Firefox :: Chris Jean

Archive for Firefox

ColorZilla, CSSViewer, and Live HTTP Headers: Updated for Firefox 3.6

by Chris Jean

January 27th, 2010

When newer versions of Firefox come out, there are always a few add-ons that fail to update quickly enough. After about a week of waiting, I’ve become tired of waiting for some of my add-ons to update themselves. These add-ons are ColorZilla (white reports 3.6.* compatibility, but it won’t install/update on 3.6), CSSViewer, and Live HTTP Headers.

Fortunately, updating is a simple matter. Just do the following:

Download the xpi file for the add-on
Open up the downloaded xpi file as a zip file
Open the install.rdf file inside the xpi file
Search for the targetApplication section with an id of {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
Change that section’s maxVersion to the version number to whatever Firefox version you want to be supported
Update the xpi file with the modified install.rdf file
Install the add-on by dragging the xpi file onto the Firefox window and clicking the Install button (this works for upgrades as well)

Here are the modified xpi files for each of the add-ons:

Note: All of these add-ons were updated to work with 3.6.*. Of course, they may not be compatible with future versions of 3.6, so use at your own risk.

Keep in mind that if you manually upgrade an older add-on, you do so at your own risk. I tested these add-ons, and they all work properly with 3.6.

Categories Tips 'n Tricks
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Upgrade to Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu 9.10

by Chris Jean

January 21st, 2010

One of my all-time most popular posts was how to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu 9.04. Now it’s Firefox 3.6′s turn to be installed on my system that is now running Ubuntu 9.10.

The team working on Firefox have put a ton of effort into this release and, in order to make our browsing lives safer and faster, rolled a number of features scheduled for 3.7 into this release. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

Read the 3.6 release announcement for details about what is new with this release.

So now onto the installation. Here are the commands that I ran in terminal to install 3.6.

[chris@rommie ~]$ cd /tmp/
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ wget "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux&lang=en-US"
--2010-01-21 11:41:08--  http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux&lang=en-US
Resolving download.mozilla.org... 63.245.209.58
Connecting to download.mozilla.org|63.245.209.58|:80... connected.
...

100%[=============================>] 10,161,471   924K/s   in 11s     

2010-01-21 11:41:20 (899 KB/s) - `firefox-3.6.tar.bz2' saved [10161471/10161471]

[chris@rommie /tmp]$ tar xvjf firefox-*.bz2
tar: Record size = 8 blocks
firefox/
firefox/update.locale
firefox/plugins/
firefox/plugins/libnullplugin.so
...
firefox/defaults/autoconfig/platform.js
firefox/defaults/autoconfig/prefcalls.js
firefox/libmozjs.so
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo cp -r firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.6
[sudo] password for chris:
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.old
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-3.6/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-3.6
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.6 /usr/bin/firefox

Simply run each command listed in white in your terminal to upgrade your system with the latest release version of Firefox.

After running these commands, close out Firefox, wait a few seconds to let everything shut down properly, and run Firefox again. If all the steps were executed properly and without error, you should be running 3.6. You can click Help > About Mozilla Firefox to confirm.

Happy browsing.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Fix “The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded” in Firefox on Ubuntu

by Chris Jean

September 9th, 2009

In Linux, clicking the middle mouse button (or mouse wheel) pastes the most recently highlighted text from any application. This is useful; however, it has an extremely-annoying side-effect in Firefox. Whenever I middle-click outside of entry fields, I get an annoying pop-up that says: “The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded.” This frustrates me to no end. It usually happens when I accidentally nudge my mouse and miss middle-clicking a link in order to open it in a new tab.

So, why is it doing this? Turns out that, by default, Firefox for Linux allows you to use this middle-click to paste functionality to allow you to navigate to a highlighted URL simply by middle-clicking non-editable portions of the page. When an invalid URL is the result of the paste, the annoying popup appears.

Today, I found out how to get rid of this annoyance.

Open a new tab in Firefox and navigate to “about:config”. This will take you to an interface that allows you to tweak and configure very specific functionality of Firefox.

In the “Filter:” text box, enter “middlemouse.contentLoadURL”. This should present a single entry that lists the option as having a value of “true”. Simply double-click the listing to change the value to “false”. The effect is instantaneous.

Now when you middle-click outside of editable areas in Firefox, it will no longer try to navigate to a URL. This change only modifies the navigation to URL functionality; the middle-click to paste in editable areas still functions.

If you like the middle-click to scroll functionality found in other browsers/operating systems, then search for “general.autoScroll” and double-click the listing to change it to true. Now you can middle-click to initiate scrolling.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Upgrade to Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope

by Chris Jean

July 1st, 2009

Updated for Firefox release 3.5.5

Firefox 3.5 was released yesterday. This is an exciting new release complete with features such as support for HTML 5, video and audio that works in the browser without the need for plugins, a much faster Javascript engine, a native JSON parser, private browsing mode, support for SVG transformations, and other great enhancements.

I’m sure that you’re just as excited to get started with Firefox 3.5 as I was yesterday when I heard the news. But wait! We’re on Ubuntu, we can’t just install whatever we want, we need to wait for a package. Right? Wrong.

Here’s a really quick way to get 3.5.5 running on your Ubuntu 9.04 system.

Categories Linux
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Food For Thought

by Chris Jean

March 7th, 2009

I’m more or less taking the night off. I’ll leave you some good reading material that should cover just about any reader that comes here.

Make Linux: Harder – Better – Faster
This page is a great compilation of links on how to improve security, speed, functionality, or appearance of your Linux system.
Firefox Minefield
Very interesting version of Firefox that is in development. Apparently, it is capable of massive speed and gives Chrome a run for its money.
Conky
A highly-customizable graphical system monitor for your Linux desktop.
Armed and Dangerous
A blog I just happened upon today that has many great reads. The topics are varied, but there should be a little something for everyone. I was hooked with the My comment to the FCC on DRM post, as I share many of the feelings that the author does on the subject.
Swift Weasel
This project builds Firefox from source to provide optimized builds for the Linux platform. It’s still in the early stages but has potential.

I hope that my big post yesterday makes up for my weak one today.

Categories Linux, Random Ramblings, Tips 'n Tricks
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Multiple Firefox Profiles in Ubuntu

by Chris Jean

February 23rd, 2009

When Windows was my main OS, I was a big fan of Portable Firefox. With Portable Firefox, I could do multiple installations of Firefox on my system that could be customized to run concurrently with other installs of Firefox. This allowed me to have tailored installations with different sets of plugins and features.

Why would I want to run more than one Firefox at a time? For me, the reason is that it eases development. Here are a few ways that I use multiple installs:

One install that was just the default install with no additional tweaks or add-ons and would have all cached data, authenticated sessions, and cookies cleared when closed. This was a great browser to use when I would test new code to make sure that it ran well on a stock Firefox. It also gave me a clean cookie and authentication slate so I could test sessions from scrath without clearing my main browser’s history, sessions, etc. If I wiped the slate clean on this browser, nothing was lost.
Since having a large variety of add-ons in Firefox has a tendency to slow things down, I had another browser that included all the major development tool add-ons. I would load this browser up when I needed to explore the DOM in detail, debug layout issues, debug Javascript, etc. This allowed me to streamline my main browser down to just the add-ons that I use frequently.
Since Portable Firefox isn’t installed and just resides in its own folder, I could load multiple versions of Firefox. This made it easy to test for compatibility problems between different versions.
I even played around with the idea of having a browser specifically for media. I would use it for music sources like Pandora and for video sources like Hulu or Red vs. Blue.

Last week, I looked around for a solution like Portable Firefox for Ubuntu. I quickly found a solution that wasn’t nearly as difficult as doing multiple installs: multiple profiles.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Firefox Titlebar Missing in Ubuntu

by Chris Jean

January 14th, 2009

I just experienced a very odd behavior with Firefox on my system. Somehow, my titlebar had disappeared. I chose to ignore this as an odd glitch, figured it would go away when Firefox was restarted, and went about my work.

Eventually, it started to drive me nuts. Not only was the titlebar missing, but I could not resize Firefox, could not move Firefox, and it kept stealing focus from other applications and obscuring new windows.

Even at this point, I did not want to restart Firefox yet, so I kept just ignoring it. Then, Firefox froze entirely. It seems like I could still interact with Firefox via the keyboard (since the titles in the Window List panel kept changing), but the rendered image of Firefox never changed.

Restarting Firefox didn’t work. Restarting the system didn’t work. Changing from Emerald to Metacity (run “metacity –replace”) didn’t work. Uninstalling some new packages didn’t work. I was at a loss.

I settled back into just dealing with the problem, when I happened to accidentally switch Firefox to fullscreen (F11). Amazingly, when I switched back to normal, the problem went away.

So, the quick way to fix the problem of a missing titlebar in Firefox with Ubuntu (this problem may be present in other distros as well) is to switch to fullscreen and then back. Basically, you can press F11 twice to fix it.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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