Friday, 6 June 2008

GMail addons

Increasingly I'm online away from offline apps like my Thunderbird and Firefox, which means I don't get my settings and addons that I've setup in Thunderbird as I use GMail online. What Google really need to launch is an addon mechanism for their GMail and other services, in the same way that Facebook support users adding apps to their profile etc. So wherever I login.. I get my setup!

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Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Shockwave Flash crash takes out Firefox

If like me you see the problem with Adobe's Flash format and how it diverts us away from the openness of the interweb market which has facilitated so much progress you'll see the bugs in Adobe's software as just another problem in their strategy.

Today I needed to use a computer in an office running Windows, at least it was Firefox, but Adobe Flash still managed to bring it down with a crash!Adobe Flash CrashIt's fully reproducible from this page, linked from this other page with Firefox 2.0.13 and Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60, DLL v9.0.60.184 backtrace:
NPSWF32! 3000d6fa()
NPSWF32! 300d106d()
NPSWF32! 300d343e()
NPSWF32! 300e580e()
NPSWF32! 300e5a22()

3000D6FA mov ecx,dword ptr [eax+1Ch] <--Crash
3000D6FD call 3000D705
3000D702 ret 4
I have plugins installed:

Shockwave Flash

File name: NPSWF32.dll
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60

MetaFrame Secure Access Manager

File name: npCtxCAO.dll
Endpoint Analysis Client

VLC Multimedia Plugin

File name: npvlc.dll
Version 0.8.6c, copyright 1996-2006 The VideoLAN Team

http://www.videolan.org/
I've posted here as they don't provide any email address for bug reports, and they've never replied to any other communication I've sent about crash bugs in their propreitary software. Will they ever fix this? Not sure when they have loads of other exploits and privacy issues (secret cookies which ignore browser settings etc)

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Monday, 2 June 2008

Must have Firefox addons

My personal favs, save entire page as an image, (alternative is Screengrab). Adblock Plus, DownloadHelper, ColourfulTabs and MediaPlayerConnectivity complete the experience for the moment ;)

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Saturday, 16 February 2008

Firefox print to PDF

Why doesn't Firefox have a export as PDF function yet? This is one of the features I use most in OpenOffice. When I need to do it from Firefox on Ubuntu I need to print to Default/Postscript, and save to file, then use ps2pdf from the shell to convert it. However, it just just be a click away!

From KDE System Settings, I can add a new Printer as GENERIC->Postscript Printer but that file is still a PostScript file and not a PDF! The pseudo printer is a simple idea, with PDFCreator and CutePDF being available which acomplish it this way. Will Firefox 3 have this missing feature?

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Thursday, 31 January 2008

Firefox addon unsigned security issue!

Currently addons.mozilla.org does not offer signed addon extensions, so if some unscrupulous person wrote a key-logger they could quite easily get people using their addon as everyone would trust the source. I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet actually.

Firefox as other security issues too, like even when I disable an addon Firefox still runs it upon startup! (Filterset.G. Updater for example). So you really have to uninstall the addons if you don't want them to run!

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Tuesday, 29 January 2008

3D on the web (VRML, X3D and COLLADA)

3D on the web is one area that is still absent, I'd like to see that change over the next couple of years, especially as the tech has been around since the 90s. We've got the open format VMRL and X3D, which via the script tag support Javascript code. There is the Sony Computer Entertainment COLLADA format which is now maintained by the Khronos Group.

So to pull it all together browsers really need to add native support for these formats. While their are "plugins" such as the excellent OpenVRML that is still just a plugin, and not an integrated component of the browser like SVG or HTML. Perhaps someone at an innovative net business would be what's needed now to get things rolling.

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Saturday, 22 December 2007

Cookie filter and block for Firefox?

I use Firefox's Adblock and Filterset.G.Updater extensions to ditch the advert pollution on many pages of the interweb. What we really need is a decent CookieBlock and CookieFilterset updater, the sort that blocks cookies like urchin I blogged about before. Is it that because cookies aren't visible they're not annoying enough to start blocking the unique trackers on pages? Should have been available before now, so as Mozilla guys aren't implementing as a core feature I hope someone will scratch the itch as an extension ;)

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Friday, 14 December 2007

Firefox still doesn't support TIFF, doh!

This tiff firefox bug seems set on never being resolved by the Firefox team. Outstanding for 5 years already! Why can't the browser most popular with users display a standard graphics file format? It's just like the reply-all bug in Thunderbird which doesn't get tackled.

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Sunday, 9 December 2007

Install and restart in Firefox

It is interesting to see that Firefox suffers the same problems that MS-Windows does. Every time an extension is installed it says it is necessary to restart before changes will take effect. Why can't they apply on the fly like most GNU-Linux desktop applications?

What is worse that Firefox's offer to Restart doesn't actually work, I installed Filterset.G Updater on the latest 2.0.0.11 (what's with the silly numbering?) and clicked "Restart" when it offered, and when it restarted it hadn't really restarted, as Filterset.G hadn't run its first-run functions to download the advert block list! I had to close it, and manually restart to get it to download the advert block list.

..so come on Firefox developers, catch up!

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Thursday, 29 November 2007

Fix for coral cache Adblock Filterset.G Updater bug

If like me you use Adblock Filterset.G Updater to grab the latest regexp to layout pages in Firefox without all the intrusive Adobe Flash, Gif and Iframe adverts.. you may have noticed that Filterset.G Updater doesn't work when you're behind a firewalled connection! I tracked down the cause to be because it relies on Coral Cache, which functions on the less standard port 8080. I told the guys at Coral about this problem in their design a few years ago, unfortunately they've not fixed it still.

The solution is to dive into the code and change Filterset.G Updater to not use the Coral cache.. now editing code is pretty easy, so just follow these steps:

Find fgupdater.jar in your firefox profile and copy it somewhere as a backup.
Rename the original copy fgupdater.jar.zip
Open it up in your favoriate ZIP archive browser, such as Ark, WinZip etc.
Edit the file "content/fgupdater.js"
Change the function near the top to go straight to the uncached site URL:

function fgSite(filter)
{
return "http://www.pierceive.com/filtersetg/";
}

Now save your changes, and close the editor, it should then update the archive when you close it.
Rename it back to fgupdater.jar again.
Restart firefox, and either do a manual update from the Add-ons menu, or if it does an automatic one you should then see the Adblock extension gets populated with the list of regular expressions ;)

Easy eh!?

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