When I opened Firefox earlier this morning,
I noticed that instead of my start page it had opened some notification page
from Mozilla saying that some of the plugins were out of date or something. I
am used to the makers of various browsers reminding me to update this or that a
few times a year, so I cast that page a casual look and, having verified that
it wasn't anything important, went on with my work.
When I saw the same page again when I
started Firefox the next time, I became slightly annoyed. When it happened the
third time, I became very annoyed. Apparently – unlike the usual update notices
– that piece of shit wasn't going to just leave me alone.
So I browsed that page, looking for
"do not display this warning again" or something. There was nothing
of the kind. Now I became worried. That unwanted page didn't seem to be going
away at all. And I was certainly not going to put up with Mozilla hijacking my
browser settings this way, overriding my start page with their spam.
I checked the Firefox options menu but
couldn't find a way to disable this outdated-plugin-warning thing. So I did a
Web search and quickly found a number of questions to that effect on Mozilla
help site. Apparently many people were having exactly the same problem I had:
how to get rid of the damn thing? What was appalling was the Mozilla team's
attitude. One user after another was rightfully pointing out the obvious truth
that if they programmed a feature like that, they should also have programmed
an easy way for the user to disable it. The Mozilla people were just stalling,
or more precisely filling the screen with plain bullshit bare of any meaningful
content, and whining how they are being insulted and how the ungrateful users aren't appreciating everything Mozilla is doing for them. In short, instead of being men enough to admit they had screwed up,
they not only didn't do anything to help the users to solve the problem (let
alone apologise), they acted as if they hadn't done anything wrong. The only
"solution" the incompetent arrogant pricks from Mozilla offered was
to update to the latest version of Firefox in which the problem
"should" be fixed.
It was only the other users who were offering
actual solutions. Some were helpful for some, others for others. I kept reading
through page after page and trying out one trick after another, until I finally
found one that worked for me. I will list them here. Maybe this will be helpful
to some other sufferers from this outrageous insolence by Mozilla.
Trick number 1
1. Type "about:config" in the
Firefox address bar.
2. You will see that a filter bar has
opened below the address bar. Type (or rather copy-and-paste)
"plugins.update.url" in it.
3. You should see an entry titled the
same below. Double-click on it.
4. A little window opens in the middle
of the screen in which there is a web address. Delete it, leaving the field
empty, and click "OK".
5. Close and restart Firefox.
I did that, and the plugin-update-shit page
did not open, but instead an empty page opened in an extra tab. Well, that was
better than nothing, but I kept looking for a better solution.
Trick number 2
Same as above, only in step 4, do not
leave the field empty. Paste the URL of your start page into it.
The result was that now my actual start
page was opened in that extra tab. In other words, Firefox opened with two
tabs, both containing my start page.
This might be good enough for most users.
You'll be able to start your browser without necessarily even noticing that
anything is different. The only catch is that when you change your start page,
you'll have to remember to go to that plugins.update.url thing and changing it
there to, or you'll go crazy wondering why your start page won't change.
Or you can use trick number 2 to get
Firefox to always open with two different start pages, each in its own tab.
I kept looking for a way to disable that
extra tab altogether, though.
Trick number 3
Go to about:config as before.
Write to the filter bar:
plugins.hide_infobar_for_outdated_plugin
Double-click on the entry. You will
notice that its value (the rightmost word in the line) changes from
"false" to "true". (By the way, when you double-click on it
again, it changes back to "false").
Close and restart Firefox.
Unfortunately, that didn't change anything
for me.
Trick number 4
Someone said something about a
"user.js" file to be placed in the user's Profile Folder.
I didn't know how to do that. The links to
corresponding help pages on Mozilla website couldn't be opened. So I searched
my computer for the location of a file named "user.js". Turned out
there was none on my computer. I understand that it's something you can create
on your own if you want to, but, well, since the corresponding pages on Mozilla
website wouldn't open, I thought I'd go on looking for something simpler.
Trick number 5
As in number 3, but this time change
"plugin.scan.plid.all" from "true" to "false".
I did that, it didn't change anything.
Trick number 6
Same as previous, change
"plugin.scan.Acrobat" from "5.0" to "9".
I did that, it didn't change anything.
Trick number 7
I've spent almost the last 3 hours
trying to solve this (I'm using version 3.6.28). Changing the about:config
setting didn't stick, starting in safe mode didn't help, etc.
Finally I did the following: 1) Used
MozBackup to save all my settings, bookmarks, history, etc. 2) Uninstalled
Firefox 3) Deleted the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox folder (although I
saved the searchplugins folder first) 4) Reinstalled Firefox version 3.6.28 5)
Used MozBackup to restore things 6) Verified everything was restored (I had to
reinstall 3 extensions, and re-disable the plugins that I keep off, and copy
those searchplugins into the new folder, but MozBackup pretty well got
everything back the way it was)
Now I am no longer getting the plugin
check. It seemed that something was just goofed up with Firefox itself, so
maybe a reinstall would get rid of whatever problem had come up, and yeah, it
looks like that worked.
Good luck if you feel like trying that one.
I didn't.
Trick number 8
Delete the file "nppdf32.dll"
in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Plugins .
I didn't find that file in my Firefox
folder. So I did a search and found that there were three files of that name on
my computer, one in IE folder and two in Adobe folders. Just to experiment, I
renamed all of them and Firefox still started with that extra tab, so I renamed
them back.
(By the way, did you know that when you
want to disable a bad file, it might be a good idea to not delete it but to
rename it? Like, you want to prevent the file "badfile.exe" from
executing, then you rename it to something like "badfile.exx". The
file will still be there, contents unchanged, but the computer won't recognise
it and it won't be executed. When you later find out that you want the file
after all, you can just rename it back and everything will be as before.)
Trick number 9
Same as number 6 and the previous, but
change "extensions.blocklist.enabled" from "true" to
"false".
That did the trick for me.
And a bonus to trick number 9:
I changed the
extensions.blocklist.enabled in about:config to false (as suggested by [---])
and then panicked a bit and after closing and reopening my browser a couple of
times without the tab popping up, re-set it back to true and I still don't get
the warning tab opening. This may be a fluke but maybe not.
Thanks. I will try that too.
The summary of my quest:
I wasted 50 minutes finding a
solution, and only found one that appears to be potentially compromising my
security. As I mentioned above, at least one user spent three hours. Several
users mentioned that they failed to find a solution and quit using Firefox. Altogether, the Mozilla programmers probably wasted many hundreds of hours of other people's time because they programmed a feature and were too stupid or too careless to add a removal option.
It is as plain as the nose in your face
that proper software developers would not put their users through that. Mozilla
have totally let us down. The only "solution" they could come up with
was to update to the latest version. Well, that is something I am not going to
do, because my exprience shows that whenever I update a software, there is a
large probability that some features I like have been fucked up, and
downgrading to an older version is too much a pain in the ass. I've downgraded
my Firefox once, and I don't want to go through that again. I am upgrading my
software only when I have a good reason to. Some wanker nerd from Mozilla
telling me that upgrading to the latest version is the only way to fix his sloppy work is not a
good reason.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I'd like to point out
that the real problem is not the mistake the programmers made. To err is human.
I've written software myself and I know prefectly well how easily mistakes can
happen in a complicated computer program. What pisses me off is the attitude of
the Mozilla people who are supposed to help the users. If I were paying for
Firefox, I would certainly opt out now. Since I am not, they're getting away
with a yellow card this time. But I surely am keeping my eyes open for a
user-friendly web browser whose developers care about their users. In fact, I don't even mind paying for the privilege of getting actual help whenever I'm having a problem with the software.
I would like to finish this article with this brilliant quote from another user having the above-mentioned problem:
This is a pain in the arse. There is
only one thing worse than security problems, and that is being spammed by
software developers who want to tell you what plugins you want to run.
Sorry, you got it all wrong. If I want
to stay with a version, that is MY choice.
I couldn't agree more.
