I wrote back in January that Firefox had irked me — and plenty of others — to the point where I was leaving it indefinitely as my browser.
I really would’ve preferred that be continued.
But then I did a stupid.
Here’s the thing: Right after that post, I was briefly using Vivaldi as my browser on both laptop and my phone. It was basically the only option aside from Firefox — at least the only option that I wanted to use, given the Brave browser’s CEO has demonstrated homophobic and anti-science stances, so I had less than zero interest in supporting that product — that could be used on both a Windows computer and iPhone, and would let me use my Kagi account as a search engine, and allowed me to sync bookmarks.
That’s an oddly tall order, as it turns out. There are precious few options that check all those boxes.
But Vivaldi is a chromium browser. Meaning it’s based on Google’s core browser coding. And being pretty damned anti-Google company and app and service choices as I am*, using a chromium browser just didn’t sit quite right for me.
This led to trying a few other browser options for the laptop, and with different browser options for the phone. And none were great, but I finally settled on using Orion, the Kagi company’s browser option as my phone browser, and Waterfox, a fork of Firefox but which didn’t embrace and baked in AI as Firefox had and generally was more palatable than Firefox, as my Windows laptop browser.
That worked well enough for the last several months.
And then… the stupid.
I noticed after the last Waterfox update that the fonts in the tabs seemed a bit small and/or thin, or if it had been the case for a while, I was somehow really noticing them for the first time. I work a literal arm’s length from my laptop with a plug-in keyboard in order to have the laptop screen elevated to be ergonomically level with my eyes, to save the always looking downward for sometimes hours at a stretch. This now also has the screen farther away than usual, and like the rest of me, my eyes aren’t getting any younger.
I went into the pretty decent array of settings that Waterfox offers, and was a bit surprised to find that tab font options weren’t among them. A pretty niche thing to want to change, I’d agree, but I was surprised to find nothing related to changing that was available.
I asked around a bit among various smartypants online groups about what to do to achieve changing the fonts in the tabs, and finally got what I’m still sure was correct guidance. It was a few lines of coding that had to be dropped into a specific folder that sits within the inner workings of Firefox/Waterfox, past a point where it duly warns the user, ‘Hey, be careful in here, because changes made can affect the performance and even operation of the browser.’ I’d had a little bit of experience in the past tweaking these files to affect one change or the other, so I confidently clicked on the button confirming that I acknowledged the risk, and carried merrily on.
Now here’s the thing: For the love of god, don’t just blithely drop code that a stranger sends you into the deep, dark back end filing of your computer software.
That’s just a horrible idea.
However, as I had done a bit of this type of thing before, plus this was a) all of 4-5 lines of coding that b) was posted in an open, tech-savvy forum that (verified) several hundred viewers who read the post didn’t raise any red flags about, and c) was clear enough to even me to understand what it was doing (it was creating a function that would allow me to manually change the font size of the tabs. No more, no less), I made the informed choice to do this.
I followed what seemed like very clear steps from the person to create the needed file called the needed thing in the needed place and drop in the script.
And?
It did nothing.
I had zero question about what was supposed to happen. But nothing did, even on a restart. It never entered my mind that the coding had been wrong, so knew and readily accepted that I had made a mistake on some instructional step and it wasn’t working as a result.
This was already above my usual pay grade for getting into the weeds on such stuff — past tweaks in this area had been smaller and less involved — so I was ready to accept that it just wasn’t going to happen, thanked the person supplying the code and detailed steps for the attempt to help, and was ready move on with my life, just accepting that it may be a little more squinty now.
But then I was thinking that hey… I just changed something about how the browser operates on the back end of things. And while it didn’t do what I was supposed to do, it may have done something it wasn’t supposed to do. Or it may do so down the line.
… and then the fateful decision: Why, I should go back and take that added thing back out again. (“What’s the worst that could happen” wasn’t even considered, much less spoken aloud, but you can by now guess that it may as well have been.)
Now… had I actually clicked on and deleted that same file I created with the tiny bit of coding in it, things probably would’ve been just fine. But what I did, as it turned out, was mistakenly clicked on a completely different file with a really similar name, and deleted that.
You remember the part a bit earlier where the program warns you that stuff you do beyond this point could affect the performance or operation of the browser? Yeah, that’s for people doing stupid stuff like this.
The file didn’t delete immediately. But only because it was so big.
Yeah. Big. Which was telling.
Because remember as well how I said what I did was drop in a few lines of code? Meanwhile, what it was actively and very quickly deleting at my dumb command was over 13,000 items.
Knowing something was really wrong, I stopped the deletion mid-flight.
And I was in a weird time and space where I was between knowing I just totally screwed up but not knowing exactly how or what it was I did or what the fallout of it was going to be. There’s probably a German word for that distinct, paused, hyper aware but yet clueless moment of being.
I carefully closed up the files and the and backed out of the whole thing. And then came the trying to figure out what I’d just done.
Waterfox was still working. I could move around in it, it was responsive, all the same tabs were open, and I could open new ones… hey-HEY, all good there! I could close it, and when I opened it again, all the same tabs were open as I prefer… all good.
But then I checked the bookmarks.
Or… shall I say the lack of bookmarks. Because almost all of them were gone.
Guess those were the chunk of many, many files I had deleted.
And of course I had just days ago signed up on some sites and bookmarked them, along with bookmarking a bunch of other sites I hadn’t needed to sign up on but were relevant for some work I was actively trying to muddle through.
Gone. Along with almost every other bookmark I’d ever saved.
This led to a couple of days of me in virtual dialogue with the smartypantses about what could be done about the situation. But it all amounted to the conclusion that nothing could correct it: Like some other types of computer files, bookmarks delete immediately when you remove them, so they aren’t sitting in your trash folder waiting to be permanently deleted. When I tried to get a new copy of the browser and install it in the hopes that my bookmarks had just been… maybe moved?… or were otherwise recoverable?… all it did was copy over the existing, sad smattering of bookmarks that had survived the purge.
Someone suggested that I could try to restore the bookmarks from the automatic backups of them that the browser routinely makes, but wouldn’t you know it? Those were some of the files I had deleted, as well. I mean, what are the chances, right? Other fundamental issues happened when I tried to resolve the issue on the back end filing system — all caution gone now, since I’d already screwed so much up — amounting to either Waterfox not loading at all due to an error of a needed file missing, or loading but still without the bookmarks revived.
Nothing worked.
So. I was pissed at myself plus back to where I was early in the new year and wondering what I was going to do about a browser option. In fact, I was actually back farther than that, because while I could always download the bookmarks from where I’d soon left Vivaldi, any bookmarks I’d added in the several months since then, since using Waterfox, were irrevocably gone.
What I wished was that I had some means of backup for if I ever made a stupid mistake like that again. A couple of people helpfully suggested I do manual backups of the bookmarks instead of just relying on its automated backups. Which is a genuinely great idea and I wish I’d considered ages ago. Hell, even as late as doing that just a week ago would’ve allowed me to recover what I deleted.
But meanwhile, what if I also had my bookmarks synced on the same browser on my phone? If I knew I’d made a dumb mistake on my laptop and erased its bookmarks, I could always retrieve them from my phone as an added backup source (assuming I acted before the bookmarks synced between the laptop and phone and they disappeared from my phone as well, thinking I had removed all of those intentionally and duly mirroring them to be exactly the same on both devices per my last action taken).
… which brought me back to the options of either… yep, Vivaldi or Firefox.
I’m still trying to de-Google my life when and where I can. I thought about it for a while, and given a choice, I just can’t support yet another Google-coded browser, no matter how much it may differ from their flagship Chrome juggernaut. As much as the recent actions of Firefox company Mozilla have irked me, it’s really the only game in town as far as the biggest non-chromium browser that works cross-platform plus will allow me the grace of having an added backup via synced phone in case I ever decide to go poking around in the browser system where I really shouldn’t be. And I’ll definitely start doing my own manual backups of bookmarks as well, just as added redundancy.
So I’m back to using Firefox, allowing practicality to sit above preferences.
But you’d better believe I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for other cross-platform browser options coming down the pipeline. If you hear of any, please let me know in the comments.
*Having said that, there’s nothing that beats Google Maps for what it does. We did a quick road trip yesterday, and it was definitely more helpful than Apple Maps was, which I keep trying to use instead of Google Maps and keep finding it lacking the functionality and accuracy that Google Maps offers. So while I do want to de-Google my life where I can, I don’t want to lose time and patience in order to do it.