Category Archives: firefox

Ubuntu 12.04 : Fix for Adobe Flash crashing while playing videos

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When adobe stopped support for its flash player in linux, it was not just bad news, it was a terrible news as the version then had some serious bugs. One of the common one being the people in the youtube or flash videos appearing in blue color. The blue tint was making everyone in the video like a navi from the movie Avatar.

Another common problem is seeing the flash player crashing in browsers, both firefox and chrome. One solution is provided below.

Make sure you take a backup of the file below before attempting an edit so you can revert to it, incase something fails.

$sudo vi /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

#remove the first line and the file should have only the line as shown below. 
OverrideGPUValidation=true

Now close the browser(s) and test the flash link again. It should not be crashing as often it was earlier at the least.

Source

Ubuntu : Fix for Firefox to download picasa albums

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There is a simple guide to install the latest picasa 3.8 (as of this writing) in Ubuntu as shown in this post..

However, I have noticed that, atleast in Ubuntu 11.04, that the “Download to Picasa” option doesnot work under Firefox. We would get the popup message as shown below.

Which says “Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (picasa) isn’t associated with any program.”

Most searches resulted in the following solution:
Open firefox tab and type about:config
set network.protocol-handler.expose.picasa to false
set network.protocol-handler.external.picasa to true
set network.protocol-handler.app.picasa to either /usr/bin/picasa or /opt/picasa/bin/picasa (/usr/bin/picasa is a symlink to /opt/xxx)

If the above doesn’t work for you then try the method which was mentioned in this post. It was originally meant as a fix for chrome, but works fine with firefox too.

Open the file ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list (remember to back it up) and add the following under [Added Associations]

x-scheme-handler/picasa=picasa.desktop

Thats it. Now choose “Download to Picasa”, you will get a popup to choose the picasa application, here browse until the location of the picasa binary. /opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/picasa in my case

Firefox 4 : Missing status bar!

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After the Firefox 4 update to beta 7, you may notice that the status bar by default has been discarded.

The concept of status bar has been moved to the address bar. Hence, once you hover your mouse over any links the preview of the links will appear in the address bar by default.

However, you can still view the icons used by the addons, which was previously seen on the status bar, by enabling Add-On Bar. Go to View->Toolbars-> and check Addon bar to see the same.

UPDATE!!
As of March 22 2011, the official release of Firefox 4, the status will appear Just above the Addon bar

Trying out Firefox 4 Beta 4.

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For a good long time have been a Firefox beta tester. So far, was pretty much settled with Firefox 3.6.x, but now have started to test Firefox 4. So far, the first impression I had was .. “its lighter”. But wait, more on that later.

There is an instant feedback add-on installed with FF4, as simple as “Firefox makes me happy/sad” links.

The rendering engine is better sure. But the big down part of trying new Firefox beat/releases is the lack of support for existing extensions. For me personally, I tend to use extensions with Firefox than say Firefox with extensions! In earlier times, I would just unpack, the xpi files and change the supported Firefox versions. But not right now.

Also, continuing on the observation that this new installation is lighter/faster, I think it goes only as far as installing or enabling all the extensions I use. Yes, no doubt that Firefox is a big memory hogger at times, atleast on the windows platform. My home Firefox(3.6.10Pre on Ubuntu) is much faster I believe.

Will post more updates later.

Duplicate tab for firefox 3.5

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Until I saw this post , I was sorely missing the duplicate tab for firefox. It was near the top of my most loved firefox extensions till firefox 2.x. The addons page for this extension said it does not support 3.5. Well, and then I learnt 3.5 has a built in duplicate tab feature.

Just press the ctrl key and hold the tab you want to duplicate, drag and drop it to the place/area you want the new duplicate tab to appear. And thats it!!..

Life is simple now 🙂

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Firefox 3 World Record Download Day 2008

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A guiness world record day has been planed to mark the official release of Firefox 3. On the day, a record for the most number of downloads for a single software in 24 hours will be attempted.

Download Day 2008

Spread the word around and help FF achieve this unique feat. Signup and pledge here. Experience the Web in a better way.. Get Firefox!!

Update: Firefox 3 is officially out! http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Watch web Flash Videos (FLVs) offline.

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With most websites you surf these days have some type of video content embedded in them. Be it news sports or entertainment sites. And 9 out of 10 times they are Macromedia Flash Videos (flv). If they are youtube links, there’s a good chance you can download them for future viewing. Otherwise its difficult to get hold of the flv file you are viewing. If you are lucky a simple view source will fetch you the direct link to the .flv file on the site. Even if thats not the case here’s a way to watch the video again, without wasting your bandwidth usage.

If you use Firefox or Flock, you can grab this from the browser Cache stored on your filesystem. On Linux you can find this under your $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<-profileid->/Cache. These files don’t have any extension and will have names like 05520CD8d01 etc. Proceed to this folder and you can watch all the FLVs cached so far using the following command .

ls | xargs -i file {} | grep Video | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1 | xargs -i vlc {} .

The above will directly play those files with vlc player. If you dont have vlc installed replace it with any other player you want to use. IMO, I have found vlc to render flvs better than mplayer or other players due its better audio-video sync capabilities.

Remember to backup the files you are viewing to any other folder. The files under Cache will be expunged once browser is closed.

You can copy all flvs in one shot to your $HOME with the following command.
ls | xargs -i file {} | grep Video | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1 | xargs -i cp {} ~

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Cricket Live Scores on your Firefox statusbar!

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You are a developer and spend lot of time on a browser(and its firefox I presume!!). You can’t always open a cricket scorecard site to view the latest scores. This could for two reasons, one you dont want to be disturbed and the other is you dont want to be caught by others doing this while at work 🙂

With CricScores you can view the current cricket scores on your statusbar while continuing with your work. The scores are pulled from cricbuzz.com feed.

Cricket Live Scores your Firefox statusbar

Well, I have updated it for firefox 3.* and added it at addons.mozilla.org the link to the install page is here.