Offmessage

Just upgraded to SqueezeCenter 7.2 at home (having previously been on the 6.x Debian package).  The improvements are fantastic, except… In Firefox 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) my CPU got pegged for a couple of seconds every time a new page loaded, making the interface unusably slow.

I’ve fixed it by disabling the “Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.5″ FireFox Add-on, but I can’t find much information about what that extension does and what I’m missing by disabling it. Or why on earth it breaks it in the first place.

Now it’s time for a Boom

OK – next niggle with my new Hardy Heron installation. Clicking links in emails in Thunderbird doesn’t do anything. Nothing. For the last week I’ve been pasting links from emails into Firefox. This is no fun. Some googling around didn’t really help (the suggestions here, for example, didn’t work for me). What did work for me was the following (ymmv, obviously)…

In Thunderbird go to Edit -> Preferences. Open the Advanced tab and then the General tab. Then click the Config editor button. Find the line called network.protocol-handler.expose-all and change it to True. Voilà (at least for me).

Update: OK.  I lied.  This didn’t work for me at all.  In fact what it did for me was cause Firefox to open with a downloaded version of the file.  I’m stumped.  And annoyed.

Well.  It’s taken me a long time to find something in Firefox that I both genuinely dislike and fundamentally disagree with the reasoning behind the decision.

Turns out that in Firefox 2 you cannot style RSS feeds with XSL direct in the browser.  Because, wait for it, they sniff the content and override your style sheet with their own.

Um.  This is Microsoft-like hubris, isn’t it?  If I take the time and effort to write a stylesheet and put it in my document, then surely I want it styled using that sheet, don’t I?  The comment from the developers are pretty upsetting too:

With more than 99% of the feeds with stylesheets just trying to do what we’re doing, but without the knowledge of what aggregators the user actually uses and without the chrome privileges to subscribe them, not using our transformation on feeds that have a stylesheet would just make for a worse and less consistent experience for our users.

Surely this is up to me to decide, is it not?  And now even more Microsoft-like:

please avoid chiming with your opinions/beliefs/etc (on either side). That’s just adding to the noise. We don’t make feature choices based on who shouts the loudest.

There is a (very ugly) workaround, but dear God, what a strange choice and intransigent attitude.  I’m genuinely surprised.

Not just an ad blocking Firefox extension, but an ad blocking Firefox extension that replaces ads with art. Nice.

That’s an awesome number given the time it’s been around.

Speed up your firefox…

Just in case you didn’t know about it… If you’re doing /anything/ with Javascript you really really need to install Firebug. It is truly awesome.

So… I’m using Kubuntu, but instead of every URL opening in Konqueror I want them to open in Firefox… The Debian way is to use the update-alternatives command (update-alternatives --config x-www-browser), but for some reason this doesn’t affect Kopete… Everything else opens URLs nicely in Firefox, but Kopete stubbornly continues to fire up Konqueror. Turns out that in System Settings -> KDE Components you can set the default browser there too, and lo! now Kopete opens links in FF as it should. Marvellous.