Tim Hardy

David MacIver drew my attention to Chickenfoot today: “a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser’s sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing.” It sounds like a slightly better Greasemonkey (although I must admit I haven’t touched Greasemonkey for a long time and it has no doubt changed since then.)

Being unable to install it was the final straw in making me decide to upgrade firefox. I’ve been running the default debian version out of a combination of laziness and paranoia about security but in the last few months I’ve really began to notice how out of date it is. More and more sites have been crashing my browswer. Fewer and fewer extensions have been working. But like the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water, I have noticed all this happening but failed to jump out.

Turns out it was very simple to do. I just added backports my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://www.backports.org/debian sarge-backports main

then

apt-get update && apt-get install firefox -t sarge-backports

Now I’m finally able to install Chickenfoot but I haven’t played with it yet because I’m catching up on the 1000+ unread posts in bloglines that I haven’t been able to read for months since the sites last upgrade made it crash my browser.

In Debian 3.1, Thunderbird does not launch Firefox if you click on a link in an email message by default. There is no option to change this option from within Thunderbird itself.

Instead, close the email client, fire up an xterm or konsole and type:

find ~/ -name prefs.js | grep thunderbird

This will find the full path to the file that holds the Thunderbird preferences on your machine.

Now you know where it is (the path varies on everyone’s machine for security reasons) edit it and add the following line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/bin/firefox");

Restart Thunderbird. Now when you click on a link in an email it should open in your favourite browser.

(Adapted from Linux Basics tutorial.)

Google is my first point of reference for information these days. But too many times, I look something up, check a spelling and then think - hey, while I’m here, I’ll just check bloglines and see if anyone I read has posted anything new… then four hours later I wake up to find myself metamoderating on slashdot wondering where the hell my afternoon just went.

Webolodeon is a greasemonkey script for firefox intended to catch this kind of behaviour: after five minutes online, you’re presented with a pop up asking you to justify your surfing.

If your work is done, just cancel the dialog box and quit the app; if you’re not finished (and you really need to keep zipping around the Interweb a bit longer), insert a virtual nickel by typing a summary of what you’re working on. This buys you another five minutes.

When working on something particularly tedious a couple of years ago, I had an Outlook reminder pop up every five minutes urging me to “Focus!”. It was quite unpleasant but it helped me get the job done. I wonder how this will compare.

Firefox has been annoying me recently. I tend to have dozens of tabs open at once and every now and then I find that my machine freezes as my CPU usage hits 99% for several minutes at a time. Yesterday I discovered the culprit.

Flash adverts - that I hadn’t noticed before because they were running in background tabs - were choking the machine.

Enter flashblock. This firefox extension replaces all flash animations with a little play icon that can be pressed to get them running if you really want to see them. Problem solved.

And as a side-benefit, it stops pop-ups launched by flash that can otherwise creep around firefox’s excellent pop-up blocking.

SessionSaver was number one on my “can’t live without” extensions list: it remembers what you open in each tab and can restore them all if you restart the browser and lets you reopen any individual one you might accidentally close. Flashblock has now joined it on the podium.