Today, I deleted my Twitter account. If you visit my old handle, you get a friendly message from Twitter that This account doesn't exist and, wouldn’t you please try searching for another? Anything to keep the drip of content going. Anything to propel artificial views to keep advertiser dollars rolling in.

I can’t even remember what year I deleted my Facebook account. 2015? 2016? It’s been a long time. My personal philosophies have never lined up with the big tech companies, especially not Twitter and Facebook, but Twitter always seemed innocuous enough. But today’s “historic” events gave me the “courage” to finally delete the thing.

Farewall, Mr. Dorsey. You can join Misters Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Cook in the short list of companies with which I will not associate.

Goals

My plans for this year:

• Keep it together, man.
• Get better at mountain biking.
• Find more productive uses for my time than scrolling through the news and reading about bikes.

Mozilla continues the war against its own users in Firefox 77, disabling workarounds to their horrific “megabar” that were launched with the “feature” in Firefox 75. Kill it with fire with a custom user-defined CSS. Like it’s 1997.

UserChrome.org has the instructions for doing this and a fantastic CSS generator that can override a bunch of Mozilla’s other new defaults. I didn’t notice their other address bar-related changes, so this is a barebones userChrome.css that kills the Megabar and retains the changes they’ve made to the search dropdown in the past year.

Knowing link rot, that site will disappear and/or be impossible to find. I’ll need to keep punting this file around for the next decade or so, so I’m saving it to this blog⊕I think you have to write content to call a website a blog, right? website for future reference.

This goes in a new folder named chrome in your current profile directory. eg ~/.mozilla/firefox/mlq5vmgg.default-release/chrome/userChrome.css⊕…to use a totally hypothetical path.

/*** BEGIN Firefox 77 (June 2, 2020) Override URL bar enlargement ***/

  /* Compute new position, width, and padding */

  #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] {
    top: 5px !important;
    left: 0px !important;
    width: 100% !important;
    padding: 0px !important;
  }
  /* for alternate Density settings */
  [uidensity="compact"] #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] {
    top: 3px !important;
  }
  [uidensity="touch"] #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] {
    top: 4px !important;
  }

  /* Prevent shift of URL bar contents */

  #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] > #urlbar-input-container {
    height: var(--urlbar-height) !important;
    padding: 0 !important;
  }

  /* Do not animate */

  #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] > #urlbar-background {
    animation: none !important;;
  }

  /* Remove shadows */

  #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] > #urlbar-background {
    box-shadow: none !important;
  }

/*** END Firefox 77 (June 2, 2020) Override URL bar enlargement ***/

Once that’s in the userChrome.css file… it still won’t work. 😬 That’s because Firefox 69 disabled the automatic search for, and loading of, the userChrome file. To finally be rid of the Megabar, ensure that toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets configuration setting in your about:config is true. Restart Firefox and wave goodbye to that nasty blue monster.