Craig Mayhew’s Blog

A quick way to increase the responsiveness of firefox is to turn off the disk cache and turn on the memory cache. This will keep a cache of recently visited websites/images in the computers RAM instead of on the hard disk.

Go into about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to FALSE, then right-click and select NEW -> INTEGER and type browser.cache.memory.capacity and set to 100000 (for 100mb).

Now your memory is being used for the cache instead of your hard disk. If you have loads of memory (more the 2GBs) then you could set the cache figure to say 200mb or higher for even better performance.

For my and your reference, here’s a list of my firefox addons that I’m currently using :)

Am I missing any good ones?

The usual reason for not being able to update the scripts is that your permissions are wrong in your Firefox folder. Your Grease Monkey scripts will be in your firefox folder. The default place for this is (please substitute {username} for your actual Ubuntu user name):

cd /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts/

You need to make sure you are the owner of this folder. This command will make sure you are. Again please substitute whats inside the {} brackets.

chown -R {username}:{usergroup} /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

If that still fails to fix the problem, then you also need to make sure you have write permissions on your firefox settings folder.

chmod -R 755 /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

This article details how to download and compile the latest bleeding edge build of Firefox on Microsoft Windows 7. The firefox build will be full of bugs because it is bleeding edge, so don’t use this for anything important :) On the upside you will get to play with new features long before anyone that waits for “stable” versions to be released. Here we go:

Install MozillaBuild, a package of additional build tools. Make sure you install this with a directory path that does not contain any spaces (e.g. c:\mozilla-build\). If you get a message saying this application did not install properly then you should see a windows dialog giving you the option to re-install with the ‘correct settings’. After that all should be well.

If you don’t already have Visual C++ 2008 then download and install the express edition from http://www.microsoft.com/Express/vc/

Download the windows SDK if you don’t already have it installed (If unsure install it anyway) from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505&displayLang=en

We need to make sure that windows is using the SDK that we have just installed. Find “Windows SDK Configuration Tool” on your start menu, run it. Select “v7.0″ (or higher) in the drop down box and click “make current”.

Now we need to create your mozconfig file. This will contain various compile options for your custom build of firefox. Substituting {username} for your real username, you should find your mozconfig file here: C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\mozconfig

I recommend that unless you know what your doing or run into compile issues that are specific to your system then edit your mozconfig file to look like this:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"

#adding this to prevent it erroring about not being able to build for version 601000
mk_add_options MOZ_WINSDK_TARGETVER=600

#stop the atl errors
ac_add_options --disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options --disable-activex
ac_add_options --disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility

Hurrah, that’s all of the setup out of the way. Now we can try and compile firefox! Open a shell window by running: c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat. Even if you’re on 64-bit Windows, do not use the files ending in -x64.bat.

In the newly opened shell window type the following:
To get the latest source:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

To navigate to the mozilla-central directory:

cd mozilla-central

To start the build process:

make -f client.mk

Once compiled (It may take hours depending on your system) the firefox executable can be found in C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\objdir-ff-release\dist\bin

I recommend you create a shortcut to the executable and don’t open it directly. This way you can have it run from a different firefox profile and have it running at the same time as your standard firefox build while keeping the two completely seperate. This will prevent the addons etc from erroring about the unsupported firefox version. The short cut should be formatted as such: “Firefox.exe” -p “{PROFILE}” -no-remote (note: substitute the name of your profile for {PROFILE} or omit to launch the profile manger instead). I’ve set mine to “Firefox.exe” -p “nightly” -no-remote

If your still unable to compile firefox then please leave a comment, then try other resources such as https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_Firefox_build.

Unfortunately the IPv6 issue is still at large in Karmic Koala and will effect just about every internet application.

The problem is caused by Ubuntu requesting everything by IPv6 first even if there are no IPv6 Interfaces configured and timing out each time when it doesn’t get a response.

The workaround in firefox is to go to “about:config”, just type it into the address bar and hit enter. Then change the value network.dns.disableIPv6 to TRUE.

The bug can be tracked here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/417757

Microsoft took a step to far recently when they installed an add-on into Firefox in a recent Windows update “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1“. As you can see in the following image I have disabled but not been able to uninstall the add-on.

The reason it can’t be removed is that Microsoft installed the add-on for all users but the Firefox GUI can only handle uninstalling add-ons for the current user. Microsoft have released a further update that installs the addon on a per user basis rather than for all users which enables you to uninstall it via the previously inactive uninstall button in the Firefox GUI. The download can be found here.

To fix this, rename your extensions.rdf to extensionsOLD.rdf.

On windows this file can be found in appdata in your roaming profile.