     22 |     24.7 |     67 |
| 19 | Coin Miners.txt                          |    664 |    160 |     24.1 |    504 |
| 20 | Cameleon.txt                             |  20136 |   4834 |     24.0 |  15302 |
| 21 | Chefkoch - Skype.txt                     |    120 |     25 |     20.8 |     95 |
| 22 | Chefkoch - Instagram.txt                 |      5 |      1 |     20.0 |      4 |
| 23 | Adguard.txt                              |  25950 |   4974 |     19.2 |  20976 |
| 24 | Prigent - Malware.txt                    |   3333 |    322 |      9.7 |   3011 |
| 25 | blacklist.txt                            |    566 |     49 |      8.7 |    517 |
| 26 | StevenBlack - Fakenews & Gambling.txt    |  41934 |   2504 |      6.0 |  39430 |
| 27 | Chefkoch - Popads.txt                    |   9033 |    356 |      3.9 |   8677 |
| 28 | Easylist.txt                             |  18589 |    605 |      3.3 |  17984 |
| 29 | Easy Privacy.txt                         |   6645 |    140 |      2.1 |   6505 |
| 30 | EasyList DE.txt                          |    408 |      5 |      1.2 |    403 |
| 31 | Zeustracker.txt                          |    383 |      2 |      0.5 |    381 |
| 32 | Disconnect.me - Malvertising.txt         |   2794 |     14 |      0.5 |   2780 |
| 33 | Abuse.ch Ransomware.txt                  |   1903 |      2 |      0.1 |   1901 |
| 34 | jmdugan - Pinterest.txt                  |     14 |      0 |      0.0 |     14 |
+----+------------------------------------------+--------+--------+----------+--------+
|    |                  Total                   | 637271 | 441658 |   69.3   | 195613 |
+----+------------------------------------------+--------+--------+----------+--------+

The hosts file is 21MB (though half of it is comments), so you need a fairly serious DNS server like unbound to handle it.

Edited by deanishe
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