Posts filed under 'Browser Woes'
If you’re one of the few poor (thousands, worldwide) users, you will be pretty surprised and upset once you find out why your downloads suddenly don’t work in your shiny new FF3 installation.
So what happened?
The FF developers decided that their Windows Application should respect the OS security settings. In my case, I use IE only for Windows Update, thus I put the update service from microsoft into the trusted zone and set the default seurity zone settings to high. I just don’t trust IE at all.
Why did this work the years before? Because I used FF for downloading everything else and until now FF didn’t respect this setting, which was a great life safer for me.
To make things worst I haven’t yet figured out a way to disable this behaviour in FF3, which means I’ve to suddenly lift the security settings for the complete system! As you guessed I’m pretty pissed about this.
Update: filed a bug report, excited to see what happens to it.
Update 2: Report closed within hours as Wontfix because it’s a deliberate change.
Update 3: My report has been marked as duplicate in favor of bug 445158 (which contains more information and, interestingly, has been opened by someone with an mozilla.com email address. Does that weight more then my request?)
Update 4: First comment on the report from another pissed user. I couldn’t say it in better words.
July 13th, 2008
In my last post I talked about a patch to reverse the behavior when using the mouse with the control-key to use the new full page zoom in Firefox 3 beta 1. Well, it seems like there’s an obvious simple soluation already possible: just set the hidden config mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines to -1 instead of 1 and there you go. Now that I created a patch to Firefox for the same behavior makes me feel like using canons to shoot birds . . . anyway, I now know what it takes to build Firefox from source on Windows, might come in handy one day ;-)
November 28th, 2007
I really couldn’t stand the zoom behavior with the mouse the way it has been changed for Firefox 3. However zooming is such a crucial part for me I want ahead, set up a custom build environment and after hours of fiddling a patch came out.
This patch honors the (hidden) preference zoom.reverse when doing the actual zooming with the mouse (mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action == 5). You can download my custom build of Firefox 3. It’s for Windows only and it’s just a zip file, no installer required. Unzip, change the hidden pref (hint: about:config) to true and there you go. You can start it along any existing Firefox version however you probably want to start it with a custom profile first with -P otherprofile so it doesn’t temper with your existing one. By default you can only run one instance of FF, if you’re sure you want to run them simultaneously, use MOZ_NO_REMOTE.
November 25th, 2007
Take this example screenshot I made on my system (warning: resolution is 2880×900):
Side by side: Left: Internet Explorer with ads, right: Firefox with Adblock
Question: Do you see the difference?
The thing is, at least for me, I know advertisement is a necessary business. But come on, this is way to obtrusive.
October 4th, 2006
Today we had to track a pretty nasty problem where PDF, served via a PHP script, wouldn’t display properly in some Internet Explorer browsers (worked fine in others). The PDFs content didn’t show up at all, even the plugin was not properly started (no toolbar, etc.), the page just remained white, blank, empty.
The prerequisites:
- Adobe Reader plugin 6.0.0 19.05.2003
- Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
- A PHP script serving a PDF from database
After some testing with IE, Firefox, wget and Fiddler the differences were finally found:
- We only sent the Content-Type header, not the Content-Length
- The actual PHP script serving the PDF was masked as .html with mod_rewrite
Once we made the script name as .php visible to the browser and added the appropriate header, all problems were solved.
May 3rd, 2006
For the first time I wanted to use the codes provided by the 0,5l small coke bottles inside the lock. I wrote down the code, went to mycokemusic.at, clicked on Download Shop and was prompted with this nice message:
Leider scheinen dir ein paar Komponenten zu fehlen, um die Seite www.mycokemusic.at aufrufen zu können. Dafür benötigst du:
• Einen PC mit einem Microsoft Windows Betriebssystem; Windows 98, ME, 2000 oder XP
• Internet Explorer (Version 6.0 oder höher)
• Windows Media Player (Version 7.0 or höher)
• Flash Plug In (Version 5 or höher)
Um herauszufinden ob du alle benötigten Komponenten hast, damit du Ausschnitte, Streams anhören und Downloaden kannst: hier klicken.
Ergänzend benötigst du noch:
• Eine Soundkarte
• Lautsprecher oder Köpfhörer die an deinen PC angeschlossen sind
ACHTUNG: Diese Seite ist nicht mit Macs kompatibel. Derzeit gibt es leider keinen Windows Media Player für MAC, der mit dem Microsoft Digital Rights Management (DRM) Version 7 arbeitet. Version 7 ist ein Standardformat, auf den sich die meisten Musikfirmen geeinigt haben
Oh, and did I mention that it wanted to install DRM Store DLL, whatever this is? What the heck is going wrong here. I’m not interested in DRM, I just want to use my pin to download what I bought.
This was the last time I was there.
February 1st, 2006
Another site requiring cookies! Let me clarify: I don’t want to buy anything, I only want to view the content. And that for I’ve to accept cookies? Why? There only statement on the page is:
Bitte konfigurieren Sie Ihren Browser so, dass Sitzungscookies (session cookies) zugelassen werden.
No mentioning why their super-content needs this.
So, no reason to ever visit this page again.
November 3rd, 2005
Raise your voice! Don’t let your computers get DRM infected without even telling you.
Node idea what I’m talking about?
Readthis and this and this and this and this and this and ….
Quintessence: you insert a music CD in your computer you get a free/automatic/not-asked-for installation of a Root-Kit. A basic roundup of what a root-kit does is: it uses technologies to hide things on your computer from you. Or even allow remote access.
To quote from Mark’s Internet Sysblog:
Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files.
fsck!
Update 3. Nov. ‘05
As reported by the german news Golem, there’s an uninstaller available.
November 2nd, 2005
This is the story of how I discovered the wmlbrowser extension.
It’s purpose is to render WML in Firefox. Today I tested one of our sector-specific search engines in WML. I was prompted with a nice basic view of my WML content, forms and links, everything works.
But only after a few hours I discovered that I had installed the wmlbrowser extension. I actually installed it months ago just for fun but never used it. It worked so seemlessly that I thought the ability to render WML pages was part of Firefox. Now this is what I call a great product.
October 27th, 2005
Since a view days, orf.at (orf being the public government tv broadcaster in austria) started showing half screen ads. Not just the usual fullbanners. No. Not skyscrapers. No.
The (flash) banner was always as big as the viewport height (!). And on a reasonable big screen (1400px wide) and the content page of orf.at being only as wide as a 800px there is plenty of room for this .. uhm … banner-in-your-face.
Banners? Yes! Half-viewport-sized-i-take-over-your-screen-banner on orf.at? No!
Get Adblock today and ban http://orf.at/sidebar/sidebar.html yesterday.
Oh, and btw: shouldn’t it be sidebar? :-)
Update 24th Nov. 06: They changed it to be called sidebar instead of sitebar :-)
October 22nd, 2005
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