Cameron » Firefox

Always show the location bar in Firefox

Cameron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:10:06 +0000

Not showing the location bar hides a very valuable piece of information from the user. There have been recent discussions on making the information it conveys even more visible to the user. Why is it then that Firefox allows websites to hide it? IMHO, the valuable nature of this information from a security perspective vastly outweighs the slight visual improvement this provides for small popup windows.

To disable this:

Go to about:config
Find dom.disable_window_open_feature.location
Double click to toggle it to true

Hat tip to Mozilla Links

PS. See Bug 337344

Firefox Crop Circle

Cameron — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:50:35 +0000

Okay, I’m VERY behind on this one, but for those of you who aren’t particularly Mozilla-ey, last year a bunch of folks in the US made a Firefox Crop circle and you can now see it on Google earth/maps. Wenzel has some screenshots.

Was invented here!

Cameron — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:50:35 +0000

Does it amuse any of you as much as it does me that MSN.com is currently prominently pushing an article recommending IE users switch to Firefox or Opera?

In the most valuable real estate on the MSN homepage (probably making it some of the most valuable real estate on the web) is an image promoting a news story about the Dixie Chicks and the Grammys, wait 10 seconds or so and it changes to “3 Top Web Dangers: The biggest online threats and how to avoid them.” Threat number one is of course IE.

Firefox 2 RC1

Cameron — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:27:30 +0000

I updated to RC1 today and as predicted it didn’t solve the crash-at-startup problems I was having. Finally decided it was time for a new profile so I migrated the files over and installed my add-ons again. Now everything seems to be hunky-dory. I’d like to have the time to go through my old profile and see what exactly the problem was, but I just don’t have the dedication. It’s full of junk from all the add-ons I install because of all my work for AMO (my prefs.js was over 350KB.)

So now I’ve got everything set up and back to normal – it rocks! And if I go to Help -> About Mozilla Firefox -> Credits, my name is in there! Apparently Shaver got all the folks working on Remora in there… I think we should now refer to him as “the string puller.”

My favourite new features in Fx 2 would have to be session restore and inline spell checking – Firefox crashing and losing all my tabs (which kind of work like a to-do list) was one of the biggest pains in the ass, and my spelling isn’t great (although it’s not bad either) so these make a big difference to me. I’m not so enthusiastic about microsummaries, and while the visual refresh is cool, it’s not uber fantastic. I don’t use search plugins (I use quicksearch bookmarks to save UI space) but I do appreciate all the other thousands of bugs that have been fixed for the release.

I can’t wait for Fx 3 too – Fx2 was branched off the same branch as 1.5 was on (1.8) so there have been things fixed on the trunk from over a year ago that will not be in Fx2, but that’s development for you