/dev/null/kevin

One thing I hated about the new Firefox 2.0 was the small, but significant, change to the close-tab button.  They changed it from a single, never moving button on the far-right side to multiple buttons, one for each tab.  These buttons, of course, become moving targets as the number of tabs changes.

I normally open a bunch of tabs (comics, news articles) and then read them with my mouse hoving over the close-tab button.  It was easy to close the tab and move to the next page without even looking.  The new approach of one button per tab made that impossible and caused me some angst.

Fortunately, phocks blog had the answer.  Yeah phocks!

There are now four modes to choose from:

I recently started seeing a strange problem with Firefox: it would hang for about 20 seconds every time a new window (frame) was created. It was one of those situations where "nothing changed," as I used to hear so often in my customer support days. I only saw the problem on one of my PCs and not my Sun. Rebooting didn't help so my first suspicion was a virus or spyware.

Lots of virus checks later, I found nothing. I bit the bullet and reinstalled Firefox. Fixed! So I readded my old profile. Ooops! Problem returned. OK, go back and add things one at a time. Bookmarks, nope. Themes, nope. Prefs file, nope. But when I got to the extensions, SwitchProxy caused the hang. Strange, since I have this on all my versions (I VPN into Sun a lot, Sun uses proxies, so it's nice to easily turn proxies on and off).

To make a short story long, the problem is that SwitchProxy has a setting to check for new updates automatically. This is turned on by default, but is turned off on all of my other installations. I can only guess that the SwitchProxy web site went down and SwitchProxy doesn't nicely do its update check in the background (boo!!). Turning this feature off in the options window fixed the problem.

Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 are now out (as I hope you know) and really making an impact. There are literally dozens of reasons why you should switch to these products from either Internet Explorer or Netscape/Mozilla (speed and security to name just the two on the top).

That said, there are two problems that Solaris users face when trying to switch (Linux, too). The problem is that, by default, these two programs don't know how to invoke each other. If a mail message contains a URL it won't call Firefox, and Firefox doesn't handle mailto links at all. If you search for these fixes on the web, you will find a variety of fixes, most of which apply to different flavors of Linux, or to mozilla. It doesn't take much to extrapolate these solutions to Solaris, but I've done it anyway.

Note: These solutions are for Thunderbird 1.0, Firefox 1.0 and Solaris 10. Also, when referring to the thunderbird and firefox commands, I am referring to the top level shell script, not the binary. It's important to use these shell scripts as they create the proper environment, and automatically handle the remote access. For these examples, it is assumed that these commands live in /usr/local/bin. Make any changes accordingly.

Thunderbird: Handling URLs in mail

You need to edit your local prefs.js file and add the following line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/firefox");

This file can be found here:

$HOME/.thunderbird/<PROFILE>/prefs.js

The <PROFILE> value is a random string, that may have .default appended to it. If you only have one profile, then it should be the only directory in there. If you have more than one profile, you'll need to change each prefs.js file.

Firefox: Handling mailto links

This fix is slightly more complicated since you need to create a wrapper script. We'll be calling this script mailto in this example.

Here is the code for the mailto script:

#!/bin/sh
# script to be called by firefox when mailto: links are clicked.

DIRNAME=`dirname $0`
DIRNAME=`cd $DIRNAME ; pwd`
thunderbird="$DIRNAME/thunderbird"

args=`echo $* | sed -e 's/ /%20/g'`

if $thunderbird -remote "ping()" > /dev/null 2>&1
then
	args=`echo $args | sed -e 's/mailto://'`
	$thunderbird -remote "mailto($args)"
else
	$thunderbird "$args"
fi

The mailto script should be placed in the same directory as the thunderbird script. If not, you'll need to alter the script accordingly.

The second step is to add the following line to your firefox preferences, similar to how you did the same for thunderbird. Add the following line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "/usr/local/bin/mailto");

To this file:

$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<PROFILE>/prefs.js

Same comment for <PROFILE> as for thunderbird.

You'll need to restart both apps for these changes to take affect.