Reprinted with permission from Ryan

I upgraded to Fedora 37 several days ago (pre-release).

Overall, that went well. (Post in process on that.)

SeaMonkey got bumped to 2.53.14 and it completely screwed something up to where almost any site I loaded in the browser crashed the browser.

Scrapping my old profile seems to have fixed it.

I’ve brought back my passwords, uBlock-Origin-Legacy, SeaTab-X-2, and Bookmarks, and got middle click paste off and autoscroll on in about:config.

I noticed when I went to install Palefills 1.21, it no longer works. I was looking forward to it because it says it fixes Google Drive.

Without Palefills working, Github and Gitlab broke again due to the shim not being applied, however I was able to fix those two sites by setting dom.webcomponents.customelements.enabled;true and dom.webcomponents.enabled;true in the about:config menu.

I had to get WebComponents on so I could reload the uBlock-Origin-Legacy site and click on the appropriate XPI package.

So far, I’m not seeing a hell of a lot of improvement in the Web platform department, although YouTube (Invidious already worked fine) is working better, and so are some other video sites.

The release notes suggested improvements to the Document Object Model, but if there are any, they must be minor because I haven’t seen a big difference on most sites.

Google refused to let me sign in on their Web site or through OAuth2, which is how they demand you sign in for IMAP now in a Mail client. Both said my browser was insecure, and demanded that I choose from a list of approved browsers.

So I set a fake user agent for Google.com to trick it into thinking I have Firefox 105 by creating a site-specific UA override called general.useragent.override.google.com as a new string in about:config and then setting the string value to Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:105.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/105.0 and then I went back and signed into SeaMonkey Mail using IMAP over OAuth2 and in the browser as well. I guess faking your user agent makes you “secure”.

I hate Google. I’ll probably need to go back and bump Google’s fake UA override for new Firefox versions at some point.

The only thing I saw that was “not secure” was that SeaMonkey still supports TLS 1.0 and 1.1, but you can uncheck them, and should.

For those who wonder, after setting up the fake user agent for Google.com, you can get SeaMonkey Mail to work using these settings.

Incoming Server: imap.gmail.com

Port: 993

User Name: your full gmail address

Connection Security: SSL/TLS

Authentication Method: OAuth2

Outgoing Server: smtp.gmail.com

Port: 465

User Name: your full gmail address

Connection Security: SSL/TLS

Authentication Method: OAuth2

Then you just save everything and go back to SeaMonkey Mail and click get messages, and then an authentication screen should pop up asking you to put in your google login and use your two step verification, then it’ll say Mozilla Thunderbird is trying to access your GMail Account. Tell it that’s fine.

That’s it. It should grab your email. Now you can send yourself a test email to make sure SMTP (outgoing mail) works too. It won’t ask you to authenticate again.

Now I just need to recover my other IMAP mail settings and ChatZilla, and wait for the next disaster update.

I don’t know why I keep this going along. Nostalgia, maybe.

Google (and Microsoft Outlook) switching to OAuth2 and blocking “insecure apps” has nothing to do with Security, of course. It’s about vendor lock-in and the end of normal email clients.

If Microsoft goes down the path of blocking SeaMonkey Mail, I’ll enter a fake UA for their sites too and then log in anyway.

For now, Microsoft’s Outlook IMAP settings are here. (username is always your complete email address).

Make sure to take note that you need to use TLS/SSL for the incoming server, but the outgoing server demands STARTTLS. *sigh*

Also, if your account uses two factor authentication you need to make an app password by going here and clicking on “Security Basics” and then ignoring everything else it says. The app passwords are under Advanced Security Options/Create a New App Password. Then you use that password in your non-2FA applications.

I tried setting up OAuth2 with Microsoft Outlook, however it said only work and school accounts can use that.

Also, remember to set your GMail to use the GMail SMTP server and Outlook Mail to use it’s own, otherwise all your outgoing email will go through SeaMonkey’s default, which is the first one you set up. 🙂

Now, off to set up ChatZilla again…. *sigh*

Get Facebook working again.

Facebook’s “modern” site is completely hosed in SeaMonkey, but you can fix it two ways.

Go to about:config and make a new site-specific user agent for Facebook. New String, and then use string value general.useragent.override.facebook.com from here, there are two choices.

Do you want some old no-JavaScript site that’s not really that easy to use, or do you want a more functional mobile site that it gives if it thinks you use Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 11 (more functional mobile site with JavaScript) – Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 11.0; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Opera 12 (no-JS mobile) – Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 11.0) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.17

I have no idea what sites will break but I can usually get something to work again by hacking around it.

Google Drive is messed up. I do back some things up there. Fortunately, I can get around this by mounting it as a file system in GNOME Files (Nautilus).

All this has left me wondering… How does bumping a minor browser update manage to eat its own profile?

Regardless, I did get around to spring cleaning my bookmarks file after several years of them accumulating dead links and stuff I don’t care about anymore, and organizing them into folders, then backing it all up again.

Also, GMail is set up in a way that they’re not going to lock me out of again. They’re doing nasty things to email clients and then apparently, graciously, allowing it to work again in Thunderbird. 😛

I think it’s completely stupid not having an email client in your browser. You open Thunderbird and it’s like opening an entire second copy of Firefox just to get at your mail, and ChatZilla is a rather nice IRC program.

Maybe that’s why I tolerate this. Plus, half the reason I write these posts is so _I_ can remember how I got things working later. ⬆