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:

• ColorZilla
• CSSViewer
• Live HTTP Headers

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.

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.

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.

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.

Open up Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and run the following commands:

1. cd /tmp
2. wget "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5.5&os=linux&lang=en-US"
   Note: Your download link may be different depending on your country and language. I got the link by clicking the download link, canceling  the automatic download, right-clicking the “Your download should automatically begin in a few seconds, but if not, click here” link, and selecting Copy Link Location.
3. tar xvjf firefox-*.bz2
4. sudo cp -r firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.5.5
5. sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.old
6. sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-3.5.5/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-3.5.5
7. sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.5.5 /usr/bin/firefox

Close Firefox and then reopen. You should now be running Firefox 3.5.5.

If for whatever reason you’d like to switch back to your previous version of Firefox, simply run the following commands from Terminal:

1. sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bak
2. sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox.old /usr/bin/firefox

Notice how I even create a backup of the original firefox before replacing it. It is always a good idea to do this if you replace programs yourself. This way you won’t be likely to remove a binary or script that you won’t be able to get back easily.

Now that you are on Firefox 3.5.5, check out some awesome sites that show off some of the new capabilities.

• 3-D cubes built with standard HTML content, including the new native video component.
• Audio player built entirely with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It doesn’t even use what we commonly think of as images, simply the new Canvas element.
• Video Washing Machine – Add a video to your site, crop it to fit in a circle, put a border around it, have rollover effects that change the filter on the video, and spin the whole thing as it plays. All of this with just the <video> element, CSS 3, SVG, and a bit of JavaScript.
• Add upload progress bars without the use of Flash or insane amounts of scripting.
• Create the illusion of a 3D voxel engine with an image and some creative SVG, scripting, and CSS.
• Apply textures to an animated model.
• Create a text shadow spotlight effect using Javascript and CSS.
• Web developers can now take advantage of custom typography using the new CSS rules.
• Sync page elements with the position in the video. Note that the graphs are canvas elements that are being drawn on.
• Use HTML elements to jump to different positions in audio.

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.

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.

What are Profiles?

By creating a new profile, you get another clean slate Firefox. Each profile has its own add-ons, bookmarks, history, cookies, etc. In addition, each profile even has its own layout. So, if you change the layout of toolbars in one profile, the change is limited to that profile.

I know that Firefox has had profiles for a very long time, but until now, I really never messed around with them. I guess the biggest problem with profiles is that they aren’t easily accessed. In order to produce the profile manager, you need to use a command line option (-P). Furthermore, you can only run additional instances of Firefox if you load the additional firefox instances using the “-no-remote” command line option. Since most people don’t know about command line options or how to use them, I think profiles will remain obscure until they get an easy to use menu accessible from inside Firefox itself.

However, with the information I provide here, you can easily get profiles running on your Ubuntu (or really any other) system.

Creating New Profiles

To create a new profile, we first need to load the profile manager. Open the Run Application dialog (Alt+F2) and run the following:

Note that the ‘p’ is capitalized.

A small dialog will appear with options to create a new profile, rename or delete existing profiles, and start Firefox with the selected profile. You also have the option to tell the profile manager whether or not it should ask what profile you want when Firefox is loaded. If you have this box checked, Firefox will automatically load the last profile you used. If it is not checked, you will always be asked which profile you want.

Click the “Create Profile…” button, read the information about profiles, click Next, give the profile a name and click Finish.

Now you have your new profile listed on the Profile Manager. Select it and click “Start Firefox”. When it loads, you’ll be greeted with Firefox as it looked when it was first installed.

Customizing Launchers

Since you’re probably like me and don’t want to have to type in the run command manually each time, we can easily customize the launchers to do exactly what we want. Everyone will want to customize their launchers in different ways, but what I have done with my system should give you enough information to do what you want.

Creating New Launchers on a Panel

I have a couple of icons on my top panel. One launches Firefox and the other launches Thunderbird. I wanted to add additional launchers to the panel in order to have one launcher for each profile.

I simply right-clicked a blank spot on the panel and clicked “Add to Panel…”. I selected “Application Launcher…” in order to duplicate the existing Firefox launcher in the menu and clicked Forward. I found the Firefox launcher under Internet and clicked Add.

I then right-clicked my new Firefox icon and clicked Properties. I wanted to customize this launcher to load my new Clean profile, so I modified the Command text to the following:

The other options can be customized to set this launcher apart from your other profile launchers. Change the Name and Comment fields to make it clear which profile the launcher refers to. You can even click the icon to select a custom one for that launcher.

When you are done making customizations, click the Close button. Now click your launcher and check to see that everything has worked properly.

Making a Profile Manager Launcher

I wanted to have my main launcher at Applications > Internet > Firefox Web Browser load up the profile manager to make it easy to select a profile. This way I could use it rather than running a command manually in Run Application.

I right-clicked Applications and selected “Edit Menus”. I then selected Internet followed by “Firefox Web Browser” and clicked Properties. I changed the name to “Firefox Profile Manager” and changed the command to:

I clicked the Close button in the Properties dialog and then again on the Main Menu dialog.

Updating Original Panel Launcher

The last order of business to take care of is to update my original Firefox launcher on my top panel. If I don’t update the command used for that launcher, I will end up launching the last profile rather than the default profile when I use it.

As with the first panel icon, right-click the icon and select Properties. Update the Command to the following:

Note that default is the default name of the first profile that Firefox has. If you’ve modified this orignal profile name to something different or have removed it, you’ll need to update the command with the appropriate profile name.

Closing Thoughts

I hope that I’ve given you enough information to find value in using the profiles feature of Firefox and to get started with using profiles on your system.

If you’d like additional information on profiles or have any questions, please leave a comment or contact me.

Additional Links

• Firefox Command Line Arguments
• Firefox Profiles
• Using Multiple Profiles

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.