Lucid > Firefox > Search Provider Confusion

After all the hoopla about changing search provider, Ubuntu has changed its mind and went back with Google for the Lucid release. I don't understand why this is such a big issue. Ubuntu is open source and so is Firefox. Search feature of Firefox is well known and so is the knowledge of how to change search provider or the default one. I guess Ubuntu users are getting accustomed to being spoon fed by a beautiful looking, always working, hassle free Linux distribution.

PS: This is another example of the philosophy that Apple is leading the way to make computer users dumb rather than techsavvy. I hope Ubuntu doesn't join the bandwagon.

Firefox Profile Size

Ever wondered why your Firefox profile is still at least a few MB even after you do a "Clean Private Data"? The culprit might be phishing filter database which helps you warn about phishing websites. I was checking my Firefox profile size and found out that it was more than 50MB even after cleaning the cache and all other private data. I went into the profile and noticed that the urlclassifier3.sqlite was 58MB! I didn't know what the file did, so I went on to the knowledgebase article and learnt it was the phishing filter database file.

This database can, overtime become fragmented and be of a size much larger than its real size. An easy way to get it back to the real size is to delete it (I renamed it and later deleted after everything was fine). Shut down Firefox. Firefox should download the database file again from Google at next startup. Below are the file sizes before and after deleting.

user@localhost 21:11:34 {nzkgcf5p.default} $> du -sch urlclassifier*
5.3M urlclassifier2.sqlite
53M urlclassifier3.sqlite
4.0K urlclassifierkey3.txt
58M total

user@localhost 21:42:00 {nzkgcf5p.default} $> du -sch urlclassifier*
20M urlclassifier3.sqlite
4.0K urlclassifierkey3.txt
20.1M total

So that is more than 50% reduction in size! Is there any way to set Firefox to do this automatically? It would be really great for people using remote profiles.

Scrolling: Firefox 3 and Safari

Software update started jumping up and down when I started my laptop today and I checked what it had to offer. There was this Security update and Safari 3.1.2. So I just said OK and let it work along for the 15o or so MB of data download. So after a restart, I checked the updated Safari. Is it only me or has Firefox 3 really gotten better than Safari at scrolling. It definitely is more fluid in Firefox than in Safari. Another thing I noticed is that the scroll bar in Firefox goes on a bit more even after you stop scrolling (extra distance depends on its speed when you stopped scrolling). Some might think it should just stop when the scrolling stops. But that is subjective. The extra roll, if call it that, seems to be more realistic and of a more fluid and friction free environment.

Anyway, I'm enjoying both of them right now. Hope you have got your new version of Firefox too.

PS: Watched Hulk - II today and it was worth it. Good one.

Adblock Plus and BBC

Adblock Plus has been efficiently blocking advertisements for me in Iceweasel (Firefox). But it was today that I noticed that the ABP icon was green while reading news items on BBC. It wasn't blocking the advertisements on BBC pages. On further checking I found out that ABP has whitelisted BBC! That is what was causing the adverts to appear.

A simple disabling of the whitelist entry for bbc returned the page to its clean form. What would we do without ABP?

Update: As Wladimir pointed out, the filter list was automatically updated to solve the above quirk. So if you happen to see those adverts, update your filter.

Addon of the Week

In an effort to increase the awareness of Firefox Addons, Addon of the Week has been started. There are already a couple of addons featured on AOTW. Initial plans are to have one addon of the week featured on AOTW. Smaller addons can be featured in between the regular AOTW publishing cycle. If anyone wants to write an article for AOTW, signup there and leave a comment.

Checking Firefox Version

I am trying to write a script in Javascript* which would inform a visitor's using Firefox if they are running an older version. Although Firefox does automatically check if there is an update and informs the user, I have seen visitors with versions like 0.8, 1.0.x, 1.5.y (y<11),>

Automatic updates are helpful for home users at least as corporate users might not have the rights to upgrade their software without administrator access. However, informing them with a visual warning on a web page could help in avoiding potential problems of using vulnerable versions.

Presently, the script checks the CVS branch tag i.e. rv: value with a hard coded value and prints a warning for users with older versions. Is there any way that the hard coded value(s) can be acquired automatically from say mozilla.org server and checked with visitor's user agent information? I don't know much about AJAX but would it be helpful in this case? No AJAX compatibility issues as the only browser we are checking is Firefox.

* - using Javascript because it runs client side, is available to all Firefox users and those who have disabled Javascript would most likely not need the warning to know it.

Browser Stats

Glazou started this. Here are the browser statistics for 2007 (till today) on my dynamic DNS host:

1. Gecko ----- 56.2%
2. MSIE ------ 31.4%
3. KHTML --- 8.1% (Safari 7.1%)
4. Opera ----- 2.6%

This just reflects the distribution of visitors on the dynamic host and should not be considered for browser popularity calculations. Higher percentage of Gecko is due to most of the stuff being about Mozilla and GNU/Linux. Safari's ratio is probably due to the a few desktop background images I put up for free download. But I noticed that IE 7 already has an update with version number 7.0.5730.11. Seems that the IE team is really working on it now ;)