blog.plee.me About software, technology and random things

24Oct/180

Disable Autoplay For Videos in Firefox 63

Hi!

Just after updating to Mozilla Firefox 63 (on Windows), I found that my setting to disable autoplaying media / videos was no longer effective - at least for HTML5 videos.

Apparently one of the changes for this release was to include an autoplay video blocker, but I could not find anything definitive about this in the settings.

I decided to disable autoplay for all videos (which is my preferred setting anyway) once again by doing the following:

  1. Open the config editor by entering about:config in the navigation bar.
  2. Enter the "autoplay" as a filter.
  3. Find the entry "media.autoplay.default", double-click it and set it to "1" to disable media autoplay browser-wide.

I just left the old setting "media.autoplay.enabled" as "false", even though it does not seem to be relevant any more.

After reloading the website with the video (in this case YouTube), once more it showed the play icon on top of the video instead automatically starting playback.

Source: https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/on-topic/firefox-63-0-unable-to-stop-html5-videos-from-auto-playing-in-this-release/

I hope this was helpful.

Thanks for reading!

16Nov/140

Mozilla Thunderbird: Changing the EHLO / HELO Value in the “Received”-Header for Outgoing Mail

Hi!

If you have had a look at your outgoing e-mail headers that you've sent from Mozilla Thunderbird, you might have noticed that Thunderbird uses the IP of the network interface that it uses to connect to the internet with by default. If you are using a router on your network, this is a private IP from your LAN (for example 192.168.1.2) instead of one that might be of actual use.

Example:

Received: from external.sender.host.example.org ([123.123.123.123] helo=[192.168.1.2]) by
 mail.example2.org (incoming-mta-service) with esmtpsa (outgoing-mta-service) id
 0a1b2c-3D4e5F6G7h-0a1B2c for <[email protected]>; Sun, 02 Nov 2014 20:55:41 +0100

where "123.123.123.123" is the publicly facing IP and "external.sender.host.example.org" is its hostname.

If you do not wish to expose this information to every and all recipients of the e-mails you are sending with Thunderbird to (maybe out of security concerns in a business environment), you can set the EHLO / HELO value manually for every outgoing e-mail sent by the Thunderbird client with your current user profile and even for every simple SMTP server individually.

Here's how:

Globally

  • Open your Thunderbird options ("Tools" => "Options")
  • "Advanced" => "Config Editor..."
  • Create (or edit) the entry named "mail.smtpserver.default.hello_argument". If you need to create it, use right-click => "New" => "String".
  • Change the value to the desired IP or hostname (FQDN).

Per SMTP server

  • Open your Thunderbird options ("Tools" => "Options")
  • "Advanced" => "Config Editor..."
  • Create (or edit) the entry named "mail.smtpserver.smtp<number>.hello_argument" where <number> is the ID for the SMTP server you would like to apply the setting to. Type "mail.smtpserver.smtp" to see which ones are available and which ID they have. If you need to create the entry, use right-click => "New" => "String".
  • Change the value to the desired IP or hostname (FQDN).

Technically this value is not relevant for sending/receiving the mail, but because it might be used for spam scoring or simply out of courtesy I would recommend entering a valid IP / hostname.

I myself am using 127.0.0.1.

Thanks for reading!

Sources:

8Apr/120

Hiding the Closing Button (X) on the Firefox Add-on Bar

Hey!

Since the introduction of Firefox 3 or 4 (I don't quite remember) and the removal of the status bar I have liked to use the Add-on bar instead. In the newer versions of Firefox, however, that Add-on bar comes with a closing button, an X on the very left.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in option to disable that particular button. Right-clicking and "Customize ..." doesn't allow moving or removing that button either.

After searching the web for a while, I stumbled upon a Google Groups thread: https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.support.firefox/browse_thread/thread/d4a77426b84fe2b0

In that thread, Chris Ilias gave a simple solution (thank you!):

  1. Go to your Firefox profile directory. For that, just enter about:support in your URL bar (or click on Firefox => Help => Troubleshooting) and click on the "Open Containing Folder" button next to "Profile Directory".
  2. Close Firefox. (So maybe it would be better to continue reading these instructions beforehand and/or copy them into a text editor. 🙂 )
  3. Enter the subfolder "chrome" in the profile directory.
  4. Open the file "userChrome.css". If it does not exist, copy "userChrome-example.css" and rename the copy to "userChrome.css".
    If you are using Notepad, you won't be able to see line breaks / new lines. Therefore I recommend using a program that can interpret these kinds of line breaks, for example TextPad, Notepad++ or even WordPad, which comes with Windows itself.
  5. Add the following line to the file:
    #addonbar-closebutton { display: none }
  6. That's it! Save the file, start up Firefox again and enjoy the Add-on bar without a closing button!

These instructions were written for Firefox 11, but they should stay viable for the next couple of versions as well.

I hope this was of any help to you.

Thanks for reading!