Technorama

I gave the latest Google Chrome a run through the other day. I was surprised how much is lacking, from addons, to the inflexible search engine configuration. Switched back to Firefox after 3 hours.

Hopefully Firefox can borrow the good features Chrome does have, simple config and UI/preferences. Also the default page zoom level that is missing *still* in Firefox!

Labels: Firefox

Great to see Native C/C++ is possible with Android 2.3!

Firefox 4 Beta for Android may be the first use, although that runs on my HTC Desire which is running Android 2.2!

Labels: Firefox, GNU+Linux

Noticed that my HTC Desire displays web pages smaller than they should be, and I've found the cause. The Android 2.1 update1 firmware is reporting that the DPI (Dots Per Inch) of the display is 96x96!

Whereas, the 2" x 3" display is 480x800 pixels, which means DPI is 240x266 !

Anyone know if this is going to be fixed in the 2.2 Android firmware update?

Would be handy if I could update via the "layout.css.dpi" value I've got in Firefox's about:config.

There's a nice online tool for checking browser dpi. See this post for lcd_density setting for rooted devices.

Labels: Firefox, GNU+Linux, Mobile

Firefox has a couple of bugs I'd like to see fixed in the next release. I'm happy to put my money out there, so I'm offering bounties. Scaled

• Zoom a page, and set "Zoom text only". Looks great on page, but print preview and when printed out to PDF the text is the normal size. The fix is to update print preview (perhaps just use the normal browser window, rather than a separate popup?), and get the output to PDF also in the same zoomed format. Bug bounty: £150 (UK Pounds).

• Firefox ingores system settings like Gnome, locale environment variables LC_PAPER, and defaults to "US Letter" paper format. It should use LC_PAPER, see that en_GB is in Europe, and default to A4 (of cause user can change to another preference still!). Bug bounty: £100
  

I'm running Ubuntu which comes with Firefox 3.0.x.

Payments at my discretion, upon acceptance of proof that the work has been carried out and is in next Ubuntu release ;)

Get in touch at jg (in) jguk (dot) org

Labels: bugbounty, Firefox

Firefox 3 is now released, I've written up a list of the fixes I'd still like to see, to make the browser it deserves to be:

Form buttons that don't "click" properly, and end up just looking like they've been highlighted.

Option to stop sites disabling scroll bars, and block detection of any right clicks.

A decent sized window resize on lower right hand corner (This could just be Ubuntu/KDE/GTK bug).

URL completion doesn't work from the character after http, currently I have to type https:// before it will offer me mail.google.com. At least it offers the SSL site from the history when I just enter mail.google.com.

Some passwords aren't saved always (http/s ones), currently every once in a while I need to log in to my netgear router, but sometimes Firefox doesn't populate the password fields, even though they are stored passwords! AutoAuth is one workaround for a few of the cases :)

Save Page button that I've commented on before. Currently needs a way to save the page as a PDF file!

Quicker (or configurable) time-out on loading iframes, images etc from hosts which are down. let the rest of the page load. The problem is visible on any google cache of a site where the site is presently offline and the iframes/images still try and load!

Native support for common image types like TIFF which is still missing despite many sites using TIFF files in the IMG tag.

When a webmaster embeds an MP3 or Vorbis file into a browser page using the EMBED or OBJECT tag this gives an error if the mimetype isn't supported. The error is at the top of the page "Click here to download plugin.", and there is the green jigsaw icon where the embedded file is. The green jigsaw icon is not ideal, a download link would be much nicer, e.g. "Embedded file not supported, click here to download", or be able to right click on the jigsaw icon and download it is another option. Workaround at present is to delve into the HTML and try and figure out the src URL, or if not generated by JavaScript try and get it from the Page Info (Ctrl+I doesn't work in recent Firefox unfortunately). If there is an EMBED error, my feeling is Firefox should display the mime-type, or a string describing the mime-type so we know it is a "Windows Media Video" file etc, without having to go through the plugin detection wizard to find what format it is.

Unfortunately links stop working on a page the moment we click one, so even though the new page hasn't loaded, all the page is still readable, and links clickable, but none of the links work! Often we click a link, then see another, but we can't middle-click it to open in an additional tab, as would be handy :)

Firefox3 is great as it is though, a great development from Netscape and Mozilla Suite which went before :)

Labels: Firefox, Future, GNU+Linux

Mozilla have announced their mobile browser now won't be available until 2010! It's amazing just how far they are lagging behind these days. So all the competition unified around WebKit will have two more years to consolidate their lead! Time for Mozilla to wake up?

Labels: Firefox, Mobile, Mozilla

Be it security exploits or crashes, there are multiple practical reasons not to install Adobe Flash.

The best reason to avoid Flash is that it's a counter to the openness of the Web. Each Flash item embedded into a page isn't being displayed by the browser, but by the Adobe plugin, it's a comprehensive alternative to the Web. Flash ignores all the privacy and security settings in the browser, sending secret cookies to websites, and if there is a bug or security in the Adobe plugin we're powerless to spot that or fix it as they don't warn you.

What's far better for consumers in the marketplace is for technologies to complete against each other. However, as Flash is just a proprietary system developers can't even see the specification they would need to implement to play a Flash files (without signing an unreasonable license agreement and payments).

Flash isn't compatible with many devices, as Adobe only release it on select 32bit OSs. Flash doesn't work on mobile devices, and when it does it's the Flash "Lite" incompatible subset. Webmasters don't realise they shouldn't put Flash files on public pages as defaults, for users it is better to just have Flash as a secondary option to open web standard pages.

Adobe marketing spin will tell you 98% of desktops support Flash, but what they don't tell you is that includes Windows95 machines running Flash5. YouTube, BBC, Facebook all necessitate Flash9.

Adobe have also added DRM, compulsory adverts and prevented people downloading content recently; all very anti-consumer.

The problem for Adobe is that they won't open up Flash while they have a de facto monopoly, and so they'll only open up to widen their base when MS have taken the monopoly with Silverlight, but that will be too late for Flash and Adobe unfortunately. If wise, they would open up now, standardise and secure their dominance for longer.

Others have posted similar to me I see. I like the quote from Tim Berners-Lee:

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

It is a shame so many people now embed YouTube Flash files and others into their pages as the default choice when services like blip.tv also offer in modern open web formats.

Flash does show what can be achieved though, take this Flash 3D web UI demo. We just need open web standards to achieve the same, AJAX and an OpenGL|ES binding would be a good start :)

Labels: Adobe, Firefox

Increasingly I'm online away from offline apps like my Thunderbird and Firefox, which means I don't get my settings and addons that I've setup in Thunderbird as I use GMail online. What Google really need to launch is an addon mechanism for their GMail and other services, in the same way that Facebook support users adding apps to their profile etc. So wherever I login.. I get my setup!

Labels: Firefox, Google, Thunderbird

If like me you see the problem with Adobe's Flash format and how it diverts us away from the openness of the interweb market which has facilitated so much progress you'll see the bugs in Adobe's software as just another problem in their strategy.

Today I needed to use a computer in an office running Windows, at least it was Firefox, but Adobe Flash still managed to bring it down with a crash!It's fully reproducible from this page, linked from this other page with Firefox 2.0.13 and Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60, DLL v9.0.60.184 backtrace:

NPSWF32! 3000d6fa()
NPSWF32! 300d106d()
NPSWF32! 300d343e()
NPSWF32! 300e580e()
NPSWF32! 300e5a22()

3000D6FA   mov         ecx,dword ptr [eax+1Ch] <--Crash
3000D6FD   call        3000D705
3000D702   ret         4

I have plugins installed:

Shockwave Flash

File name: NPSWF32.dll
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60

MetaFrame Secure Access Manager

File name: npCtxCAO.dll
Endpoint Analysis Client

VLC Multimedia Plugin

File name: npvlc.dll
Version 0.8.6c, copyright 1996-2006 The VideoLAN Team

http://www.videolan.org/

I've posted here as they don't provide any email address for bug reports, and they've never replied to any other communication I've sent about crash bugs in their propreitary software. Will they ever fix this? Not sure when they have loads of other exploits and privacy issues (secret cookies which ignore browser settings etc)

Labels: Adobe, Firefox

My personal favs, save entire page as an image, (alternative is Screengrab). Adblock Plus, DownloadHelper, ColourfulTabs, AutoAuth and MediaPlayerConnectivity complete the experience for the moment ;)

Labels: Firefox

Why doesn't Firefox have a export as PDF function yet? This is one of the features I use most in OpenOffice. When I need to do it from Firefox on Ubuntu I need to print to Default/Postscript, and save to file, then use ps2pdf from the shell to convert it. However, it just just be a click away!

From KDE System Settings, I can add a new Printer as GENERIC->Postscript Printer but that file is still a PostScript file and not a PDF! The pseudo printer is a simple idea, with PDFCreator and CutePDF being available which acomplish it this way. Will Firefox 3 have this missing feature?

Labels: Firefox, PDF

Currently addons.mozilla.org does not offer signed addon extensions, so if some unscrupulous person wrote a key-logger they could quite easily get people using their addon as everyone would trust the source. I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet actually.

Firefox as other security issues too, like even when I disable an addon Firefox still runs it upon startup! (Filterset.G. Updater for example). So you really have to uninstall the addons if you don't want them to run!

Labels: Firefox

3D on the web is one area that is still absent, I'd like to see that change over the next couple of years, especially as the tech has been around since the 90s. We've got the open format VMRL and X3D, which via the script tag support Javascript code. There is the Sony Computer Entertainment COLLADA format which is now maintained by the Khronos Group.

So to pull it all together browsers really need to add native support for these formats. While their are "plugins" such as the excellent OpenVRML that is still just a plugin, and not an integrated component of the browser like SVG or HTML. Perhaps someone at an innovative net business would be what's needed now to get things rolling.

Labels: Firefox, GNU-Linux, Tech, Web

I use Firefox's Adblock and Filterset.G.Updater extensions to ditch the advert pollution on many pages of the interweb. What we really need is a decent CookieBlock and CookieFilterset updater, the sort that blocks cookies like urchin I blogged about before. Is it that because cookies aren't visible they're not annoying enough to start blocking the unique trackers on pages? Should have been available before now, so as Mozilla guys aren't implementing as a core feature I hope someone will scratch the itch as an extension ;)

Labels: DataProtection, Firefox

This tiff firefox bug seems set on never being resolved by the Firefox team. Outstanding for 5 years already! Why can't the browser most popular with users display a standard graphics file format? It's just like the reply-all bug in Thunderbird which doesn't get tackled.

Labels: Firefox

It is interesting to see that Firefox suffers the same problems that MS-Windows does. Every time an extension is installed it says it is necessary to restart before changes will take effect. Why can't they apply on the fly like most GNU-Linux desktop applications?

What is worse that Firefox's offer to Restart doesn't actually work, I installed Filterset.G Updater on the latest 2.0.0.11 (what's with the silly numbering?) and clicked "Restart" when it offered, and when it restarted it hadn't really restarted, as Filterset.G hadn't run its first-run functions to download the advert block list! I had to close it, and manually restart to get it to download the advert block list.

..so come on Firefox developers, catch up!

Labels: Firefox, Future, GNU-Linux

If like me you use Adblock Filterset.G Updater to grab the latest regexp to layout pages in Firefox without all the intrusive Adobe Flash, Gif and Iframe adverts.. you may have noticed that Filterset.G Updater doesn't work when you're behind a firewalled connection! I tracked down the cause to be because it relies on Coral Cache, which functions on the less standard port 8080. I told the guys at Coral about this problem in their design a few years ago, unfortunately they've not fixed it still.

The solution is to dive into the code and change Filterset.G Updater to not use the Coral cache.. now editing code is pretty easy, so just follow these steps:

Find fgupdater.jar in your firefox profile and copy it somewhere as a backup.
Rename the original copy fgupdater.jar.zip
Open it up in your favoriate ZIP archive browser, such as Ark, WinZip etc.
Edit the file "content/fgupdater.js"
Change the function near the top to go straight to the uncached site URL:

function fgSite(filter)
{
return "http://www.pierceive.com/filtersetg/";
}

Now save your changes, and close the editor, it should then update the archive when you close it.
Rename it back to fgupdater.jar again.
Restart firefox, and either do a manual update from the Add-ons menu, or if it does an automatic one you should then see the Adblock extension gets populated with the list of regular expressions ;)

Easy eh!?

Labels: Firefox