On Sat, 2014-08-30 at 19:41 -0700, Tod Merley wrote: > Ok - considering that this Fedora 20 install and FireFox browser will > only be used for Internet transactions how would you set it up to do > it's job well? Most of them are self evident, if you know what the options mean, and some are clearly self-explanatory. Others, you have to think about how they'd do their job. I have the block pop-up windows setting set. I know of very few good sites that pop up new windows, that sort of thing has nearly always been abused. And, it notifies you if a pop up has been blocked, so if you're using a trustworthy site, you can okay that particular pop up, as and when you want to. I do tick the mostly pointless "tell sites I don't want to be tracked." Not that it can enforce it, but if sites start to analyse their data and notice a lot of people say they don't want to be tracked, something might just get through their thick heads. I use the custom history setting. I do allow it to remember browsing and download history, search and form history. Because those things are useful to me. I set the third-party cookies to be accepted from sites I visit (as opposed to accepting them from anywhere, or not at all), because too many sites fail without that (and some still fail, falsely claiming I've rejected those cookies, because their programmer was a fool, and didn't do a real test, but did something else and made a false presumption). I set it to keep cookies until I close the browser, this minimises tracking of me to a single session, but does mean that if I want to customise how I use a particular site, I have to do it each and every time I go there, if it uses cookies to store the information on my computer instead of their own. Just below that is a clear history when Firefox closes option that I don't set, but should do the same task as various wipe-all-your-data add-ons that some people install. I have the warn me when sites try to install add-ons ticked (and it seems very stupid for that to be set any other way). I have the block reported attack sites and web forgeries options set, not that I place a great deal of faith in them. And I don't go looking for hacking and cracking information, where you might well expect to get cracked as you look up how to crack something (seriously, why do people think that a cracker is going to look after your interests?). I'm sure new bad sites pop up quicker than the black lists. And I know that sort of option does leak information about what your browsing to the service which checks to see if the site is good or bad for you. For truly private browsing, you'd have to disable that feature. I do let the browser save some passwords, because that's convenient for me. Nobody else uses my login, so its not like someone can log into my ISP member page, and change my settings, just by browsing to the page and having the browser make it easy for them. I see no reason to use the master password. After all, I had to log into the computer, before I could use the web browser. Making me type in another password, just for the browser, isn't securing anything any further. If someone else can use my computer login, the game is lost. I think a number of the Firefox settings seem to relate to things like family use of a computer, where nobody has the sense to give each person a personal logon, so they can keep settings and data separate for each person. Thanks to prior Windows experience, like Win98, where that sort of thing just didn't work. I've unticked the health and crash reporters. I don't know how much data they'll send out, nor whether they'll sanitise it. The health and perfomance reporter is just going to continually leak information, and I think there's going to be more than enough thousands of people reporting crashes that I don't need to, as well. I have the option ticked for it to tell me when website asks to store data for offline use. I do let it automatically update things like the search engines. Basically, it's set for me to confirm things that are other than just simply reading webpages, before they happen. I only have two add-ons that I regularly ensure are added on to browsers, that's no-script and flashblock. They kill most regular problems without turning my web browser into a no browser. My usual example of a painful site to try with and without these things, is http://www.news.com.au/. It's not a dangerous wierd site, but demonstrates a site with annoying reloads, far too much crammed into each page, far too much scripting, and media that begins playing as soon as pages load - making multi-tabbed browsing a complete pain, as several tabs you opened in the background to get around to reading after the current article all start playing video files. -- tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.15.10-200.fc20.i686 #1 SMP Thu Aug 14 16:12:39 UTC 2014 i686 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
