Scatterism

Fixing Firefox Quirks on Linux

Rami Kayyali — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 01:44:35 +0000

I’m not really sure why Firefox/Linux packagers decided to flip some options and make it different from Windows, but there are a few quirks about Firefox that can get too annoying at times. Here’s how you fix them:

Type in the address bar about:config, press Enter, and you’ll get a list of (almost) all Firefox internal options. Now look for each of the following options and toggle them to your preference.
middlemouse.contentLoadURL: If you’ve ever middle-clicked by mistake in some page and ended up not knowing exactly where, it’s because Firefox took the content of your clipboard, pasted it automagically in the address bar, looked up the first result in Google and went there. Ouch! You might want to disable this. Just double click the row to toggle true/false.
middlemouse.paste: If this is enabled and you middle-click a text box, Firefox will paste the clipboard in there. But there’s a small caveat. It doesn’t matter if the text is selected or not. Normally, if there’s a selection and you press Ctrl+V, the text will be pasted to replace the selection; Firefox doesn’t do that, it just pastes the text wherever you clicked.
browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll: This option makes Firefox select the whole URL in the address when you click it. Yes, this is minor, but still annoying.
layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation: I spent some time looking for this one, this was the most annoying quirk to me. You know when you’re trying to delete just the directory or the query part of a URL and you press Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow to select it and delete it? Well on Linux, Firefox selects the whole text instead. This is how you fix it, enable this option and you’ll get the same behaviour that Firefox has on Windows. Nifty, huh?

Doom in DHTML

Rami Kayyali — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 23:42:27 +0000

Canvascape 3D Walker is an impressive demo of what Firefox’s new canvas can do. Oh yeah, it’s supported in Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Must.. resist… 3D Web… fantasies…

Firefox 1.0

Rami Kayyali — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:26:19 +0000

Firefox 1.0 is here, download it now and enjoy, there are a lot of bug-fixes, lots of improvements, and it’s now in 14 languages.

Firefox?!

Rami Kayyali — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 17:32:37 +0000

First there was Firebird, a stripped version of Mozilla. Then there is Firefox, the new version of Firebird!

Actually, this was due to a conflict with Firebird, the database server, and earlier with Pheonix, the BIOS. Hopefully Firefox will deliver something new to Web surfers.

For Firebird lovers, I’m sure you’ll love Firefox, go ahead and download it, give it a shot, and trust me, you’ll never come back to IE again :)

Mozilla 1.6 Released

Rami Kayyali — Sun, 18 Jan 2004 23:50:03 +0000

Mozilla 1.6 is released, go get a grab of it at mozilla.org, trust me, you won’t regret it.

For those of you who don’t know what Mozilla is, it’s the successor of Netscape’s long-praised browser, Netscape Navigator. But Mozilla has a lot of great features like tabbed browsing, POP-up supression, password management, and for the developers there’s Venkman, the JavaScript debugger, and a lot of DOM compliance.

Like I said, you won’t regret it, grab a copy for your platform right now!