# Tag Archives: firefox

Anything related to Mozilla Firefox

# Firefox 3.6 and the million proxy password popups

I needed to authenticate with a proxy today and with Firefox 3.6 I constantly got user/password dialog boxes. Of course, this is annoying. Some searching lead me to an article on the Mozilla support site which mentions a setting (which you can reach via about:config) named network.auth.force-generic-ntlm which, when set from false to true, fixes a lot of these popups.

# MathML and SVG in HTML 5 with Firefox

I’ve been using MathML for a while now for some of my documentation work on 3D graphics. Unfortunately the only way at the moment is to use XHTML 1.1 modular doctype to include either or both of MathML and SVG. In HTML 5 these have become embedded content parts of the specification. So for example, using MathML would be as simple as doing:

[html]<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>MathML test</title>
<body>
$<mrow> <mi>y</mi> <mo>=</mo> <msup> <mi>x</mi> <mn>2</mn> </msup> </mrow>$
</body>
</html>[/html]

Unfortunately the only browser to support either MathML or (parts of) HTML 5 at this moment is Firefox 3.5. However, the MathML or SVG embedded content did not render under 3.5. After reading John Resig’s post about a new HTML parsing engine in Mozilla’s Gecko engine I set out to test this engine’s support  by downloading the latest nightly and setting html5.enable to true in about:config and ‘lo and behold, it renders as expected.

# FireMath – MathML editing made easier

I discovered FireMath today, an addon for Firefox that makes editing MathML much, much easier. Give it a spin. I just wish more browsers than Firefox supported MathML out of the box.

# TinyMCE in WordPress 2.7.1 not working on FreeBSD?

Discovered today that with both Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.63 on FreeBSD, TinyMCE within WordPress 2.7.1 is not allowing me to use the visual editing mode. I tried the example of TinyMCE and it works without problems. Based on this and the fact it works on Windows, there must be something weird in either WordPress or its included version of TinyMCE with FreeBSD. I logged a post over at the WordPress forums.

# Zotero and PDF indexing on FreeBSD

For a while now I have been using Zotero on Firefox to handle researching topics. It also allows PDF indexing, but for this you need to set some things up first. Start by installing xpdf from ports, it’s located under graphics/xpdf. This will install pdfinfo and pdftotext amongst others. Next go to your Zotero data directory, by default this is the zotero directory under your profile directory in \$HOME/.mozilla/firefox, and create two symbolic links pdfinfo-uname -s-uname -m and pdftotext-uname -s-uname -m which will point to /usr/local/bin/pdfinfo and /usr/local/bin/pdftotext, respectively.

Now, when you restart Firefox, Zotero should be able to pick up the files. Check by going into Zotero’s preferences and navigate to the Search tab. It should state something to the effect of pdftotext version UNKNOWN is installed.

# Running ClickOnce .NET on Firefox

Currently only Internet Explorer can run ClickOnce applications natively. Now with FFClickOnce, a Firefox add-on, you can also launch these from within Firefox. Quite useful if you don’t want to use Internet Explorer, but do want to test deployment of .NET applications with your favourite browser.

# urchinTracker() is not defined

I tried to use Google Analytics for the first time and encountered an error message I’ve seen before.

Firebug would report: urchinTracker() is not defined.

I just could not understand why I would get this error message.

Turns out to be simpler than I imagined.

1. I was blocking urchin.js at googleanalytics.com using AdBlock (so for all of you people who blindly trust their results, they’re awfully skewed),
2. the provided JavaScript from Google does not properly check if the urchinTracker() function is indeed defined prior to calling it. Suppose you have it blocked through AdBlock the urchin.js file won’t load, next you try to call the function, which isn’t declared in the namespace and thus triggers an error in the Firebug debugger.

One way around this was to use the code from http://www.buayacorp.com/archivos/google-analytics-urchintracker-is-not-defined/ and the problem should go away. It seems that the suggestion in this thread over at Google groups has already been incorporated with the current urchin.js file.

# Weird weathering days

Went to see the Fantastic Four on Saturday. A pretty good movie to be honest, very funny. Seeing Jessica Alba as Susan Richards (with appropriately dyed blonde hair) was actually enjoyable, of which I had my doubts before going to see it.

In other news, Mozilla/Firefox released Deer Park Alpha 2 is now released.

These are interesting tidbits from the release notes:

• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs
• Improvements to popup blocking

Been working on some ideas for my labs@tendra project. This will focus heavily on languages, especially Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and probably Hindi.

# X can suck hard at times

And to the question why people still use Windows try setting up your X environment to properly support MathML with Firefox.

Truly, using new fonts within X is a black art still reminiscent of dark and medieval times when we did not know better. I thought we would have progressed that stage by now.

From a user perspective Windows definitely wins hands down in this, drag a file to a Fonts folder, done.
No, X wants us to use crazy incantations of mkfontdir, mkfontscale, fc-cache, ttmkfdir, xset with various fp options and hope xlsfonts shows the font you are after.

Users do NOT want to be bothered with foundries, weights, encoding types, and what not. They just want to add a font, select it in their favourite application and go: “owww, pretty!”

Is that, anno 2004, too much to ask?

Apparently…