A Man and his Penguin

I’m currently using Firefox 3 beta 2. The clever dudes at Mozilla created a self-contained binary of it for 32-bit Linux, so you just extract it into your home directory and it works!

I like how it integrates with the Gnome theme, except that the Human theme looks a bit strange on some web pages. I never really noticed that Firefox 2 didn’t integrate very well, but now I’m *really* noticing that the FF3 beta does!

Saving tabs is different, some of my favourite extensions don’t work :-(  No more Youtube downloading for me, unfortunately. All the beta testers seem to hate the History interface - it’s now a PITA to delete all the history for a particular day (if you don’t want other users to know what you’ve been looking at). You can’t just bring up the sidebar and select "delete" for the day - that doesn’t do anything. You have to go into the Places Manager and select all the pages there; but they’re not delimited by the date.

Still, eveything else seems to be working fine, and after I broke my Debian Alternatives system and fixed it*, links automatically open in Firefox 3 beta. After using Firefox 3 beta, you can’t go back to 2, because it forgets ALL your passwords (even the ones that were remembered when you used Firefox 2). That’s a bit of a pain too, but Firefox 3 is stable enough already for daily use. It’s just the darn incompatible extensions.

*Whenever I clicked on a link to a web page from some other sort of program, it would open in Konqueror, since Konqueror was the last web browser I installed. This used to happen under Dapper too, but I never worried about it. When Konqueror is installed, it creates a link to itself under /usr/bin/x-www-browser, and any programs which use the Debian Alternatives system for selecting a web browser (sensible-browser) will open links in Konqueror. This is because sensible-browser really just passes URLs to whatever browser is linked to in /usr/bin/x-www-browser.

I didn’t realise this, however, and I stuffed around with update-alternatives program until sensible-browser and x-www-browser stopped working. Finally I realised that all the alternatives were also linked at /usr/bin, so I created the link to Firefox 3 there and everything worked out alright.

Moral of the story: Don’t stuff around with your alternatives unless you know what you’re doing!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Open-source application software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.