I’ve been getting an annoying dialog box that pops up whenever I tried to open a web page from the start/run or my address bar in windows. The dialog box would say “Windows cannot find
I’ve just kept clicking ok (or ignoring the dialog box) and the page would load anyway. Today I found out from the mozilla bug database that this is normally caused by AdBlockPlus, an extension to assist in hiding adverts but in my case it turned out to be AdBlock – the original version. I removed adblock, installed the latest version of adblockplus and everything is working again.
For some reason my Firefox Bookmark toolbar was blank, yet going to bookmarks, Bookmark toolbar folder showed all of the links there so the data wasn’t completely gone. Doug has a solution of restoring the default set which didn’t work for me until I disabled all extensions (using MrTech’s install extension), restarting firefox, right clicking the empty toolbar, selecting customize and then clicking Restore Default Set. That brought back all the links to the Bookmark toolbar. I then enabled all extensions, restarted firefox and everything is almost fixed. I still have an issue with Web Developers Toolbar being blank and if I click Restore Default Set I loose all the links again.
The day I install an old version of the firefox to onenote extension (using the override version check), it was announced that a new version has been released that is marked as compatible with existing firefox versions. You can download the new Firefox to OneNote extension here.
I’ve been puzzling over the missing pictures in internet explorer after the post two before this one had the picture missing. In internet explorer on the main page at absoblogginlutely.net you will get just an empty space where the google map picture is, but if you click on the space you will get taken to the larger image so it really is there.
If you click through to the monthly archive or individual entry the image shows up fine.
I know the problem is partly to do with the align=”left” attribute on the image – if I remove this, then the image appears again properly. I know that this should really be styled with css, so I put the float=”left” on the image and the image disappears again. If you add the “position=relative” to the css then the image appears again and the text wraps around correctly but if the page is wide the graphic overflows out of the background image and spoils the effect.
There are several posts on the internet that I’ve found describing my problem but I couldn’t find a solution.1 2 3
The following posts were made from a sample posting to demonstrate the problem (I chose a garish yellow background to make it easier to see where everything is). As all these screenshots are hosted on zooomr and I’ve used the blog picture functionality, which includes styling on each picture posting, these images look ok in this posting but the styling is a pain to type in for each picture and not exactly easy to remember either.
The original posting with an empty picture.
The same posting viewed in firefox – looks great
and in firefox again, extra wide – the image stays within the background box.
Remove the float left and the picture appears in internet explorer
But if I set float=left within css the image disappears again.
Add position=”relative” and the image reappears again and looks great
Until I change the width of the browser and then the image bleeds outside of the box.
Somehow I’ve managed to get firefox beta 2 installed on the parents in law computer. I’m not quite sure how it managed to get installed as I was on 1.5.0.6 with automatic updates turned on. As usual it was prompting me that a new version was available to download and then all of a sudden 2.0 was active! All of the extensions apart from tabmixplus were gone, but I’m not really sure how many were installed on this computer in the first place so it’s not that much of a problem. TabMixPlus was there, but disabled as it is incompatible with Firefox 2, probably because a lot of the functionality (but not all) has been duplicated into firefox2.
With ff2, the active tab is in bold with all the other tabs inactive – a great improvement over previous versions as it was often hard to tell which was the active tab when there were many (20+) open . However, it manages to do this by only opening up a certain number of tabs across the screen, any more tabs get added to a drop down list to the right of the screen which actually displays all of the tabs, not just the ones that don’t fit on the screen.
You can’t middle or right click on the drop down list to close the tabs though.
The other thing that is different is that using the mouse scroll wheel when hovering over the tab row scrolls the tab row, but the active tab does not change until you click on it – this is different to how tabmixplus behaves. I’m not quite sure which behaviour method I like – it would be nice to get a choice between the two.
One of the addons (they’re not labeled extensions anymore) that I will need to add is mouse gestures as I am so used to right-left clicking to go back and left-right clicking to go forward – I really miss that on pc’s/internet explorer that don’t have this option enabled or installed.
Microsummaries are a neat bookmark extension which means that if you bookmark a site that has a microsummary, the name field has a dropdown arrow next to it. By selecting the Live Titles information, the bookmark data will change as the web page is updated. Great for having a mini ticker like functionality, but not much use if you are used to using certain keys to navigate to a site in your bookmarks, or just trying to find the site (ie Absoblogginlutely! stands out a lot better than Firefox2 or Google Analytics or Event 1030) as it will no longer be called the same – see woot for a good example with the deal of the day where this would work.
Oh – spell checking is now available within the browser – this post has 11 “mistakes” in it – www is a spelling mistake apparently!
There’s a new version of firefox out now and the notification in the current version has actually been pretty useful. Rather than telling me there is a new version, I download it and *then* discover that most of the extensions I have won’t work, this time the installation gives me the ability to find out which extensions are not set to work with the new version. The only downside is that most of the extensions that it wouldnt work with are currently disabled in the version that I am running at the moment.
There’s a new zero day exploit for firefox and internet explorer which involves javascript. So if you are running firefox, then installing NoScript will give you added protection. If you are running IE – then ooooooops 🙂
Having said that, it doesn’t look that malicious – you would have to be tricked into entering data into one page, which can then be sent to the malicious site at the same time, so you are probably only at risk if you do random surfing or surf in dodgy web site areas in the first place – and if you are doing that then I really hope you are not running internet explorer (or as an admin!)
How to fix ie freezing when you use the drop down box and the answer (at least official) isn’t to use firefox. This is due to a known issue with HP hardware and the MS06-015 / KB908531 patch.
On a related note I was wondering what readers policys on implementing patches are. We tend to wait a week or so to see if there are known issues (like above) but if everyone waited a week to see if there were no issues then this policy isn’t very practical. Also testing the patches on machines isn’t often very practical either – with a vast array of software on users desktops – most of which I would not use, just how do you test the effect of patches? Even getting hold of a spare box in most companies is unlikely as they are all in use. I’ve also found that the details in the patch documentation is getting sparser so it is also difficult to tell just what the patch does or what it affects.
And as to firefox – I’m not that impressed with the autoupdate facility for 1.5.0.2 – now most of my extensions don’t work and on my home computer they seem to have been ALL wiped out – not sure if that is because it’s loaded a new profile or not. I’ll look at that later, but having all the extensions disappear is very annoying. The other strange thing is that I wasn’t aware of there being any major patches or bugs in firefox – they’ve kept them pretty quiet unlike the latest MS patches – is there a mozilla security zine like the MS security posts that I should be subscribed to?
I’m currently reading the Firefox Hacks book which is so much better than the firefox garage book. One of the extensions listed in the book is infolister which lists all extensions and themes installed in firefox and can publish it to a website. (Which would possibly reduce these firefox extension posts 🙂 Combined with the Mass Installer extension it looks like you can replicate an install of software from one machine to another easily – this would make it a lot easier for me to keep my machines in synch. Note that I’ve not tried this yet as the infolister on this machine is very bare – only two extensions but that is because all the extensions that were loaded got wiped when I moved my Firefox profile directory. It would be good if infolister also listed greasemonkey scripts installed – perhaps that will come in the future. The forum discussion is 20+ pages long so I’ve not had chance to read it yet to see if anyone else has had the same idea.
Update The infolister is merged into Mr Tech’s Local Install (but doesn’t have the ftp uploader facility) but you do have the ability to copy/paste the output as html, text or bbcode – I’ve added the html output from my machine in the extended entry…..
A useful tip to provide a bit more screen space in the browser (useful for low resolution monitors) is to move the bookmarks toolbar in between the throbber and the help menu.