Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.
For a few months now, the file dialogs (open, save, etc) in Firefox on Linux Mint 17 KDE malfunctioned. Clicks didn’t go through and/or were interpreted as drags. I finally figured out that it was caused by the Oxygen KDE theme.
So, I installed mint-themes-gtk3 and chose Mint-X as my theme.
It is now fixed.
Some time ago, the Firefox developers decided it was a good idea to trim the http(s):// from the address in the address bar. Since then, I’ve been getting HTTPS site where I don’t want it, because I can’t see what I’m doing. Especially so because HTTPS has no concept of virtual host names, and putting https:// in front of any domain might put you on a completely different web site. So, when I accidentally typed https:// in front of an URL once, it will remember that, but not show me…
Luckily it can be disabled, by setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false in about:config.
This annoying feature is right up there with the removal of the RSS icon from the address bar.
I just installed Nanny for Google Chrome, which, like LeechBlock for Firefox, should help me to recoup some of the time that is now actively being stolen by YouLube and FaceLook. If I’m too weak on my own to push back technology to its proper servile place, then I might as well use technology to do some of the pushing for me. You’re a tool, you damn computer, nothing more than that!
I don’t like that firefox nowadays opens new tabs after the current tab. When I open stuff, I remember in which order I opened it and I don’t want that order changed by having tabs inserted.
Change:
browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
to false.
Mozilla products, firefox and thunderbird, seem to have the strange behaviour of overriding the paper size set by the operating system; it scales the page to letter and then prints it to A4.
To fix that, you need to go into about config and set the print_paper_data parameter to 9.
Wednesday, after returning to Groningen from Barcelona, I saw Ying using Vimperator. I was sold immediately.
I like to use the keyboard. Point and click is not really my cup of tea. It just doesn’t work without a touch screen. (A while ago I had the opportunity to see an expensive tilt-able touch screen in action and I was quite impressed by how suddenly a GUI became less of a disaster.) I’m an avid VIM user. Although I’ve tried training myself to Emacs, I’ve never made the switch. Even if I would have, this wouldn’t have changed the fact that I’m a shell person, not a desktop person.
I do a lot of writing from my web browser (Firefox). This is not the most enjoyable activity imaginable using the typical <textarea>. It’s not that HTML textareas are so bad, it’s just that I don’t like typing anything extensive without using VIM.
The It’s All Text! Firefox add-on is one way to solve this problem. It adds a small “edit” button to the bottom right of all textareas. (It also adds a context submenu, but this can only be used to edit the whole page’s source (which I found to be a little bit disappointing as I’d rather seen that this acted on just the textarea when going there from a textarea).) The button executes an external editor of choiseGVIM.
Using Vimperator, when in insert mode (inside a textarea), I just have to press Ctrl-i
to execute GVIM. The It’s All Text! add-on has thus been deprecated.
Due to my reluctance to switch to a tiling window manager, I’m still using WindowMaker. Starting Firefox in WindowMaker is a bit of a nuisance because the main window opens too far out beyond the top left of my workspace. The only way to change this is to tell it to start maximized. However, the main window and the dialogs have the same WM_CLASS and I was somehow annoyed with getting all the popups maximized as well.
Vimperator starts these windows within the browser tabs, so there’s no longer a good reason not to start Firefox maximized. This saves me another keystroke whenever I begin a new browsing session.
fand type a number. The View Access Keys extension is no longer necessary.
Ctrl-z, you can make the web page win until you escape the mode.
There are more modes, but I’m not here to write a tutorial. 🙂
I have many of the scrolling options that I’m used to in VIM. Most importantly, I can scroll half a page instead of a whole page! Before, I’ve spent a lot of time mucking around trying to find out how to make Firefox do this and the only extension that seemed to be able to deliver was Firemacs which I shied away because it did away with many of Firefox’s default key bindings, which is ironic because Vimperator seems much more extreme in this regard. 😛
On thing that I would really like Vimperator to do is to disable Flash content from stealing focus. That would remedy the last type of situation where I simply don’t feel in control of my web browser.
My sister was so fond of the RSS feature that came with Google Desktop’s sidebar that she kept it permanently visible at the right side of her screen. (What a news junkie!) Now that I got her stuck with Linux, she misses her precious Google Desktop and I’m trying to figure out an alternative for her.
For those who want to truly stay on top, just pointing Firefox to Google Reader occasionally isn’t good enough. (I know: I’m slow. I like it that way.) I had heard of various Firefox add-ons to aggregate your RSS feeds in the sidebar, but the sis had thought of this already and didn’t like to have something permanently filling up space at the left. Ok, I can understand. I thought there must probably be some Firefox add-on to move the whole damn sidebar to the right and of course there is; it’s called RightBar.
Screenshot of the RightBar Firefox Addon
The extension is so simple that you could achieve the same by adding a few lines to the userChrome.css file in the chrome subdirectory of your Firefox profile directory:
/* Change the sidebar's position */ #browser { -moz-box: reverse; }
(If the file doesn’t exist yet, create it from a copy of userChrome-example.css.)
What’s left now is to choose which feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox to use. So far, I’ve only tried Sage (based on a five-star rating and familiarity with the name). It seems to work quite well, although, really, I still prefer just visiting Google Reader every once in a while. I mean: I’m a man, I don’t multi-task, I can hardly single-task.
I’m going to forward these suggestions to my sister, probably just to see them ignored for one crucial oversight: the sidebar doesn’t look very different
. One of the things she liked about the Google Desktop, she told me, is that it looked very different from the rest of the stuff on her screen, causing a minimum of distraction. Probably I’ll end up recommending some kind of gDesktlet. (Or is there something better-looking these days?)
The “Places” system in the new Firefox 3 is great. I’m still getting more effective usage out of just the location bar every day. But, sometimes I’m on a different computer, or I haven’t been to one of my web pages for a very long time.
How cool is it then that I can just Control+K to my Google search box and enter: bypassing smart completion
to get my own page on the top of the result list?
Since my blog is literally a log that I mostly use to keep track of what I think and do while problem-solving, it’s great that I can rely on Google to find my way through memory lane.
I’m not very fond of file picking dialogs. They’re much too squeezy to my taste. I much prefer a full-blown file system browser to pick my files. I feel no need to suffer cute, miniature wannabe file choosers. That’s why I was very pleased to come across the dragdropupload extension for Firefox today. I upload files very often, and this extension makes uploading using web forms a little less awkward!
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