the empty quarter » firefox

Removing description from Firefox bookmarks

martin — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:59:14 +0000

By default Firefox populates the Description field of a bookmark with the content of the page’s tag. I find is a little annoying and was looking for a way to remove these descriptions.

Since I have a lot of bookmarks I wanted to clean them all up in one go rather than editing them one by one. Luckily there is an easy way to do this since Firefox stores the bookmarks in an SQLite database file which can be opened and manipulated.

Install SQLite Database Browser (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install sqlitebrowser Windows: download and install from SourceForge).
IMPORTANT! Export your Firefox bookmarks to have a backup in case something goes wrong.
Close Firefox (you can’t edit the bookmarks file while Firefox is running).
Run SQLite Database Browser and open the places.sqlite file which is located in your profile folder.
Run the following SQL which will remove the description from all bookmarks.
delete from moz_items_annos where anno_attribute_id = 2
Save and close, run Firefox.

Reference on the places.sqlite file can be found on mozillaZine and Mozilla Developer Network.

Change Firefox address bar search engine

martin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:10:36 +0000

Follow these steps to change the search engine used by Firefox 3 address bar:

Enter about:config in the browser’s address bar and accept a warning dialog if it appears.
In the filter box type in keyword.URL
Double click the entry and paste in your prefered search engine URL (e.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=)

You can always revert back to the default Google search by right-clicking the entry and selecting the Reset menu option.

BIRT chart scrollbars in Firefox

martin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:27:55 +0000

There’s a strange bug in BIRT charting with Firefox on Linux. Some charts are rendered with horizontal and vertical scrollbars, sort of like an embedded frame which is too big to fit in the allocated space.

The fix for this annoyance is straightforward, simply change the output format from SVG to PNG on the first tab of the chart dialog. This also makes scrolling smoother and improves overall responsiveness of Firefox when a report with a lot of charts is displayed.

Jaunty notifications in Thunderbird and Firefox

martin — Sat, 23 May 2009 17:45:08 +0000

One of the major new features in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) has of course been the new notification system. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a pretty good, bold piece of work and the notifications look pretty good. The trouble is, as with any new framework, that not all applications out there are using the new notifications, leaving the overall impression somewhat disjointed. Good news is that with a bit of tweaking Firefox and Thunderbird can be made to send their messages to the notification area.

Firefox: Credit for this tip to the OMG! Ubuntu blog: For Firefox, there is an add-on (currently experimental) which sends the “Download complete” messages to the notification area. You should also change the browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete setting to false under about:config to stop Firefox’s native little notification from popping up.

Thunderbird: For Thunderbird’s “New email” notification, I found that the GNOME Mail Notification applet works very well. Follow these steps to set it up:

First install Mail Notification by running
sudo apt-get install mail-notification
Once installed, open the Mail Notification config dialog from System > Preferences > Mail Notification.
On the first tab (General) click the Add button and browse to the Inbox file of the Thunderbird mail account for which you want to display notifications. The Inbox file should be under location similar to this one :
/home//.mozilla-thunderbird/.default/Mail//Inbox

(.mozilla-thunderbird is a hidden directory in your home directory).
Make sure that on the last tab (Message Popups) the “Enable message popups” check box is ticked.
Now configure Mail Notification to run on session start up: open System > Preferences > Startup Applications and click Add. Name and Description can be set to anything, under command enter
mail-notification --sm-disable
Last step is to open Thunderbird and disable its native notification messages by going to Edit > Preferences and on the General tab uncheck “Show an alert”.

All going well you should now have Thunderbird using the new notifications and a cool applet in your notification area showing you if there are any unread messages in your Inbox.

Two quick changes in Firefox about:config

martin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:41:54 +0000

Here are two quick and simple changes which I always make on a fresh Firefox install. They are both accessed through the about:config URI. Simply type about:config to the Firefox address bar and accept the disclaimer. This reveals a lot of “hidden” settings which cannot be changed directly through the preferences dialogs.

To make backspace button go back in history (this is default in Windows but not in Linux), change the value of browser.backspace_action to 0.
To open the result of search from the search bar in a new tab change the value of browser.search.openintab to true.

A reference of these and other about:config parameters can be found in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Install RealPlayer as a Firefox plug-in in Xubuntu

martin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:42:16 +0000

I used the following steps to install RealPlayer in order to listen to BBC Radio. Although I did this on Xubuntu 8.04, it should also work for Ubuntu and other distros.

Download and install RealPlayer for Linux from Real. I downloaded the deb package and installed it through gdebi.
My install path was now /opt/real/RealPlayer. Check that the following two files exist:
/opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.xpt
Copy those two files to the Firefox plugins directory (the code below should be a single line):
sudo cp /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.* /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/
Restart Firefox. You can verify that Firefox has picked up the plugin under Tools > Add-ons > Plugins. It should say something along the lines of “Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible”.

Good luck and happy listening.