Hey folks,

When I upgrade from Firefox 66 to 67 (which is a pretty good idea because of security issues and stuff), the browser seems to lose internet connectivity. It starts up and tries to restore my tabs, but all of them are blank and in the "loading" state. If I go to "Help -> About", even the "checking for updates" seems unable to connect.

I've tried disabling all my addons, but that doesn't make a difference. There's no proxy configuration or other network trickery. If I reinstall FF 66, stuff works again.

Does anybody have an idea what could be wrong? Or, alternatively (and perhaps better in general), how I can export and re-import all addon settings in a fresh installation? I have a whole bunch of uMatrix and NoScript configuration that I'd really, really hate to redo.

So, this has taken far longer than I wanted it to, but the time has finally come: fSekrit is going opensource. I don't personally feel comfortable using closed-source security products, so better put my money where my mouth is.

TL;DR: w00p w00p.

Why has it taken so long - after all, I've mentioned open-sourcing it as early as 2008, and probably earlier (this was the lazy first result from a quick search)? Well, as mentioned in that post, embarassment of showing your source to the world was one factor. Then there was time and motivation: fSekrit 1.40 does most of what I need, and after getting a full-time development job, doing some fundamentally boring development (cleanup, documentation, ...) in my spare time didn't seem like a lot of fun.

There were also a number of decisions that had to be made - for various reasons, I didn't feel like dumping the entire Subversion repository (some of the code was embarassing, but there were also issues like having used hardcoded paths and passphrases during early development, not using a standard repository layout, and stuff I've forgotten by now). It quickly became clear that I wanted to move to Git, and that I wanted a cut-off point for what I shared with the rest of the world - and I bumped my head on grafting. Furthermore, I wasn't sure which license to release the code under.

So, I've finally made some decisions, in order to be able to move forward:

• I've chosen 1.40 as the public cutoff point.
• I won't muck around with grafting, will suffer subversion if I need history.
• License will be //TODO// - I'm leaning towards something permissive, though.
• The code will be released under my real-name GitHub account, but otherwise the 'f' in fSekrit stays.
• The work-in-progress 2.0 code will be pushed later, but it's currently in a too messy state.

I won't make any guarantees about further progress, but at least this is a step forward. There's some boring grunt work that has to be done before development can properly be resumed.

• The current 2.0 branch basically has to be salvaged; I tried to do too many things at once, and keeping Win9x compatibility means adding proper unicode support resulted in kludgy code.
• Win9x support will be dropped. If there's still people using Win9x, bug fixes might be backported to 1.x.
• Less focus on super-small executables, for instance I'll (at least initially) be using STL containers.
• Builds will be done with a C++11 (or newer) compiler, support for VC2003 toolkit will be dropped - it hasn't been available for download for ages, anyway.
• I need to add unit tests. Any suggestions for a framework? Integration with Visual Studio is a plus, but the core must be cross-platform. Google test? Or Catch?
• I need to do some work on the build system. Is SCons still viable? Or should I just go Gradle?

I don't have SCons installed at the moment, but the current code can be directly checked out of Git, imported into Visual Studio 2013 (with conversion, the solution is VS2008) and built.

After Curt linked to a RAMdisk Benchmark, I decided to do my own testing, just for good measures, completeness' sake, and because I'm curious :-)

Note that the benchmarks were run on my workstation, with the load of normal apps I usually have open (firefox, thunderbird, pidgin, skype, and a zillion others) - while they were all pretty much idle, this obviously makes the benchmark slightly less "pure" than a "real" benchmark, but IMHO the numbers shouldn't be measurably skewed. Also, I have Intel's speedstep power management enabled, and didn't bother to "pre-burn" to ensure the CPU was running at max frequency; I'd wager say this shouldn't effect the benchmarks much either, since they're long-running, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Benchmark software & configuration:
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64
5 passes, 2000MB test file
Test data: random (default)
...I'm not a super big fan of CDM, since it's weird and uses the silly SI units for MB - but it's easy to use, and what Raymond's benchmark uses.

ATTO disk benchmark: 2.47 bench32
Direct I/O, Overlapped mode
transfer size: 0.5 to 8192kb, tested with queue depth of 2 and 8
total length: 2GB

OS: Win7 x64 SP1, Build 7601
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770 (Ivy Bridge)
RAM: 4x4GB Corsair DDR3-1600MHz
Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V PRO

General RAMdisk configuration:
4gig, formatted as NTFS with 4kb clusters

Note that I did not test the speed winner of the Raymond's benchmark, Bond Disc, since it simply seems too weird - and it has a max size of 640MB, which makes it a no-go anyway. I tested: Superspeed - because it's a big professional commercial product, and I had access to some older version of it
ImDisk - because it's more or less the "reference opensource ramdisk"
SoftPerfect - because it's a commercial product but free for non-commercial use

It might also have been worth looking at CPU usage while doing the benchmarks - I kept half an unscientific eye open on Process Monitor, and it seems like all three more or less maxxed out a single core while benchmarking, but nothing more accurate than that :)

Without further ado, results for each product - the textual results are from CrystalDiskMark:

SuperSpeed RamDiskPlus 10.0 x64
  Test : 2000 MB [Z: 1.2% (48.3/4094.7 MB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/10/22 21:12:55
           Sequential Read :  6251.861 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  8910.925 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  6268.756 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  8409.925 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :  1171.595 MB/s [286034.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   882.728 MB/s [215509.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  1152.307 MB/s [281324.9 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :   754.141 MB/s [184116.5 IOPS]

---

SoftPerfect RAMDisk 3.3.2 (2012-Oct-11) x64 - note that v3.3.1 from Oct06 changelog says "Major optimisation with performance gains 20% to 900% in various tests."

  Test : 2000 MB [Z: 1.2% (48.3/4096.0 MB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/10/22 21:33:50
           Sequential Read :  8575.204 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  9629.429 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  7506.314 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  7784.935 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :  1538.529 MB/s [375617.4 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :  1067.687 MB/s [260665.8 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  1490.878 MB/s [363983.8 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :   901.656 MB/s [220131.0 IOPS]

---

ImDisk 1.5.7 (2012-Jul-30)
  Test : 2000 MB [Z: 1.2% (48.3/4096.0 MB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/10/22 21:56:39
           Sequential Read :  5955.938 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  8793.090 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  5747.944 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  8380.221 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   670.431 MB/s [163679.4 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   563.793 MB/s [137644.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  1519.625 MB/s [371002.2 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :  1135.113 MB/s [277127.1 IOPS]


I think my recommendation henceforth is going to be SoftPerfect. It's fast, it's free and it's got an uncluttered interface (ImDisk is somewhat raw and messy), and it can do differential image saves instead of dumping the entire memory contents (saves quite some time if saving a large ramdisk). Also worth noting is that adding a new drive is instantaneous in ImDisk and SoftPerfect, whereas it takes quite a while (up to a minute or so) in RamDiskPlus.

EDIT 2012-11-07: added links for softperfect and imdisk.