Tag: Firefox
January 25th, 2010 | Posted in Developer Blog | Tags: Firefox, Google, Google Chrome
I’ve been using FireFox as my primary browser since version 0.9 and have admittedly grown quite attached to it. On the other hand, I’m quite fond of Google as well, so the prospect of making the switch to Chrome seemed almost inevitable as FF continues to grow into a resource heavy machine. The first deterrent however, was the lack of extension support in Chrome. The main reason I love FireFox (or so I though, as you’ll see in a moment) was for the extensions that make my day to day so much easier and that I cannot live without—such as Web Developer Toolbar, XMarks, AdBlocker Plus, pdfIt, and more.
Now that Chrome supports extensions, I really thought I was making the transition. I installed many extensions, and got Chrome to the point where I really felt like I could use it on a daily basis to accopmlish my tasks. It loads much, much faster and I thought I was in love! To my surprise, however, there are many nuances in Chrome itself that I feel make it lacking enough to the point that I cannot use it, in spite of extension support. In other words, I have complaints about the browser itself, not about the lack of extension support. These are things that extensions might possibly fix at some point, but I feel they belong as part of the browser’s base. Hopefully Chrome adopts many of these seemingly simple features as it graduates from Beta and beyond.
Here is my list of things I depend on in FireFox that are missing in Chrome:
- Several right click menu options
- “View Background Image” – While Chrome does have support for viewing a forground image in a seperate tab, I need the ability to view a background image. It’s a feature I use a lot in FF.
- “View Selection Source” – I understand the advantage of using the “Inspect Element” feature in Chrome, but the behavior is something quite different. I love that FireFox will show me only the code I’ve selected and highlights it in the popup window.
- Minimal frame options – Chrome has a few options to aid you within frames, but Firefox’s options are so much richer and I find myself missing them quite a bit
 Chrome Frame Options  Firefox Frame Options
- Customization support – Simply plugging “about:config” into the FF browser offers a vast amount of customization settings. Enough to let you really screw things up if you aren’t careful. As of yet, all I’ve seen in Chrome is the ability to set a few startup switches.
- A perplexing inablility to use Google Bookmarks in a meaningful way – So I can synchronize bookmarks across browsers, fine…but where do they get stored if not in Google Bookmarks? Even extension support is weak at best.
- Bookmark dividers – I’m an organization freak, what can I say?
- Search as you type
- Good visual representation when the word you are searching for cannot be found – Chrome simply says “0 of 0″ where FF changes the box to red.
I’m sure I’ll find more with time. These came about in a matter of a couple of days.
What about you? Have you found yourself having a hard time making the switch as you develop or use Chrome in your day to day? If you’ve found things in Chrome that you wish Firefox had, please share those as well.
March 6th, 2009 | Posted in Developer Blog | Tags: Firefox, Omniture
If you use the latest version of Omniture’s SiteCatalyst, you are probably aware of how poorly their nice pretty reports translate to PDF, Word, and Excel when you use the “save” tools available right there in the suite. Images get removed, text gets misaligned, and colors get skewed.
Today I devised a nice, quick method for getting a printable report that looks identical to the report you see on your screen. The one downside, no selectable text for copy/paste later. But if that’s your concern, rather than printing, you probably aren’t worried about format as much anyway.
The solution I created involves downloading a FireFox extension called Pdf It! and Omniture’s own print feature.
Once you have Pdf It! installed and your report you wish to print is on the screen, simply click the print icon in SiteCatalyst’s toolbar at the top of your report. This will open a new window with limited browser chrome (toolbars, status bars, etc.) and will load your report without any of the extra navigation at top or left of your report. Basically a nice printable report. Only to print from this screen doesn’t always give the result you desire as browser to printer support isn’t always the greatest. You will still run into issues with missing images, cut off edges, etc.
So, the next thing to do is cancel the print job that automatically appears. Now you are left with just the print window. Right click somewhere in that print window and select Pdf It! > Save as PDF > Whole Page. Pdf It! will open a save dialogue and you can save that page to your desired directory. From here you can simply open that newly created PDF and print. Or if you prefer, attach it in an email to the people who care.
(NOTE: Since this post was first written, I have since abandoned Super for the far superior Movavi Video Converter which will do everything Super does, but is much easier to use and obviously much easier to download. It even rips DVDs which Super cannot do. It’s not free like Super, but it’s well worth the cheap $30. Trust me on this one!)
Ever get stuck in an endless loop, trying to download video converter, Super? Here’s how to break the loop.
I’ve never once been able to download it using Firefox, so if I were you I wouldn’t even bother trying.
Basically, you need to add the download site to your trusted sites in IE. But wait! I said the download site. Although it may appear that you are downloading directly from the www.erightsoft.com domain, you will actually be downloading from gpl.download.free.fr/Super.html so go ahead and point your browser there now.
Once you are on the right domain, open up your internet options and click the ’security’ tab. Then hit the ‘trusted sites’ icon and add the current domain (be sure to un-check the option that requires it to be an https site). Now that gpl.download.free.fr has been added to your trusted sites list, change your trusted sites level to ‘Low.’
Now all you need to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘Start Downloading SUPER’ which will take you to http://gpl.download.free.fr/Superdc.html where you will see a link that says ‘download and use’ near the top of the screen. Click that and it will take you to http://gpl.download.free.fr/S6Kg1.html where you will see the download links at the bottom of the screen. Why didn’t I have you go there to begin with instead of clicking all these links? Well, the good people of erightsoft (or whoever they are) don’t want you to download Super from anywhere but on their site, so they check the referrer of how you got to the download page and if you don’t get there in the order I described above, you will be redirected to the begining and have to start all over.
Happy video converting!
In December I posted an entry called Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards as an improved suggestion over the Flash Satay Method. I’ve recently been playing with objects such as Windows Media and Quick Time where the Satay Method doesn’t even begin to work. As it turns out the Gillay method works for all types of objects (and allow me to re-emphasize that it works without javascript).
Before I get too far, let me show an updated example of the Gillay method. This example will appear slightly different than the examples in my other post but reflects further discussion that took place within the comments section of that post.
<!–[if IE]>
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase=
"http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab
#version=7,0,19,0" width="780" height="590" id="gilluminate">
<param name="movie" value="gilluminate.swf" />
<![endif]x–>
<!–[if !IE]> <–>
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="gilluminate.swf" width="780" height="590" name="gilluminate">
<!–> <![endif]–>
<param name="movie" value="gilluminate.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#2C676C" />
<p>gilluminate is mostly a showcase of things I have done, things I am doing, and things I can do. It is powered by a combination of HTML, Flash, ActionScript, XML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP and displays my recent websites and artwork.<br />You need the latest free <a href="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?
P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">Flash Player Plugin</a> to view this site.</p>
</object>
Basically what is happening here is that I’m hiding the IE friendly object tag from every browser that’s not IE, and vice versa.
This same principal can be applied when "embedding" Windows Media or Quick Time movies, and probably every other type of object. Here’s an example of using the Gillay method with Quick Time:
<!–[if IE]><object classid=
"clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" width="250" height="140" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab
#version=6,0,2,0" standby="Loading Quick Time components…"><![endif]x–>
<!–[if !IE]> <–>
<object type="video/quicktime" data="example.mov" width="$width" height="$height" standby="Loading Quick Time components…">
<!–> <![endif]–>
<param name="controller" value="true" />
<param name="type" value="video/quicktime" />
<param name="autoplay" value="true" />
<param name="scale" value="aspect" />
<param name="BGCOLOR" value="#000000" />
<param name="target" value="myself" />
<param name="src" value="example.mov" />
<param name="pluginspage" value="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" />
<a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">Quick Time Player</a> required or <a href="#" onclick="window.close();">close this window</a> and select a different format.
</object>
This code will play the example.mov movie in Firefox, IE, Safari, and IE for Mac and will validate on the W3C website
March 18th, 2005 | Posted in Developer Blog | Tags: Firefox
As a web developer, I am constantly reloading pages that are still in the development stage to see how my code is affecting the outcome (Dreamweaver can only preview so well in the design window, thank goodness for F12). Since I want to be absolutely sure that what I’m seeing is the most current version, I always turn my “Temporary Internet Files” and my “Cache” off. This becomes especially important as I develop with Flash.
When Firefox came out, I went to the options dialogue to turn off the cache and only noticed the option to specify how big the cache could be. So I ignorantly set the size to zero and thought it would do the trick. wrong! This causes major problems with our friend the Firefox.
The first issue I noticed was that I could no longer install extensions and themes. For some reason, firefox has to cache them before it can install them. So, thinking I was a genius, I set the cache limit to 1, instead of zero. That fixed the problem. For the past 6 months (or however long I’ve been using Firefox now) that’s the way it’s been. Until today.
Lately I’ve noticed that my personal websites (including the blog you are reading now) have had problems loading the CSS file. It was kind of random; sometimes it loaded, sometimes it didn’t. I searched and researched the problem blaming Firefox all the way. But today, as part of my research, I upped my cache to 10000 and the problem went away. So I started researching more in that direction and came across a help file on mozilla.org telling me that if I wanted to turn off cache I could do it by plugging about:config into the address bar and changing the setting browser.cache.disk.enable to false.
DUH! Why didn’t I think of that before. Probably because it should be in the options menu to begin with, in my opinion.
Now even though I have my cache set to zero my CSS files are loading properly and extensions have no problems installing because I have actually turned cache “off”.
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