briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Firefox)

Flash: I hate you

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:16:09 -0700

If there's a version of Flash on Linux that does not crash my browser multiple times per hour, I'd love to know where I can get it.

When I want to browse more than 2 or 3 movies on Youtube at once, I switch over to Opera, because at least when Flash crashes in Opera, it just turns into a black box and Opera keeps going. Firefox on the other hand shuts down entirely.

But sometimes Flash even manages to crash my X server. That takes real talent. Flash cannot possibly die fast enough. We've been dealing with this atrocity for over a decade now.

Firefox 3 beta 3

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:34:21 -0800

Firefox 3 beta 3 finally has updated their add-ons dialog window. I ranted about this way back in 2006. Goes to show that typing blog posts is a good replacement for fixing things yourself. (No it isn't.) You can now sort of download some Firefox extensions in the Tools => Add-ons window.

I say "sort of" because it still doesn't do nearly as much as I wish it did. For example it only seems to offer you a few of the top "recommended" extensions for immediate download. It still retains the magic link that takes you to the Firefox addons website if you want to view more than those. And there's now a search box for searching plugins, but doing the search in the window only shows a few results, and if you want to see ALL results you still have to go to the Firefox website.

Also this new magic add-ons-browser only seems to work for extensions. Not themes. Oops. Another annoyance is that when searching themes on the Firefox website, it shows themes for all versions of Firefox, including old themes that don't work with the version of Firefox that I'm using. This is highly annoying. It'd probably be hard to write a web page to automatically filter out themes and extensions I can't use based on my browser, but it doesn't seem like it'd be hard to do that if everything was in a window in Firefox itself.

And installing extensions still pops up an annoying Vista-like "ARE YOU SURE I SHOULD INSTALL THIS?" dialog, which counts down from 3 to 0 just to make sure the annoyance is complete. And installing themes still requires me to restart the browser before I can use it. Opera doesn't require a restart. Early versions of Firefox didn't require a restart, but admittedly if you didn't restart, horribly bad things happened until you did. Maybe no one can figure out how to get Firefox to do it right, or maybe there's some technical reason for it, but it's still annoying.

So Firefox 3 beta 3 is a bit better than before in the add-ons-installing department, but still oh so far from optimal. Why do I need to go to a web page (a clumsy webpage that seems to be perpetually changing its interface) to download themes and extensions? Opera has this solved beautifully for themes. Even many KDE apps (e.g. Amarok) let you download themes and plugins via a popup window in the app itself. Why do I need to restart Firefox (thus losing all my session authentications, thus forcing me to re-type a billion passwords for everything I was doing) just to change how the buttons look?

This is just a minor nit-pick. Firefox 3 beta 3 is looking pretty good in general. Bookmarks work better now. No more annoying focus-grabbing yes/no dialog boxes about saving passwords. And so on.

In other Firefox news not related to the beta, I finally figured out how to turn off Firefox's God-awfully annoying form auto-completion. Note to self: browser.formfill.enable in about:config. Formfill is the bane of my existence. I can't remember how many times I've typed a google search, then accidentally clicked the formfill dropdown and replaced my carefully crafted search string with something from the formfill history. Argh. Well now I need worry no longer.

(Took me forever to figure out what to search for in about:config to locate this option. "Text field"? "Drop down"? "Auto complete"? The term "formfill" somehow never occurred to me.)

Goodbye Opera, for now

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:07:11 -0800

I tried Firefox 3 beta 2 today. (Happily it was in Portage, albeit hard-masked.) Seems to work OK so far. I managed to crash it once already by trying to open eight websites at once. But it is a beta after all.

Turns out some of the weird issues I was having with my neverending photoblog project may have been Opera-related. Opera would hang and fail to connect to my locally-running Hunchentoot server very often. Firefox though never seems to have that problem. Very odd.

Firefox 3 also seems to incorporate (maybe "rip off" is a better term) some of the nice features of the Opera versions. Like the dropdown list of history items matching text you type into the location bar. Firefox's version of this looks much nicer than Opera's and doesn't cause the whole interface to lag like Opera's does. You can also get speed dial for Firefox, and this Firefox extension seems to be more configurable than the built-in Opera version. Firefox + extensions does a very good job of imitating most of the good things about Opera, at the end of the day.

So yeah, there isn't a heck of a lot of reason to use Opera. It's a great program but it's always been quirky in my experience, and seems to be still even in the latest versions. So I'm going back to Firefox for a while.

I was pleasantly surprised at how many themes and extensions are already up-to-date and usable in Firefox 3 beta 2. In particular I'm now using this very nice dark theme. And Adblock Plus works in Firefox 3 already, which I kind of missed when using Opera. Unfortunately the same old horrendous theme / extension installer dialog box is still there, unfriendly as ever. If Firefox is going to rip off features of Opera, I wish they'd pick Opera's theme installer, because it's far superior.

Aside from little layout tweaks, there doesn't seem to be anything really revolutionary in Firefox 3 though. It's kind of a let-down in one way, but I read that there were a lot of updates to the rendering engine, so that's good. And then again maybe there are only so many features you can (or should) cram into a web browser.

I've been using Firefox since, oh, probably version 0.3 or 0.4 when it was still called Phoenix. Those were fun days. I used to badger everyone in sight to use it. when no one except uber-geeks had ever heard of it. Nowadays almost everyone I know uses it, and I'm always thrilled to see random strangers, even non-geeks, using Firefox. The word is clearly getting out.

Fickle

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:34:51 -0700

My conversion to Opera is still going well. I'm not sure that browsing is altogether more enjoyable or anything, but it's at least as good as Firefox. I'm getting into using the sidebar nowadays. I tend to have an aversion to sidebars in general, but Opera's are hideable and displayable via a toolbar button, which is nice. It's very flexible. The sidebar is a perhaps ideal location for bookmarks; menu-based bookmark browsing annoys me to no end. Same with history. It's also a nice place for file download progress to be shown. The download dialog box in Firefox is my mortal enemy.

I think sometimes about how fickle I am when it comes to software. Linux users can afford to be fickle. It's one of the perks of being a Linux user. For web browsers we have at least two wonderful choices, Firefox and Opera. Think about how many choices we have for text editors, xterm-clones, IM and chat clients, graphics editors, music players, video players, desktop environments and window managers, scripting languages, pretty much everything. Even OS choice; we have so many Linux distros to use. And if you don't want Linux, there's BSD and other alternatives.

We're really spoiled in the open source software world. Most of us never contribute a speck of anything to the majority of these projects. We happily use them and we can stop using them on a whim and use others.

Sometimes I tell myself that simply using the software and telling others about it is a form of giving back to the community. Basically "spreading the word". I have personally influenced a few people to use Linux, to a lesser or greater degree. I have helped people when they've asked for help, to the best of my ability. But such things are a minor contribution, if one at all.

But I think most of us are leeches in a sense; we use the products of others for our own purposes and give little or nothing back. But in another sense, we aren't taking anything away from anyone by using their software. It doesn't cost the author anything when I use Vim or the GIMP or the Linux kernel, other than the cost of a file download. If I didn't use the software, they'd be in exactly the same situation as if I did. If you light a fire, and I light my own fire using yours to start it, did I take anything from you? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Opera

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:01:11 -0700

I decided to give Opera another try. How is Opera so much insanely faster than Firefox at rendering? I wish I knew the answer to that. Supposedly the 9.5 alpha is going to be faster still. It's currently hard-masked in the portage tree so I'm going to hold off trying it for a while, but that would be nice to see. Either way, even with Opera 9.23, page transitions especially are noticeably faster than Firefox, and page load times tend to be fast enough that you can appreciate the difference.

Themes in Opera are still 100x easier to find and download and install than Firefox's. And a lot of them look really good. Maybe someday Firefox will get this right. (3.0?) There are a lot of fairly minimalistic Opera skins, which is what I like. But also a lot of the typical Vista clones, and Tango and KDE/Gnome lookalikes etc. On the topic of the interface, Opera comes with way too many buttons and sidebars enabled by default, but you can strip all of that crap out of it and get something even more minimalistic than Firefox if you want.

The preferences menu of Opera reminds me a lot of KDE, in the sense that there's a config option for absolutely everything, if you're willing to dig through a thousand dialogs and collapsable trees of options to find them. I learned recently that there's an opera:config similar to Firefox's about:config which lets you get at any option you'd care to edit, which is a blessing. Plugins (e.g. Flash) seem to work OK also. I think I recall that being a problem in the past, but I didn't have to do anything to get Flash to work in Opera this time around.

Opera is not tied to Gnome/GTK, which is another immensely huge advantage in my book. The file chooser in Opera is a crappy Windows 98 lookalike built out of QT widgets, but even that is preferable to Gnome's monstrosity of a file chooser dialog. I'm pretty sure you can change which file chooser Firefox uses if you're willing to screw around enough to do it, but it's nice to have a sensible functional default.

There are a lot of other little things that Opera does right, but I don't have the time or inclination to type about them all. On the other hand I have three main problems with Opera. One, it doesn't have the large selection of extensions that Firefox does. Opera has built-in abilities that give you most of what you'd want from most Firefox extensions, but there are a few gaps here and there. Adblocking based on regex matching of URLs for example. Opera does let you right-click a page and "Block Content", and then just click everything you want to block, which works well, but I don't know of a way to use some third-party auto-updating list of ad elements to block.

Two, it has some crap built-in that I don't want. It comes with a mail client, a bittorrent client, and a "widgets" tool and I don't know how to get rid of them. You can very easily IGNORE them however. You can set any external mail app (including terminal apps) to handle mailto for example. You can also easily set apps to handle other protocols, which is typically nice of Opera to allow.

Three, I don't see an easy way to arrange which order the toolbars stack vertically. I'd like my tabs to appear directly above the web page content. You can get it to look about right by dragging all the individual buttons and toolbar elements from one toolbar to another and them removing them from the original toolbar, but that takes way too long. I'd like to be able to drag toolbars themselves around. I don't see why that should be so difficult. Firefox doesn't let you do this easily either, so oh well.

Those are minor concerns. In general Opera seems to be faster and more powerful and more configurable than Firefox. And it's cross-platform, and updates are released regularly, and it seems to be as standards-compliant as Firefox if not moreso. So why isn't Opera the most popular free browser for desktop users? It is closed source, and I'm sure that hurts it. Beyond that, not sure. Maybe people remember back when Opera was ad-infested unless you paid for it. That certainly still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In any case, I'm going to keep trying Opera as my primary browser for a while.

Dark QT theme = unreadable text fields in web pages

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:55:12 -0700

I use a dark QT theme. Many web pages (example: Youtube) have CSS which sets text fields to have black text, but don't set the background color of text fields to be anything. So the background color ends up being my default dark (set by my browser / window manager), but the text in the fields is set by the page's CSS to be black, so I can't read it.

This is incredibly annoying. If sites would either set BOTH the text color and background, or NEITHER the text color nor background, things would be readable. Picking one ends up causing a mess for anyone using a dark theme.

In Firefox to fix this I have to screw around with ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE.default/chrome/userContent.css and force the font color of all my text fields to be white. This then screws up pages that style their text fields to have white backgrounds, so I have to force my background to be dark for all sites.

input {
    color: white !important;
    background: black !important;
}

However this looks horrible. Largely due to the fact that form elements in Firefox look like Windows 3.1 widgets to begin with.

In Opera on the other hand, I can go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> Style Options... -> Enable Styling of Forms and disable all form styling on all web pages. This cause forms to revert back to their default appearance as decided by Opera. In Opera, the default appearance is often set by the theme you're using, so this is actually a nice option and gives nice-looking form widgets. You can also use a custom stylesheet in Opera similarly to Firefox where you can override the colors of form elements using CSS, if you so desire. It's in the same dialog box as the option above.

Any styling that a web page applied to make form widgets fit in better with the rest of the page is gone when do you do this kind of thing, but I'm willing to pay that price.

GIMP... sucks?

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:21:49 -0700

I was going to call this post "GIMP sucks!" without a moment's thought, but GIMP doesn't suck. I'm quick to say "XYZ sucks" but I always mean "XYZ sucks for my needs at the moment" or "XYZ sucks compared to ABC". Of the many things I've said suck, most of them are fine tools. But hyperbole is my favorite pastime, and it helps get the point across.

In any case, I decided to draw a picture yesterday. I dusted off my old Wacom tablet and thought, why not use the GIMP? Gentoo-wiki has good instructions on getting a Wacom tablet working in X windows. A few kernel modules compiled, a few edits to xorg.conf, a tweak or two to some udev rules, a quick X restart and it was all set. (It's not quite as simple as that, of course, but what is?)

Next step, get my tablet working in the GIMP. I have the very latest version of the GIMP installed at the moment, 2.4.0-rc1 release candidate. GIMP recognized my tablet just fine. There are some options via Preferences -> Input Devices that you can set to tweak how the tablet works. You can also install wacomcpl via emerge linuxwacom and it gives you further options to change sensitivity and tracking speed etc.

So off I went. I put in a good hour or so trying to draw a very simple picture for practice. Result: utter failure.

The next thing I tried was hooking up my old Windows machine that's been sitting in the corner (my cat had been using it as a perch / bed) and trying Photoshop. Result: relative success.

What went wrong? Well, my first problem was brushes. The Gimp has an extremely limited selection of brushes. 10 solid circles, 10 faded circles, that's about it. Photoshop has a berjillion brushes by default, and it's really easy to make your own on the fly. GIMP has a brush editor, but it's clunky and unfun.

Beyond that, there's just something not right about my Wacom tablet in X windows. I don't know what, but no matter what I tried, the thing was all jittery. I thought it was just me, maybe my hand isn't steady enough. But in Windows / Photoshop, I had no problems whatsoever. No matter how I played with settings in Linux I couldn't get the thing set up where I could draw a simple straight line.? I turned the speed way up and/or way down, played with sensitivity, changed the tablet from working full-screen to per-window, all kinds of things.? Nothing I did made it any easier to draw a simple straight line.

Another fun experience I had was that pressure sensitivity would randomly stop working in the GIMP, forcing me to restart it and then pressure sensitivity would return. This may be because I'm using an RC version of the GIMP, but who knows. It kind of kills the mood when you're trying to produce artwork.

Beta-quality GIMP doesn't explain this bug though: after using my Wacom tablet for extended periods of time, Firefox would stop responding to keyboard input until I restarted Firefox. This may be coincidental and I'm not 100% sure it's because of my tablet, but I never had a problem like that before, and I haven't had one since I unplugged the tablet.

If you do a search for "GIMP vs. Photoshop" you'll come back with a million Photoshop-people saying GIMP sucks, and then a million GIMP-people saying it's just as good as Photoshop but all the Photoshop junkies are too used to what they already know and unwilling to change. I'm from the exact opposite world. I use the GIMP all the time for basic photo manipulation and I actually like the interface. I don't know Photoshop at all beyond very simple operations. I really wanted to use the GIMP in Linux; I hate using Windows for anything. But in the end I went with Photoshop.

Does this mean anything? No, my experience is an anecdote. But this experience makes me sad nonetheless. Looking on the bright side, 2 years ago I tried to get my Wacom tablet working and only succeeded in crashing my X server. So we're getting somewhere (or I'm becoming ever so slightly less incompetent). But I think we're still not quite there.

Mozilla C++ portability guide

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:48:40 -0700

I'm up to Chapter 18 of Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language. The templates chapter was painful and I had to read it twice. I think I got it the second time through. Stroustrup talks about how people ask him how long it takes to learn C++ and he says (paraphrased) "a year or two probably; be happy, it's not as long as it takes to learn a spoken language or a musical instrument". It's still frustrating. The syntax and whatnot are so easy to learn, but the idioms and common practices take forever to ingrain.

Today in my somewhat futile half-hearted attempt to learn autotools, I chanced upon the Mozilla C++ portability guide It includes such advice as:

Don't use templates.
Don't use exceptions.
Don't use namespaces.
Don't use the C++ standard library, not even iostream.
Don't put assignments in if statements.
Use macros.

This is interesting, since it's the exact opposite of what Stroustrup writes. And Stroustrup also says he wrote this book in such a way as to demonstrate "standard" portable code. I guess I don't doubt that the Mozilla guys know what they're talking about, but if that's the extent you have to bend in order to write "portable" code, I hope I don't ever have to.

Firefox controls are ugly in Linux

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 07:40:05 -0700

This little article gives instructions on how to make your input controls (input fields, buttons, drop-down lists) look nicer in Linux. I tried and it worked pretty well. The buttons end up very slightly rounded, which is better than the GTK1-like crudely-3D blocky things I had otherwise. The colors of the controls changed to match my QT theme too, which is nice.

Firefox + vim

Wed, 09 May 2007 17:39:44 -0700

In about:config change view_source.editor.external to true and you can pick a "View Page Source" editor via view_source.editor.path. /usr/bin/gvim for example. Wish I'd have discovered that a couple years ago.

Playing media files in Firefox in Linux

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:55:06 -0800

I've never had luck with media-playing plugins in Linux. I enjoy MediaPlayerConnectivity; it lets you spawn a full-fledged media player of your choice as a separate browser-independent process. Where a media file would normally appear in Firefox, you instead get a big black box and you click on it and up pops your media player. You can also view or copy the URL of the media file using this plugin, which is nice if you feel like wgetting it. An added bonus of this is that you can browse away from a website in Firefox and the media keeps playing. (Another added bonus is that Firefox doesn't crash every 10 minutes from buggy plugins.)

So I have everything set to use /usr/bin/gmplayer, of course; this works wonderfully. But you can also specify different players for different filetypes. It's tempting to use mplayer rather than gmplayer, but this can lead to problems. When you play a media file, mplayer will spawn in the background, and you see nothing until up pops your video. If mplayer chokes or times out or something else untoward happens, you can end up with mplayer processes thrashing in the background and not notice until your fan starts revving up due to 100% CPU utilization. For things like MP3s, you pretty much have to use gmplayer, if you want any kind of ability to stop the song from playing other than pkill -9ing the thing.

Sites like YTMND have MP3s set to play in the background of some pages. MediaPlayerConnectivity can handle those fine. But those MP3s loop. They don't loop if you use MediaPlayerConnectivity; they play once and mplayer closes. So I had the bright idea that I'd set the command for MP3 files in MediaPlayerConnectivity to

/usr/bin/gmplayer -loop 0

This broke the plugin in horrible ways; a bunch of things disappeared from the plugin config menu and the plugin stopped working on any page with MP3s on it. Possibly the plugin chokes on parsing commands with spaces in them. I had to resort to the config "wizard" to get the plugin to work again at all.

So I made a bash script:

#!/bin/bash
mplayer $@ -loop 0

This works.

Even more cow

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 22:26:35 -0800

I updated my layout to be even more cow-like. My girlfriend made me a cow-themed top banner which I think looks good enough to eat. I often wish I had any kind of graphic design skill, but I don't. Not nearly as good as her, anyways.

It's always so hard to find a good balance between leaving something readable, and making it look good and catch the eye and stand out in some way. As much of a geek as I am, even I will probably pass by a plain-looking site unless I know beforehand that there's something on it that's worth reading. Putting some effort into making your site look nice shows that you actually give a crap about the site, I think. And the more you give a crap about the site, the more likely there is going to be something worth reading on it.

Wordpress impressed me today. I remember a long time ago making a calendar (to list your post archives) was extremely painful. Now you can do it with a single get_calendar call, and it looks fine and works fine. I like relying on Wordpress for this kind of crap because chances are they already worked out what works in IE and what doesn't.

Which brings me to my next point.... dear God, IE sucks. If you're looking at this site in IE right now, and you're using a screen resolution 1024x768 or lower, you'll notice that my site is so wide that it forces a horizontal scrollbar. This isn't so in Firefox. In IE though, the existence of pre tags apparently causes everything to stretch, even when I indicate overflow:auto or overflow:scroll.

And IE interprets border: 1px transparent solid to mean border: 1px BLINDING_WHITE solid. It makes you cry, after a certain point. Also my top header image is a transparent png which looks like garbage in IE, but I'm not fixing it.

Whenever IE drives me into a murderous rage, I just pull up my site stats and suddenly everything seems right with the world:

Making Firefox sane

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 23:45:00 -0800

After installing Firefox, there are things I must do every time to make it behave sanely. Thank God for about:config. Strange how all of these things are disabling some feature of Firefox. Maybe Firefox tries to do too much.

browser.formfill.Enable => false. This prevents those little pop-up drop-down lists from appearing every time you try to type something in an input field. I detest that drop-down list. It steals focus too often. If your mouse happens to be in the wrong place and the drop-down list appears underneath your mouse, it seems to automatically pick an entry from the list, unless you perform some arcane combination of keypresses to avoid it. And the history remembers typos and stupid crap. Trying to use phpmyadmin with those drop-down things enabled is torture. Type a 1 and it suggests 1, 10, 17, 124, every number I ever typed starting with a 1. And you have to hit tab or click around randomly 14 times to get the stupid list to disappear. Argh.

browser.tab.autoHide => false. This prevents the tab bar from disappearing when you have only one tab open. Why in the world isn't this the default? Tabs are one of the main strengths of Firefox. I always thought this was turned on by default so that people migrating from Internet Explorer, used to having no tabs and such, would feel comfortable. But IE7 has tabs. Everyone should be used to tabs by now. And if they aren't they should be MADE used to them, in my opinion. I think also that the "new tab" button on the toolbar is not there by default. Again, this is kind of annoying that I have to add it manually every time. But such is life.

browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing => false. Ugh. Need I say more? (As an aside, it's interesting that about:config options seem to be a completely random mixture of CamelCase, underscore-delimited, and dash-delimited identifiers. Just trying to keep us on our toes, I guess.)

middlemouse.ContentLoadURL => false. This prevents middle-clicking on a random spot on a page from doing a Google search on your copy-paste buffer contents. I can't imagine anyone really wanting this kind of middle-click behavior. "Hmm. Let me just add this text into my copy-paste buffer, and then middle-click on a random website in a random location so that I can do a Google search and jump directly to the first result!" No. Especially for compulsive clickers like myself, this is painful. There are also privacy concerns obviously. I'm pretty likely to have things in my copy-paste buffer that I don't want to be firing off to random servers somewhere.

browser.tab.closeButtons => 3? This gives back the single close button for tabs, rather than one button on each tab. I'm still a bit conflicted which version I like better. I think I like my close button to remain stationary so I can keep clicking to close multiple tabs quickly, rather than hunting down the close buttons on each tab. But on the other hand, sometimes closing multiple tabs easily is a bad thing, because I can close them by accident. I could go either way on this one.

Opera theme chooser

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:48:44 -0700

Previously I blabbered about how writing themes for Firefox sucks.

Now, on a related note: why is the Opera theme browser so much superior to Firefox?

Observe Opera:

In Opera the theme browser opens in a window in the application itself. You browse some themes. You pick one and click Download and it downloads right in the window there. It applies (without restarting the browser, note) and asks if you like it. If you don't, then it reverts back to the original theme.

Changing between already-installed themes involves a SINGLE CLICK in the themes dialog. You click a theme name and it applies instantly. That's it.

Observe Firefox:

When browsing/applying themes, Firefox opens up this window. Clicking the obscure "Get More Themes" text link takes you to an external URL, https://addons.mozilla.org, in my opinion one of the worst-designed theme sites I've ever seen. There, you get to browse through text links of themes on the main page (without thumbnails). Sometimes thumbnails appear on the secondary individual theme pages, and sometimes not; but not a thumbnail in sight on the main page. This means to visually browse themes (judging by, you know, what they look like rather than their name and version number), you have to click about a hundred times on all the theme links.

Once you find a theme you like, you can click the "Install Now" link on that page, in which case a dialog box appears asking if you want to install a theme from this JAR file:

Now, why in the world does it do this? I'm a borderline-OCD computer-programming geek-monster and even I don't give a crap about the URL of the JAR file I'm installing a theme from. One reason for this is that after downloading a theme JAR file, I have no idea what to do with it to get Firefox to import it. It used to be that you had to run a special page with some Javascript triggers that would import a local JAR theme file into Firefox. Then I read that you can drag-and-drop a JAR file into Firefox to install it, but this never worked in Linux and I never tried again. I don't want to screw around with this crap. I want Firefox to load the theme.

Anyways. Clicking OK to install the JAR file makes the theme magically appear in the original (separate) Themes dialog I posted a screenshot of above. And then, to try the theme, you double-click it or click Use Theme, and THEN you have to restart your browser. And if you don't like the theme, you have to restart your browser AGAIN to change the theme back.

Firefox used to let you update your theme without a browser restart. This was years ago, but I remember it. And it never worked right. Sometimes parts of the interface would change and parts wouldn't. And you'd have to restart the browser to fix it (or to discover that the theme just hosed your Firefox profile and you need to wipe it and start fresh).

Firefox got this wrong in pretty much every way. I just tested Firefox Beta2, and other than combining the Themes and Extensions windows into one window, and moving some buttons in the Themes window around, it looks exactly the same. Bad bad bad.

(IE has no themes. So it still sucks worse than both. apply "IE_Sucks" tag)

Firefox theming sucks

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:23:47 -0700

Firefox makes me sad. There are many reasons, but if I had to pick one, I'd say theming. Writing a Firefox theme is so ridiculously hard as to be pretty much not worth the effort. I wrote the Lila theme for Firefox a couple years ago. I kept up with it for a few Firefox versions, but there's just no way any sane person would want to continue doing so.

The theme itself is packaged as a jar file, for reasons that are beyond me. Inside this file are XML files which you get to hand-edit. Now, don't confuse Firefox's UUID with your theme's UUID (which you must generate manually in some way). Remember, em:targetApplication.Description.em:id is where YOUR UUID goes!

The whole layout is controlled by CSS. Not just CSS, but CSS with Firefox-specific crap mixed in. These CSS files are scattered randomly through a bunch of directories with helpful names like "browser" and "global" and "communicator". I assume some of these are leftover trash from Netscape, but I have no idea. There are many times you'll find two directories with the same name, and you have little idea which of them you should be using. global/icons or browser/icons? Beats me. Some folders contain image files that look like they were designed for Windows 3.1, which again I assume is some kind of legacy remnant of Netscape.

If you want to change the look of a single component of the display, you're likely required to wade through 4 or 5 levels of cascading CSS files scattered in multiple directories. The partial solution to this is apparently to stick !important on everything, to override everything that came before it. However this too loses its usefulness after the 4th layer of !important's overriding !important's.

$ grep -r '!important' `find lila -iname '*.css'` | wc -l
666

I didn't make that number up. How interesting.

At the time I wrote my theme, there was absolutely no documentation (that I could find) on how to do anything. Basically you were expected to wade through a couple hundred threads at MozillaZine or something. In practice what everyone did was grab someone else's theme as use it as a default, because otherwise you have no chance. (Clearly someone, somewhere came up with the FIRST theme, from which all others are derived. My theory is that this original theme was introduced into human society by extra-terrestrials or some kind of god-figure.)

The hoops you have to go through to test a theme while working on it is ridiculous. The normal theme install procedure for Firefox was designed by someone with a severe masochistic streak. Where is the Lila theme installed on your computer? If you guessed ~/.mozilla/firefox/01yf2p25.default/extensions/{9957f6c1-021d-4cbf-9462-26a0c1921fe4}/chrome, you're right! But that's just the location of your theme's jar file. If you want Firefox to read it in non-jar format, it's possible, but the method of setting it up can only be called black magic. But without doing this, seeing the result of making any change in your theme requires 5 minutes of fumbling.

Is there a difference between themes for Linux, OS X, and Windows? Clearly so, because those things are specified on the specs for each theme on the Firefox site. What exactly those changes are, or how to resolve them, I would not want to begin to guess.

The best thing is that every Firefox release completely breaks old themes. Even today at MozillaZine we have a 16 page thread about changes from 1.5 to 2.0. And there's already an 8 page thread about changes from 1.5 to 3.0 (God help us all).

Someone apparently updated my Lila theme for version 1.5 at the official Lila page. I installed it, and big surprise, it's broken. The RSS/secure connection icons in the toolbar are totally trashed in the layout. Menus have random highlighting problems. Etc. And here comes Firefox 2.0! Time to rewrite it again! Big chance this theme won't even install in version 2.0, let alone look correct. Nothing at all against whoever updated this theme; I tried to update my old one for version 1.5 myself and I just gave up. Not worth it.

FlashGot

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 10:29:35 -0700

I'm likely the last person in the world who heard of FlashGot, but better late than never. FlashGot is a Firefox plugin that lets you integrate with an external download manager program. It also lets you download every link on a page via a single menu command, which is either nice or overkill, depending on what you want to do.

Linux doesn't have many (any?) good download managers. There's D4X, but I never cared much for it. I installed GWGET but FlashGot didn't auto-recognize it, and I'm not going through any trouble to get it working.

However I still find FlashGot incredibly useful, for one reason: You can use a custom downloader executable. FlashGot will then call the executable and pass it the download URL as a command line argument. You can also pass other arguments (read about them all here) but the URL is all I really need.

The downloader I use is a simple Ruby script I wrote myself which calls wget. What's the point of this, you ask? Well, you can do some neat things like:

Filter your downloads into directories by filetype, filename, source website, or any criteria at all.
Spawn massive numbers of parallel downloads with a single click. (Probably not a good idea to hammer servers too much with this though, it's not nice.)
Use all the power of wget, which includes:
custom timeout duration* download retrying* download resuming* filename timestamping* download speed throttling* FTP suport* (perhaps my favorite) GOOD filename collision resolution, so if you download a file called 1.png and then download a file called 1.png from a different site, wget will save the second one as 1.png.1. This something I miss from Safari. Firefox by default tends to ask you if you want to overwrite the old file, which gets very annoying very quickly.
You could even conceivably crawl a web page or do recursive downloads.

Let's say you want every MP3 you download to go into a "music" folder, every PNG you download to go into a "Pictures" folder, and ignore all other files. You could do something extremely simple like this (which I just wrote in 5 minutes and haven't tested):

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'fileutils'

begin
    ARGV.each do |arg|
        dir = ''
        if arg =~ /mp3/i then
            dir = '/home/chester/music'
        elsif arg =~ /png/i then
            dir = '/home/chester/pictures'
        else
            dir = nil
        end
        if dir then
            FileUtils.mkdir(dir) unless File.directory?(dir)
            Dir.chdir(dir) do
                `wget #{arg}`
            end
        end            
    end
rescue Exception => e
    # If you want to see the output
    # when the script crashes, you 
    # could log it here.
    raise e
end

Point FlashGot to this script and when you "FlashGot All", all linked PNGs and MP3s on a site will be downloaded and sorted, and all other links will be ignored. This would be very useful if you want to grab a whole page of wallpapers for example.

Opera

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:49:11 -0700

I tried Opera today (first time in a long while). It's extremely annoying in many ways, but Firefox is even MORE annoying in even MORE ways, nowadays. So I'm going to give Opera a try for a while.

It's really come a long way since last time I tried it. I still fondly remember the early days of Firefox aka Firebird aka Phoenix, and Opera always had tons more options and good stuff than Phoenix back then. Maybe I'll get used to Opera's mouse gestures again, who knows.