Often you find a neeed to keep an old copy of Firefox around for testing or to use a specific plugin (Example: Selenium). In these cases it can often prove problematic to allow the browser to auto-update. Here are some simple steps to prevent this behavior.
Enter “about:config” into the Firefox URL bar, then change the following values. You can click on them to toggle.
app.update.auto = false
app.update.enabled = false
Alternately, on Windows you can edit the config file at: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
.default\prefs.js
REFERENCES:
Categories: Work Tags: about, auto, browser, config, ff, firefox, js, mozilla, prefs, testing, update, version
With the rapid release cycle (currently every 6 weeks) for Firefox, it’s a good idea for developers and testers to use the upcoming release versions before they are released to the general public.
For Windows users, you can download and install an appropriate version from:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/
On Ubuntu, it’s a little more difficult, but rater straight-forward:
- Open a new Terminal window
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-nextsudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install firefox
REFERENCES:
That’s all…. Happy Testing!
Categories: WebStandards, Work Tags: alpha, aurora, beta, browser, client, developer, firefox, linux, mozilla, ubuntu, windows
There are often circumstances where you do not want users to select certain text on your page in order to maintain a facade… rounded buttons for example.
In most browsers, this can be achieved using CSS (much of it proprietary below), For IE and Opera, you will need to use the unselectable expando property of the element you wish to be unselectable.
You can set this using an attribute in HTML:
<div id="foo" unselectable="on" class="unselectable">...</div>
<style type="text/css">
.unselectable {
-webkit-user-select: none;
-khtml-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: none;
-o-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
}
</style>
Sadly this property isn’t inherited, meaning you have to put an attribute in the start tag of every element inside the
. If this is a problem, you could instead use JavaScript to do this recursively for an element’s descendants:
function makeUnselectable(node) {
if (node.nodeType == 1) {
node.unselectable = true;
}
var child = node.firstChild;
while (child) {
makeUnselectable(child);
child = child.nextSibling;
}
}
makeUnselectable(document.getElementById("foo"));
REFERENCES:
With the recent rapid release cycle (currently every 6 weeks) for Firefox, it’s a good idea for developers and testers to use the upcoming release versions before they are released to the general public.
For Windows users, you can download and install an appropriate version from:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/
On Ubuntu, it’s a little more difficult, but rather straight-forward:
- Open a new Terminal window
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install firefox
REFERENCES:
That’s all…. Happy Testing!
Categories: WebStandards, Work Tags: aurora, beta, browser, early, firefox, free, linux, mozilla, mozilla. beta, pre-release, qa, release, testing, ubuntu, windows
After months of anticipation and three Release Candidates, the new version of Firefox is now available for download. (Due to demand, servers are still a bit slow, so just keep trying and you will eventually get it!).
http://www.getfirefox.com/
Most common developer plugins were updated to support FF3 in the last week or so:
- YSlow! was finally updated on launch day
- Unfortunately, Google’s discontinued support for their “Google Browser Sync” and does not plan to update it to support FF3.
Cheers!
This is knowledge that is generally “tribal” by nature, reserved to only the nerdiest web developers, recently I was asked to name these and failed. Here’s the bounty of my research.
Gecko is generally considered to be the second most-popular layout engine on the Web, after Trident (used by Internet Explorer for Windows since version 4), and followed by WebCore (used by Safari) and Presto (used by Opera).
Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape browser releases. Written in C++ and licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards. Originally created by Netscape Communications Corporation, its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation.
Trident (also known as MSHTML) is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4 in October 1997, has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today. For version 7 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft made significant changes to the Trident layout engine to improve compliance with web standards and add support for new technologies. Despite these changes, Trident remains significantly less compliant than competing layout engines Gecko, Presto and WebCore.
Presto is the name of the current (Opera 9 series) layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. It was first released (following several public betas and technical previews) on January 28, 2003 in Opera 7.0 for Windows. Presto replaced the Elektra engine used in versions 4–6 of Opera. Presto differs from Elektra in that it is dynamic: the page or parts of it can be re-rendered in response to DOM and script events. The Presto layout engine is only available as a part of Opera browser or related products. The source or binary (DLL) forms of the engine are not publicly available. Subsequent releases have seen a number of bugs fixed and optimizations to improve the speed of the ECMAScript (”JavaScript“) engine.
Tasman is the name of the layout engine introduced with version 5 of Internet Explorer for Mac. Tasman was an attempt to improve support for web standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, MSIE for Mac is no longer supported, but newer versions of Tasman are incorporated in some other current Microsoft products.
Cheers!
Categories: WebStandards, Work Tags: browsers, css, gecko, html, mac, mozilla, msie, opera, safari, standards, webkit, windows
I’ve used PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) since I was in college. It provides for both digital signatures and strong encryption and content without the user having to go make extraordinary effort. The process uses what is known as Public Key Encryption and uses a Web Of Trust to certify individual users.
For years I used the original PGP 2.6.2, 5.x and 6.x products that were available as freeware. After PGP was acquired by a much larger commercial entity, most development has shifted to the open-source community that makes it available as GnuPG aka GPG.
There are several plugins available for common Email Clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook to natively integrate the functions into those applications. Additionally plugins are available for Firefox to enable encryption and signing of WebMail services such as GMail (Google Mail).
My public keys are available online at http://www.giantgeek.com/pgpkeys.asc, http://www.skotfred.com/pgpkeys.asc, or through most of the keyservers.
References:
I look forward to your signed/encrypted emails,
Cheers.
Categories: Life, WebStandards, Work Tags: email, encryption, firefox, gnupg, keys, mozilla, pgp, pke, signature, trust
Here’s another, albeit awkward configuration change for Mozilla Firefox for networking.
Enter about:config in the URL of the browser and manipulate the following, I’ve shown the defaults in parethesis to aid in reverting them if you encounter problems.
network.http.pipelining=true (def:false)
network.http.proxy.pipelining (def:false – only required if you use proxies that support)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=8 (def:4, max is 
References:
Cheers!
Previously I discussed the McAfee SiteAdvisor plugin. Another similar project is WOT.
The differences with it are as follows:
- Instead of a centralized service, WOT is democratic. As such, the result is based on the feedback of any user that takes the time to rate a given website.
- WOT is available for Firefox and MSIE.
Since this coexists well within the browser, there’s no reason you can’t use both!
References:
Happy surfing!
Due to my UNIX background, I’ve found it helpful, for both security and performance reasons to relocate your ‘cache’ or temporary files to a new location (Unix/Linux gurus may prefer /tmp/) here’s the simple process for doing this on a Windows machine using Firefox.
This is useful for several reasons:
* Moving many of your ‘tmp’ files/folders to a single location makes it easier to “clean house”.
* If you move ‘tmp’ to a separate drive or partition (like in UNIX), your primary drive will be less fragmented and may even show increased performance.
Firefox didn’t make this as easy to change as MSIE, but it’s a trivial matter. Find and edit the prefs.js file in your Profile directory and add the following…
user_pref(”browser.cache.disk.parent_directory”, “C:\\temp\\Mozilla”);
Alternately, you can type “about:config” in the URL/address line of the browser and add the String…
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a value of “C:\\temp\\Mozilla”
If you want to keep your existing cached files, you can always copy them over from the old location.
For Windows XP with MSIE6/7, the disk cache location is easily changed in the Internet Control Panel, on the General tab, Settings button. Microsoft seems to change that control panel with every new OS/browser version, but it’s generally named similarly on different configurations.
Good luck !