Utah Open Source Planet

Can anyone point me to a trick or extension that makes bookmarks more like, um, bookmarks? You know, in the real world, when you’re reading a book and you decide to stop reading so you can go get a drink of water or go to bed or something, you put in a bookmark. That bookmark is only good until the next time you read—then you’ll put the bookmark in a different place. Web “bookmarks” are more like gluing tongue depressors to the book to help you find the book later.

Use case: you’re reading a web comic, or an online book, or some other serial content that takes days or months to go through. You want a very simple way to update the bookmark whenever you stop. Ideally, it would be automatic.

I have been getting more and more tired of Firefox lately. Tired of the bloat. The unreliability. The gecko engine. I’ve been tinkering with alternate browsers such as Midori (which is *great*, assuming you can get >=0.1.6), Arora and Chromium. I think WebKit is the browser engine of the future, and with these browsers it is nearly a reality. They are still a little rough around the edges, but I can honestly see one of them absolutely taking off by the end of this year. Firefox, prepare to be dethroned!

The one missing link in most users transition to a new browser however is their reliability on extensions. I know I have a few extensions that I really don’t like to live without. I bet you do as well. Let me guess what your number one extension is? AdBlock Plus? So, if these new browsers don’t have an extension architecture (yet), how can I block ads? You can use your /etc/hosts file.

Let me tell you, quickly, about the /etc/hosts file for those that may not be familiar. The /etc/hosts file is the predecessor to the DNS system that we use now. It is a local mapping of IP address to hostname. At this point, as we now rely on DNS, the /etc/hosts file is generally pretty empty. You’ll likely just have entries that make sure your machine can find itself by localhost or hostname. Something along the lines of:

127.0.0.1    localhost  hostname

Now, you might be thinking “How am I going to block all the internets advertisements if my /etc/hosts file looks like that?” Well, you won’t, if it just looks like that. I have a solution for you though, and it requires very little work on your part.

In searching for a solution I have come across an /etc/hosts file that is (minus comments) 15,169 lines long. That’s right. Fifteen thousand one hundred sixty nine lines long. That is a lot of mapped IP addresses! What someone has done is collect every nasty thing he could find into the hosts file, and map it to 127.0.0.1.

What does that actually mean? It means that anytime your browser is told to display an ad it’ll need to look up the address. The /etc/hosts file is checked first before DNS, which then tells it to ask the local machine. The local machine, of course, does not have that information to display and therefore nothing is displayed. Bingo! No more ads.

But wait, there’s more! This not only applies to blocking ads, but also banners, 3rd party cookies, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even most hijackers. You’re not only blocking advertisements, you’re outright blocking thousands of known problematic and malicious websites. And all this without requiring a single Firefox extension. It works in ANY browser.

So, I hope you’re wondering where you can get a copy of this magical file that solves all of the worlds woes. Well you can get it here of course!

disclaimer: I am not the original author of this file, but it has been published under a CC-BY-SA license and under that license I am redistributing it. Attribution is contained within the file itself.

sudo mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.orig

sudo wget -c http://zelut.org/projects/misc/hosts -O /etc/hosts

These commands will move your original file as a backup and then pull the file from the web, putting it directly where it needs to go. You should be ready-set-protected after completion of the second command. Pull up a browser (hopefully you’ll try something other than Firefox), and give it a try.

If you have anything to add or subtract from the hosts file, you may edit it directly with a text editor. If you’d like to share your changes with the rest of us you may email me your update in the form of a patch. Please make sure your patch is created against the latest version.

I hope this solution works for many of you towards trying out and helping improve alternate browsers. Again, I highly suggest Midori or Arora as GTK or Qt (respectively) WebKit based browsers.

Other Points of Interest

• June 18, 2008 — Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH (5)
• April 4, 2009 — Help Needed: Auto-Configure Proxy Settings via DHCP (13)
• February 24, 2009 — DNS Hiccup (0)
• February 22, 2009 — Server Migration Complete (5)
• November 12, 2008 — Wiki Editing With Your Favorite Editor (5)
• October 25, 2008 — Ubuntu Tutorials Search Plugin (1)
• July 15, 2008 — Create Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials (6)
• July 8, 2008 — Improve Application Startup Times With Preload (5)
• June 25, 2008 — Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox (5)
• June 22, 2008 — Firefox Shortcut Keys (21)

(Mainly notes for myself). Since I switched over to Gentoo and am running Awesome for a window manager, I no longer have the Ubuntu fonts/cursors are consistent thing going on (widget themes are another story, and quite frankly, I'm not worried about getting them consistent). Here's some notes, (gentoo wiki used to have this somewhere but it's gone, here's the link), hopefully they are useful to others.

I'm using konsole, akregator, konversation, firefox, emacs, OOo, gimp and inkscape as my main apps. Also I've got a T61p thinkpad (1680x1050) and am normally using a 24 inch monitor (1920x1200) in combination with it. The defaults fonts were way too big for me.

KDE

I just used kcontrol "Appearance & Themes"->"Fonts", "Adjust All Fonts..." to bring the default size to 8.

GTK+

To get GTK+ fonts smaller I created a ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file with

gtk-font-name="BitStreamVeraSans 8"

OOo

"Tools"->"Options". "OpenOffice.org"->"View".

Java

TBD

Emacs

See Emacs with Xft gentoo docs

I also wanted to change the default cursor. I installed xcursor-neutral and restarted X but it only worked for kde apps.

KDE

Just works

GTK+/Firefox

add

gtk-cursor-theme-name="Neutral_plus"

cd /usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/
ln -s Neutral_Plus default

OOo

Works with default link

Java

TBD

Feel free to leave tips/hints in the comments

Image via Wikipedia

I've spent the last several days immersed in debugging Javascript in Internet Explorer. It's not as bad as it could be. After all, I'm using jQuery and that cuts down on the cross-browser incompatibilities.

In it's normal usage, Kynetx Network Services (KNS) compiles our domain specific language, called KRL, into Javascript. Since we test that the Javascript is compatible with multiple browsers, normal rule evaluation is pretty safe.

However, like any good DSL, KRL has a way of dropping out of the DSL and into the base system--in this case Javascript. That's when things get dicey. There are so many ways of creating browser problems when you're working with Javascript and CSS.

In Firefox, the venerable Firebug add-on is the tool for debugging CSS and Javascript. I use it's console all the time to execute Javascript against the page and see what works and what doesn't.

Alas, Firebug isn't available for IE. There are a few "for pay" tools that are supposed to be similar, but I haven't been able to see to my satisfaction what I'd get for my money. I also understand that Visual Studio has good tools.

When I was at Add On Con last week, Joshua Allen from Microsoft said that you should develop in IE8 because it has the best developer tools. I found that to be true--although they still leave a lot to be desired compared the Firefox.

The first thing you have to do is turn on debugging in IE by making sure that the "Disable script debugging" options are unchecked.

The error messages you get are pretty cryptic, but they at least give you a clue about where to look. The worst part is that they don't give you the name of the file where the error occurred. Ugh. @whitmer suggested Companion JS (not free for commercial use). I haven't tried it, but it looks like its a step above the stock debug messages.

Another good tool is the IE Developer Toolbar (free). This gives you the ability to browse the DOM, change CSS properties on the fly, clear the browser cache, etc. As far as I can tell there's no actual Javascript debugging and certainly no console. Still, being able to see the DOM, especially as its modified by Javascript components has been a great help.

I found this tutorial on using Web Developer Express Edition to debug Javascript, but I haven't tried it.

So far, that's what I've discovered. I'm sure there are better ways and tools. I look forward to someone educating me.

Tags: debugging internet+explorer kynetx firefox

The final session of the day is a panel on the future of the browser. On the panel are Joshua Allen of Microsoft, Mike Shaver of Mozilla, and Nick Baum of Google. Noticeably missing are Opera (excused due to distance) and Apple (absent without excuse). Douglas Crockford, of Javascript fame, is the moderator.

Douglas asks is the add-on the best model for letting users solve their frustrations with the lack of capability in a browser. Joshua talks about Microsoft's goal to move toward extensibility through Web standards where ever possible and get away from native apps. Mike says that add-ons solve the problem of having multiple special purpose applications. The browser allows a piece of software to accompany the user on the Web as part of the browser experience.

Mike says there will be convergence on similar functionality but doesn't think there will be a common set of touch points for all browsers and all plug-ins. I think that means no common API, but I'm not sure.

Douglas asks if there should be a standards process around the add-on. Joshua doesn't think we need standards for convergence to happen. He says "its pretty clear what others are doing for extensibility and it's pretty easy for others to adopt it." Mike doesn't think it makes sense to codify behaviors that we might want to change later. We don't know enough to create standards yet.

The Web is under attack by proprietary platforms like Air, Silverlight, etc. They have clear and obvious advantages but they have one big disadvantage: their lack of openness. Nick says that we need to accelerate the inclusion of the capabilities of these closed platforms in open standards and browsers. "We need more stuff in the browser faster." Mike says that the competition of Web browsers has led to improvements like Javascript being 10x faster now. Joshua thinks that stories about the threat to the Web are highly overrated. The Web has made great strides over the last few years.

Joshua says that no one controls enough of the market to have veto power, so everyone needs to work together.

Douglas: the biggest threat to openness is mobile. Mobile platforms have been trying to lock into closed systems since it's inception. Now they're moving to the Web, but trying to make the mobile Web something different in order to control it. Nick thinks that the trends are toward open platforms for the Web (references iPhone and Android). This is the right direction. Mike says that we need to continue to improve the mobile experience so that it's the same as the non-mobile web.

Joshua thinks there's some wishful thinking there because with a cell phone the company that supplies bandwidth controls the physical infrastructure. Without rules that require carriers to allow competing backend services, they will continue to create walled gardens. Mike argues that as mobile platforms get more capable it will be more and more difficult for service providers to lock users into their own services.

Tags: addoncon addons internet+explorer firefox browsers

Words of advice from the multi-platform add-on session at AddOnCon:

1. Start from the beginning to support multiple browsers by not using features that are specific to one or the other.
2. Keep things like XPath expression standard
3. Test IE add-ons on Vista and IE8 first--especially if you're going to use an external process.
4. Using an external process in IE can greatly increase testability
5. Modularity and code portability
6. The learning curve for IE add-on development is steep. Once you're on top, it flattens out and gets easier.
7. Crashing the browser is easy in IE and the opportunity for conflicts is high
8. Make sure your code can generate debug reports and give the user the opportunity to forward them (debughelp.dll is your friend)

Tags: addoncon addons programming windows internet+explorer firefox

Image via Wikipedia

An add-on in Firefox is Javascript, XUL, and CSS. Any part of the Firefox UI can be modified by an add-on. Version control is built-in as is an upgrade mechanism. Platform APIs allow an add-on to access anything on the machine. That's good and bad. There are security issues, but it makes add-ons very powerful because you have full access.

One of the nice things about moving a mashup into an add-on is that you do away with many of the cross-site scripting restrictions that make mashups hard, or even difficult.

Much of what you do is the same. Javascript, DOM and XUL are pretty much the same and work as you'd expect. What changes is the ability to do XHR calls easily and in the background. JSON can be encoded and decoded as functions rather than using eval. Avoid using eval inside plugins because of the upgraded privileges that add-ons enjoy. As an add-on you run in the context of the browser window (chrome) so you have access to both the chrome and content windows. Avoid allowing content window scripts to access the chrome.

Tools for debugging include Firebug and LiveHTTPHeaders. Venkman allows you to debug Javascript code inside the add-on (not just the page).

Some examples: Ubiquity, Snowl, Zemanta, Operator, and lots of Twitter and weather related examples. And of course, don't forget Kynetx.

Some resources:

• XUL Tutorial
• The Extension developer IRC channel at Mozilla

Tags: addoncon addons mozilla firefox mashups

Image via Wikipedia

Joshua Allen of Microsoft is speaking about porting add-ons from Firefox to Internet Explorer. IE add-ons have been less popular for a few reasons:

• Building for IE is difficult
• Debugging tools are few and far between

The best reason to target IE as well as Firefox is that the Web is about interoperability. The point of the Web is any use anywhere can get your stuff and use it. There's no competitive advantage to an add-on company to be in one browser. Being in as many browsers as possible is important.

Joshua uses Oomph, microformats tool, as an example. You can download it and see how an IE add-on is built. Also, check out Oomph for Firefox: Microsoft's Microformats IE plugin as Greasemonkey script, for contrast.

Using CLR for IE add-ons is not well supported because you can only have on version of CLR installed per iexplorer.exe. That means if something else requires a different version, you won't work. You need to work in all CLR version > 1.1.

Add-ons in IE are loaded as DLLs based on a list in the Registry. These are in-process with iexplorer.exe and there is one instance per tab.

When you building a sidebar ("Vertical Explorer Bar" in MS parlance) you get a Win32 window that you can do anything in, but you should embed WebOS in it and use Web standards.

Protected mode creates a low integrity sandbox for add-on code. That means you can only save to the temporary files folder.

The best way to deal with Web services is to use common AJAX techniques. Use cookies for persistence. Background processing is best done by calling a service from DCOM.

Don't mix SSL and non-SSL content. Local files can't mix with Web files unless you stamp them with the Mark of the Web (MOTW). There's no way to intercept headers.

For testing and debugging, start with Vista and IE8. Vista has the most restrictive security and good developer tools. If i works there, it ought to work with other IE and OS versions.

To deploy, you have to create an MSI installer (use WiX v3) because you have to deploy a DLL and update the registry.

The bottom line, as I listen to this, is that doing add-ons for IE is just a lot harder than for Firefox. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, but it does indicate why there are so many more add-ons for Firefox.

Tags: addons addoncon firefox internet+explorer

Image via Wikipedia

I this week's Technometria podcast, Scott, Ben, and I are joined by Tyler Whitaker and Dion Almaer, who both discuss some of their recent technology activities.

Ben and Dion have recently been hired at Mozilla, where the company is working on new open web tools for developers. They talk about some of their long-term and short-term goals, including plans on ways to make it easier to deal with browser differences. In addition, Tyler discusses some of his recent internet connectivity problems and Scott talks about his recent delayed flight and how a website helped him better understand the cause of the problem, as well as quickly inform him when his flight would be arriving at the airport.

Tags: itconversations mozilla firefox

Recently I was tasked with doing a bunch of documentation work here at the office, and I decided to put together a wiki for the job.  After a few hours of editing directly into the browser I was about to blow my brains out.  I quickly decided that if I’m going to be working with a lot of text I need a real editor, like vim.

I set out to find some solutions and quickly ran into a Firefox addon that allows you to edit most forms, including wiki pages, with your editor of choice.

You can install the addon directly from Mozilla or you can get it from the Ubuntu repository.  Links for each below:

It’s All Text!

sudo aptitude install itsalltext

Once you have it installed you’ll need to, of course, restart the browser and then you can configure it.  You can configure it via Tools > It’s All Text > Preferences, or from within your Addons Management Window.

As you see here my prefered editor is gvim, which I can select using the “Browse” button.  Note: if you don’t have gvim installed you’ll want to add the vim-full package:

sudo aptitude install vim-full

Now that you have this configured you can simply edit most forms on the web by right-clicking within the form and selecting “It’s All Text”, or by clicking the “Edit” button that you’ll now see to the lower right (based on my configuration) of the input field.

For all of you that spend hours and hours editing wikis and other online forms I hope this helps out.  I know it saved me from wanting to throw myself out the window!

Other Points of Interest

• October 25, 2008 — Ubuntu Tutorials Search Plugin (1)
• July 15, 2008 — Create Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials (6)
• July 8, 2008 — Improve Application Startup Times With Preload (5)
• June 25, 2008 — Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox (4)
• June 22, 2008 — Firefox Shortcut Keys (20)
• June 18, 2008 — Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH (4)
• June 13, 2008 — Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs (8)

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

OS reinstallation would be much easier with a plugin that could dump your entire list of Firefox plugins and reload them later.

Does anybody know of a plugin like that?  I’ve used screenshots to remember which plugins I’d installed, then reinstalled them one at a time, but that’s a remarkably sucky way to go.

What do you use to avoid having to find and reinstall your favorite plugins one at a time? Anything?

I got an email this morning from a thankful reader who had taken the time to generate a true FF/IE7 search plugin for Ubuntu Tutorials.  After chatting about it a bit we took it one step further and added code to automagically add the search plugin to the browser of those that are interested.

If you would like to add Ubuntu Tutorials to your quick-search menu simply visit the site and then click your quick-search dropdown.  You shoud be prompted with a new menu item allowing you to add “Ubuntu Tutorials Search” to your search menu.  Once you’ve done that you can immediately start directly searching this site for all your tutorial needs.

Other Points of Interest

• Create Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials
• Improve Application Startup Times With Preload
• Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox
• Firefox Shortcut Keys
• Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH
• Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs

Note to self: The next time sound stops working in Kubuntu, amarok, youtube, etc stop working, run the following:lsof | grep snd and kill the offending process.

A great new Firefox plugin has been created that allows you to create new Tomboy notes from selected text in Firefox, check it out here.

I have been trying to come up with some more ways to make this site and the content more helpful for the community.  In my searching for new “features” I came across the Firefox feature of “Smart Keyword Search”.  This post is two part.  One, I’ll outline how to create a Smart Keyword Search item in Firefox specifically for this site and second create Smart Keyword Searches for any website.  This will allow you to quickly and easily search this sites contents anytime you need instruction on a topic!

Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials

To create a Smart Keyword Search for this site you’ll need to first right-click on the blog search field.  The search field is found on the top left above the Donate button.

The resulting window will ask for a name and a keyword.  The name is just for your use, allowing you to organize multiple keyword searches.  The keyword field is the keyword you’ll need to use to quick-search the site.  In the example below I used “Ubuntu Tutorials Search” for the Name and “ut” for the keyword.

Click “Add” to save the changes.  You can now quick-search this site for whatever it is you’re looking for by entering “ut <search term>” in your address bar.  To search for posts related to vmware, for example, you’d use:

ut vmware

Searching can be done from any tab, so you don’t even need to pull up the site first.  Quickly find the tutorials you need, simply and easily.

These steps work for any search form you can find on the web.  Right-click, “Add a Keyword for this Search…”, enter the keyword, and you’re done.

Other Points of Interest

• Improve Application Startup Times With Preload
• Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox
• Firefox Shortcut Keys
• Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH
• Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs

If your computer habits are anything like mine you probably have a set of applications that you use nearly every time you log in to the machine.  Let me guess.. Firefox?  Pidgin perhaps?  Thunderbird or Evolution?  You may have more or less, but it is common for a user to use the same applications regularly.  Wouldn’t it be nice if those commonly used applications could startup faster?  That is possible with a tool called “Preload”.

Installing Preload

The preload service is available through the main Ubuntu repositories, and can be installed by clicking the link below or running the command:

sudo aptitude install preload

A few things to note now about using Preload.  First, this will not improve boot time.  Preload monitors recurring applications and, after establishing a pattern, will preload those binaries into memory at startup.  Given that it also has to establish a pattern you may not see a performance increase immediately.  Give it some time though, you’ll start to see a difference soon enough!

Other Points of Interest

• Create Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials
• Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox
• Firefox Shortcut Keys
• Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH
• Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs
• How To Manager Multiple Outbound Addresses In Evolution

As long as we're on the subject of Technometria stats, here's the browser breakdown for last month on Technometria:

1. FireFox - 41.80%
2. Internet Explorer - 33.76%
3. Safari - 12.65%
4. Mozilla - 9.06%
5. Opera - 1.79%

Roughly two-thirds of the visitors to Technometria were using something other than Internet Explorer. Granted, this is a pretty geeky crowd.

Of the Firefox users, roughly 30% were using version 3. Of the IE users, roughly 40% were using version 6. Only four visitors the entire month were using IE 5.5. I had a few IE 8 visitors.

Tags: blogging browsers firefox

I recently blogged about installing the Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 8.04.  For those that followed that tutorial you may also be interested in adding the Firefox plugins for Adobe Reader as well.  These will also require the Medibuntu repository, which I’ll review quickly here.

Configuring the Medibuntu Repository

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

Installing the Mozilla Acroread Plugins

sudo apt-get install mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins

The acroread-plugins package will provide support for completion of fillable forms and javascript.  The mozilla-acroread package will provide support for mozilla, firefox, galeon and konqueror.

Enjoy!

Related

• Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs
• Install Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1.2 on Ubuntu 8.04
• Firefox Shortcut Keys
• Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH

Not long ago the USB mouse that I’ve been using with my laptop finally died.  Granted it may have been due to me stubbing my toe on my backpack and crushing it during the middle of the night.  In any event, I’ve become pretty proficient in the use of keyboard shortcuts in Firefox at this point.  I thought I would share a few with you.

Navigation Shortcuts

Forward, backward, home, address bar and search bar can be done via keyboard shortcuts:

alt+Left Arrow : back

alt+Right Arrow : forward

alt+Home : Home

ctrl+L : address bar

F6 : address bar

ctrl+K : search bar

ctrl+K+Down Arrow : toggle search engine down

ctrl+K+Up Arrow : toggle search engine up

Tab Shortcuts

Opening, closing and navigating your tabs can be done via these shortcuts:

ctrl+t : new tab

ctrl+w : close tab

ctrl+Page Up : previous tab

ctrl+Page Down : next tab

ctrl+tab : next tab

alt+num (1, 2, 3, etc) : tab number

ctrl+shift+T : open recently closed tabs

ctrl+r : refresh tab content

ctrl+shift+r : force-refresh tab content

ctrl+u : view tab source

Are there any shortcuts that I’ve missed?  If you’ve got anything to share, comment.

Related

• Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox
• Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH
• Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs

I have been tunneling all of my web traffic over an encrypted SSH connection for some time now. Considering the fact that I travel a lot, I’m very regularly on untrusted, insecure networks. I prefer to secure those connections (web, IM, email, etc) by creating an encrypted SSH connection and pushing the traffic through it. Today I also found a method for also pushing DNS requests through the same tunnel. This ensures total privacy between yourself and the SSH Server.

Step 1: Creating the Tunnel

Creating this private connection you’ll need a remote SSH server to connect to. Mine runs at home in my garage on an old Pentium III 500MHz box (yeah, the kind most people threw away long, long ago!). I connect to this tunnel using:

ssh -D 8080 -fN user@server

This creates a SOCKS compatible proxy, which is a requirement of the DNS forwarding. Other methods on the interwebs suggest using ssh -L or similar, which are not SOCKS compatible proxies.

Step 2: Forwarding DNS

If you’d like to also forward your DNS requests (ie; the site addresses you type into your browser), you’ll need to change a setting in Firefox. This can be done by accessing the address about:config, and entering this string into the configuration:

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

Change this value to “true”.

Step 3: Using the Tunnel

The last step is to configure your browser to use these new settings. In Firefox 3 (I hope you’ve upgraded by now), you can activate/toggle these settings via:

Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings

Select “Manual Proxy Configuration” and add localhost to the “SOCKS Host:” field, followed by port 8080 (assuming you’ve used the port in the example above).

This will then forward your web traffic through the SSH tunnel and DNS requests will also be forwarded.

You may want to check out the FoxyProxy plugin for a simpler way of toggling this on & off.

To deactivate the tunneling and use the local DNS again simply revert Step 3 back to “Direct Connection to the Internet”.

Related

• Use VNC? Encrypt It Via SSH
• Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox
• Firefox Shortcut Keys
• Enhance Your Network Connection With OpenDNS
• Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs

I ran into some Mozilla Firefox easter eggs this afternoon.  Do you have any more that I don’t know about?

Visit these addresses in Firefox 3:

about:mozilla
about:robots

Also some other interesting things to find:

about:config
about:cache
about:credits
about:license
about:buildconfig

(Reference to the “warranty” is a warning message and I’m sure its a joke.  Refer here to previous warning messages prior to this one.)

Related

• Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH

I still develop JS in basically the same way I did back in 2001. Back then IE had more of a stranglehold on the browser market, but it was a horrible JS development environment. So one would use Mozilla with the Venkman debugger to make things a li

For those who read my post in your RSS reader, and then came to my blog in hopes to comment, you will notice the post removed. For those of you who are frequent readers of my blog, and have been reading for a while, you have probably noticed that I do this on occasion. Here’s my problem: I’m extremely passionate about technology and various products, and as such, I tend to act without thinking. I certainly have no intention of spreading FUD, especially via the Ubuntu Planet. This is an ongoing lesson that I keep learning over and over, and yet I don’t seem to get the hint. Thus, the reason for this, and other posts.

Mozilla- I apologize for rushing to conclusions before making an intellectual and educated decision about the post regarding blocking bugs in the browser. I should have followed up on more research, formulating a more educated decision before posting. I have no excuse, other than my lazy nature to argue while building on a sandy foundation. Even though I may not agree with how the development of Firefox, or Gecko, is progressing, I was out of line with that post. Please accept my apology.

I do hope, however, that you take a closer look at the code, maybe even with the stringent attitude that the OpenBSD team has towards its OpenBSD operating system, and stabilize the browser. My experience has been that Firefox has been unreliable since version 1.5, progressively getting worse. While the delay of Firefox 3 may be improving the code base, I worry that the browser is getting bloated and unstable. Please take these criticisms seriously, as they are coming from a fan who loves the product, but is looking at either running Konqueror or Epiphany on my Ubuntu machine as a replacement. I would love to see Firefox completely displace Internet Explorer in the market, but at this point, I’m beginning to have my doubts.

Thanks,
Aaron

WOW. That’s all I have to say. Firefox 3 will prove to be exceptionally buggy when it ships. According to the New York Times (NYT- learn to code nice URLs), Firefox 3 will ship with 8 out of 10 blocker bugs. 80% people! And people call me crazy for noticing the browser getting less and less stable on each release? Heh.

Here’s my take on the matter. Mozilla has lost touch of what it takes to develop an open source application. Rather than focus on release dates and features, you should work out bugs, ensure code quality and then design in the latest and greatest. Luckily, they’ve been pushing back the browser, which means higher chances of getting these blockers out of the browser. However, for me, Firefox 2, as instable as it is, works just fine. What are the necessities for upgrading to version 3? My opinion is, work out the bugs, and ship the browser with 8 out of 10 bug blockers fixed, rather than the reverse. Firefox is turning into an app the quality of OpenOffice.org.

At this point, I would recommend ditching Firefox for a more stable, and less bloated open source browser, such as Epiphany or Konqueror. Both have proven to be extremely flexible and reliable, and they’re available on every distro. They are certainly not bug free, and I’m not expecting Firefox to ship with 100% bugs fixed. However, I would like to see better reliability out of my browser, I would like to see less memory leaks, and I would like to see better handling of buggy extensions.

I guess only time will tell, but I’m not looking forward to the release of version 3.

So what is all this RSS hype? I've known about RSS feeds, what they are for, and how to use them for quite a while. It's not like they are new or anything! It wasn't until recently that I started to actually use them though. I didn't know what I was [...]

Firefox 3 beta 2 came out this last week. After reading some of the press it has gotten, I decided to give it a try.

I went to the beta download page where there are several language options available for downloads built for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I selected the English (US) version for Linux and was given a bzip2-compressed tar file to download.

I would imagine a lot of less experienced Linux users would have no idea what to do with a tar.bz2 file as this is different than the way most common distributions package software (e.g. RPM files or DEB files.) I'll explain what I did to try Firefox 3 on my Linux system.

I downloaded the file to my /tmp directory. Then, I created a ff3 directory in my home directory:

shellprompt% mkdir ~/ff3

Then, I went into that directory and extracted the files.

shellprompt% cd ~/ff3
shellprompt% tar -xvjf /tmp/firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2

At this point, I could run Firefox 3 by running ~/ff3/firefox/firefox, but I wanted something a little simpler, so I created a symbolic link in my ~/bin directory called ff3. Alternatively, you could use an alias command for this (e.g. 'alias ff3=$HOME/ff3/firefox/firefox').

shellprompt% cd ~/bin
shellprompt% ln -s ../ff3/firefox/firefox ff3

After that, I could run Firefox 3 by running the command ff3. I highly recommend you terminate any other Firefox processes (i.e. your distribution's Firefox 2 installation) so there's less possibility of the two fighting.

First impressions

It looks a little different, but not too much. All the familiar elements are still there. The first thing I noticed was the bookmark sidebar looked cleaner.

As I opened a few pages in different tabs, I noticed Firefox 3 does respond snappier than Firefox 2, confirming the reports that Firefox 3 employs much better memory management than previous versions.

Next, I checked out some of the cool features I'd read about, like the added functionality of the location bar.

This stuff is pretty dang cool! First of all, the location bar features a drop down button and an autocomplete feature just like it did before, but the drop-down list includes page titles and the autocompletion matches against titles as well! Again, the layout of this was markedly cleaner than similar features in Firefox 2 and the response was refreshingly snappy

Here's an image showing the new drop-down location bar list in action.

Next, an image showing the autocompletion matching against URLs and page titles. I typed ron p and several pages from my recent history were displayed in the location bar drop-down list. I'm not sure how they're ordered, though.

Another nifty feature of the Firefox 3 location bar is an even-easier way to bookmark pages with one click!. A small star icon is displayed at the right side of the location bar (next to the drop-down button). If the inside of the star is uncolored or white, the page is not bookmarked. If you click the star, the inside of the star becomes yellow and the page is bookmarked. Click the yellow star and a small popup appears allowing you to configure where the bookmark goes in your bookmark heirarchy. Very cool!

Here's a look at the unbookmarked location bar.

Below: The location bar after clicking on the star to bookmark the page.

Below: Clicking the "bookmarked" icon to activate the bookmark options dialog.

Another nifty new feature I discovered while preparing this post: When Firefox 3 displays a file upload form, simply clicking in the filename text box activates the file selection dialog. That's at least one less click!

I'll continue exploring this new beast and maybe report some more on what I find. So far, however, this is the most stable Firefox beta I've ever used and that's saying something.

I'm not an HTML/CSS guru, but I do know my way around and I do try to use "semantic HTML" and CSS for styling wherever possible. I hate tables for layout, if for no other reason than they're a big mess and hard to read, and I do all my HTML by hand (or generated programmatically, e.g. by Markdown, Markaby, or Haml).

So I'm a little bit surprised that even lil' ol' dabbler me has more than once wished to put blocks together in an inline-like flow, e.g. for a photo gallery or other dynamic grid-based layout, and yet the big guys are content to fall back on tables. Maybe I can afford to be more puritanical as a hobbyist.

I dug into the issue once again, determined to finally grok the CSS box model and view model once and for all. I don't know if I got that far, but I do understand enough about display: block and display: inline to see why it doesn't work the way I was hoping it would work. It boils down to a block element will seek the left edge of its parent.

But, there *is* a way to do precisely what I want to do in CSS 2.1. It's called display: inline-block, and it says to layout block elements in the inline flow. If you're still lost about what I'm driving at, there's a nice live demo and screenshot of display: inline-block at quirksmode.org. Alas, IE and Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, etc.) don't support this display mode. But in browsers that do (e.g. KHTML-based browsers like Konq and Safari), it's a thing of beauty.

So we need a workaround for Firefox and IE. You could revert to tables if you detect those browsers, but I like to keep the HTML unchanged. You could use float: left, and that works very well unless your blocks are different heights. So you can force your blocks to be the same height, and possibly use overflow: auto to give scrollbars as needed (or hide the overflow or let it just overflow or whatever).

So here's a little example. The blue blocks use display: inline-block and the green blocks use float: left.

.inlineblock {display:inline-block; border: solid blue; width:150px;margin:5px;} .floatleft {float:left; border: solid green; width:150px;margin:5px;}

Do play around with it by resizing your browser and dusting off that Konquerer or Safari browser to see how the blue blocks look when rendered correctly.

I think it's a crying shame that firefox doesn't render this properly. Maybe the complacent table-hugging masses haven't made enough noise. Let's make some noise.

While I'm on the subject, I highly recommend css_browser_selector.js method of doing browser-specific CSS.

One of the more drool-inducing features of Leopard (for geeks, anyway) is Spaces, Apple's virtual desktop implementation. I'm a big virtual desktop fan, and I'm glad to see it working its way into the mainstream. And all things considered, Spaces is a decent (and beautiful) implementation.

But there are some bugs. I hope that we will see them worked out. Some of the bugs are in Spaces itself, some are probably with 3rd party applications. The most notable, and annoying, problem is buggy application switching. When you cmd-tab to switch applications, you are taken to the space with that application. This is good, but it must have given the Apple developers heartburn because in some ways it flies in the face of the "Apple Way", which thinks of an application as a whole not as independent windows. That's why the menu bar is at the top, and it's behind the design of the dock. But what happens when there's a Terminal window on this Space, and on that Space? The natural thing should be, switch to the terminal window in this Space. If that's not what the user wanted, well you can't be expected to read minds. But when I cmd-tab to Terminal, I am always taken to what Leopard apparently thinks is the master Terminal Space, regardless of whether I have a Terminal window in this space, which Terminal window I last used, etc. Bad news. As a workaround, I just put Terminal on all spaces and thank my lucky stars it has tabs now. This affects most multi-window applications to some degree, but it's most annoying with Terminal and Adium.

On a related note, I'd expect cmd-` to switch between windows of the same app on different Spaces, but it only switches between windows on the current space.

Some applications, especially Firefox and to a lesser extent Thunderbird, have focus bugs that may be related to spaces. Sometimes when I switch to Firefox (with cmd-tab), the window is not in focus and is not brought to the foreground. The menu bar reflects that I'm in Firefox, and I may have moved spaces to get there, but it's in the background. I have to switch to it with cmd-` (or, horror of horrors, with the mouse). I imagine this is the sort of thing that Apple and/or Mozilla will hammer out soon. There are other Firefox irritations but they're for another post—if they haven't been fixed by then.

So far, nothing too surprising. Virtual desktops is hard to get perfect, and various Linux window managers have been floundering for years or even decades. Overall, I'd say they're off to a smashing start. I have two other more minor irritations. First, I'd like the current application to stay the current application when I switch spaces with the keyboard, instead of switching to the topmost application in the new space. This is because I often want to choose an application (by cmd-tabbing to it), then navigate to another space where I want to open a new window (e.g. Terminal). This is a design decision, of course, and one that people tend to fall on either side with about 50% probability. The second is keybindings. I'd like to switch spaces with cmd-ctrl-hjkl (Vim keybindings). Maybe we'll find a way. I'd also like to have more keyboard operations, especially "move me and this window to the {left,right,up,down} space".

Thanks to the great “Extension List Dumper” extension, I’m happy to share with all of you my favorite extensions and a short little bit about each of them.

Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.1.2/Adblock Plus 0.7.5.3

This is a great extension for blocking ads. Using the Filterset.G component provides me with automatic updates which tell Adblock Plus which pictures are ads and which are valid content. I quite enjoy this one and don’t get the flashing ads nor do I get the buzzing bees anymore

Download Statusbar 0.9.5.1

synic saw this tonight and asked me what it was. I run Download Statusbar in “Mini Mode” and never use the standard download dialog provided from Firefox. If you prefer to show all of your downloads near the status bar at the bottom, the Download Statusbar is for you.

FireGPG 0.4.3

FireGPG provides me with a quick and easy way to use my gpg keys. I can sign, verify, encode and decode messages in my gmail by clicking the extra options this extension gives me. I’m sure it works in Yahoo! Mail and others as well. I regularly get mail that is signed with someone’s gpg key, this is very nice for that reason.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer 1.0.1

Foxmarks is in my opinion the best bookmark synchronization tool. Google has one, other people have one, but Foxmarks gives me something that those others just can’t. I get the ability to manage all of my bookmarks from the safety and security of the extension itself. Setting up the account, updating and synchronizing can all be done from within my Firefox browser. I don’t have to go to a web page and agree to terms, it just works.

Morning Coffee 1.26

I use this feature off and on though I really like its concept. When you add this extension, you get a little coffee mug up near your search box. Every day when you open your firefox, it will automagically load your chosen sites into the browser for you. Customizations can be made for each day, weekends and the whole week IIRC. Its a great little extension.

StumbleUpon 3.11

If you’ve never used StumbleUpon, you’re missing out. This extension provides you with hours of entertainment. Think of it as social networking on crack! You’ll be so addicted to “stumbling”, that by the time you get tired of it, you realize its morning. I absolutely love the StumbleUpon extension.

TinyUrl Creator 1.0.4

If you’ve never been to tinyurl.com, check it out, but this little plugin will help you make long web links into short, manageable ones you can give to your friends. Never again will you have to copy and paste http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=111843562736606607846.000001132f1a80671132d&z=13&om=1 but rather http://tinyurl.com/3bx3yv. Now isn’t that so much better?

I’ve recently discovered a couple more that I find interesting. I’ll report back to you all when I’ve tested them out, but here’s a quick list for your enjoyment:

ScribeFire - Blog from Firefox

Firefox Showcase - Hit F12 to show a quick preview of all of your tabs. Reload and browse here too if you like.

What are your favorite extensions. What ones did I miss? I’d love to hear from you about some that will make my Firefox even better!

Cheers,

Herlo

An annoying bug in Firefox is that it detects the horizontal scroll sent by synaptic as the back/forward actions rather than scrolling. To fix this you need to go into firefox and type about:config in the location bar.  And then filter for mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.

You need to set the action to be 1 (2 is forward/back) and  set sysnumlines to true.

so it should look like:

mousehweel.horizscroll.withnokey.action = 1
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = true

and then you will be able scroll properly!

You can also disable the scroll completely if you don’t want it at all by adding Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0″ to the input section of xorg.conf

Lately, I’ve caught the IceApe bug (IceApe is a rebranded/renamed Mozilla Seamonkey), and I’d like to share my enthusiasm about it.

First, a friend of mine got me hooked. Steve Dibb, a Gentoo user (yeah, I know. ), loves it, and has been using Seamonkey ever since I’ve known him. Being a heavy Firefox advocate, I tried everything in my power to show him the One True Browser, but he refused to budge. Now, rather indirectly, he’s got me using IceApe. How did that happen?

Well, running Debian Sid on my laptop, due to the better hardware support than Ubuntu at the time, an X11 update came down the pipe. With this update, IceWeasel had the ability to crash X by selecting an unfocused tab. The way to get around this bug, was to start IceWeasel in safe mode, disabling any and all extensions. This was fine for the occasional here-and-there, but when it came to web development, I needed my extensions. Wondering what to do, I realized that IceApe used the same Gecko 1.8 rendering library as IceWeasel, so I installed it and gave it a try.

First impressions weren’t that great. The default theme is the same theme that Netscape and the Mozilla Suite was using back in the day. Not to terribly exciting to look at. Further, it doesn’t have any real way to manage extensions and add-ons through the browser. However, as I started fiddling with it, I noticed the insane amount of configuration options, and it actually was using less resources than the combination IceDove/IceWeasel that I was using. Getting the same amount of work done with the same or better productivity is always a plus in my book. And if it uses less RAM than previous setups, I’m all for it.

Since installing and running IceApe, it’s been flawless. It would be nice if there was a better way to handle extensions, and it would be nice if some of the extensions that I use would work with it, like Firebug. All-in-all, however, I love it. It’s snappy, powerful, and full of config’ing. Since running it, I haven’t seen the need to go back to the IceDove/IceWeasel combination. One suite, IceApe fits all my needs very nicely. I’d highly recommend it.

I just updated my Ultimate Firefox Extension List For Junkies page. I added a new category of “Past Extensions” and updated the list of my “Current Extensions”. Of course, if there are any comments on list, I am curious as to what they are.