Firefox 2.0
 

Despite all my prior poo-pooing, I've come to like using Firefox, I'm particularly thrilled that the new version spell checks my posts - or anything else I type into a web form. I wish I could use it a t work.

Ah, thanks for the heads up. I too am a former detractor turned Firefox user. Unfortunately, it looks like the spell check doesn't work in the quick reply box.

Gah! And "Alt-s" now brings up the History menu, so I can't use it as a "submit reply" shortcut anymore. :(

Me likes Firefox 2.0, too.
:)

Your post prompted me to download it - there's some cool new features.
I also had a look at add-ons and went with the download statusbar and Adblock Plus. We'll see how they pan out.

Really? It works for me.... :confused:

I love Firefox. I need to get the new version.

Oh, oops. User error, yeah it's working.

Alt-S, however... :mad:

I have the new version and while I like it, particularly the new spell check feature (which is working in my quick reply box), I've also had it crash a couple of times in the last few days. Not sure what is up with that but it is annoying. Of course, the possibility exists that there is something else fishy going on with the computer that is causing this. I haven't heard of anyone else having the same issue.

Ugh, I want to use it, but my MAC ver. dosen't work with it so I'm stuck with IE until I get a new Computer. Dang it!! :(

I've been using 2.0 for about a month now and so far it has been as stable as the previous version for me.

I don't like the keyboard shortcuts in Firefox since they so often conflict with the Web sites I may be browsing, but while Alt-S may be new it has been enough of a problem that I just haven't used keyboard shortcuts at all for a long time. I can't remember.

However, if you don't want the History menu option (and it isn't something I would ever use, you can install the MenuEditor Add On and turn it off. This will, I believe, make Alt-S work in your preferred way again.

Score, I was JUST starting to look for exactly such a thing. Thanks.

ETA: Dang, menu's gone, but the shortcut still doesn't work. It was the one keyboard shortcut I DID use consistently in Firefox 1.x. Sigh.

Test of Alt-S

Hmm, that implies that it worked for you. Do you have Google toolbar installed, because for me, Alt-S just puts the cursor focus on the toolbar search field.

Looks like Firefox 2.0 has the accesskey set to Alt-Shift by default.

Type "about:config" into your menu bar.
Enter "ui.key.contentAccess" into the filter line
The value is probably currently 5. Right click on the line and select Modify and change it to 4.

Now, this will disable Alt for accessing menu shortcuts. However, it will mean that menu keyboard shortcuts are also triggered by Alt and there could be conflict.

To change what triggers menu shortcuts modify "ui.key.chromeaccess"

In either item possible values are:

1 - Use Shift
2 - Use CTRL
3 - Use Shift-CTRL
4 - Use ALT
6 - Use CTRL-ALT
7 - Use Shift-CTRL-ALT

Hmm, I think it makes more sense to just retrain myself to Alt-shift as I also use some keyboard menu shortcuts. That much I can do.

I don't have the Google Toolbar, see this old thread for discussion of that. If you have multiple things in the window using the same accesskey value then that is going to be a problem. I don't know if Google Toolbar counts at chrome or content (if the former then you can separate them but if the latter then not).

Another test

Alt-shift-S is does the trick, so I'm not going to worry about it. That's an easy enough adjustment to make.

Is it working for you on the Post Quick Reply button for the Quick Reply box? According to page code that is also an S accesskey but while it works for me on the full reply page, it isn't working for me here.

Yew Nerrfen housen yergie bergi meeewsten gweeten derr Bork bork bork

My favorite FF addon :)

Yup, it's working for quick reply as well. Even quick edit.

ETA: double checking quick edit

Yet another test. Last one, I promise.

It always had that. Or at least the 1.whatever version I have been using has it.

In 1.x, that was only available if you installed an extension that added it. That was not part of the standard Firefox configuration until 2.0.

I've never installed any extensions - just the basic vanilla Firefox

Then you ended up with an add-on without realizing it or a non-standard build. The close button on tabs definitely was not a default feature prior to 2.x. Searching for that functionality is what introduced me to Tab Mix Plus, my favorite tab management add on.

By the way, I'm reading about a lot of people who don't like having the close tab button on each tab (I don't know why; I love being able to close a tab without making it active). If you don't like it, you can change it:

go to about:config
Filter for browser.tabs.closeButtons

The default setting is 1. Change it to any of these:

0 - Close button on active tab only
1 - Close button on all tabs
2 - No close buttons at all
3 - No close button on tabs but one close button at the far right on the tab row (which, when clicked, closes the active tab).


3 mimics the default (and only native) behavior for 1.x.

I've got Firefox 1.5.0.8, have never added add-ons, and have always had close buttons on my tabs too!:confused:

Oh, good. Count me among not liking it. Within minutes of installing 2.0, I accidentally clicked the close button when trying to switch tabs. Middle click closes a tab without making it active, that works perfectly fine for me.

I wonder if we're talking about the same thing.

I've been poking around to see if there was a build that had this before and can't find anything (all of the developer communities talk about this as a new feature for 2.0).

This is one thing about TabMixPlus. I had (haven't reinstalled it yet) it so that when I moused over a tab for 1/5 second it became active. Never clicked on tabs to make them active so there was no risk of accidentally clicking the close button. I disabled the middle click because I am more likely to accidentally to click it when trying to scroll.

But there is a ton of cool personalizations that can be done in the about:config options if you poke around into what they mean.

Perhaps they're thinking of the close button in the upper right that closed the active tab, rather than having a close button on each tab in the tab title, active or not?

I have close buttons on all tabs, active or not!

Wacky.

Mac?

Nope, Vaio w/Windows XP Home. Wonder what Kevy's got?

Kevy's got a Mac, which is why I asked.

On Firefox, when I open a new page it is blank. Does anyone know how to assign a page to open everytime when you hit 'New Tab'?

Don't know if there's a way to do it by default, but the Tab Mix plus add-on that Alex mentions above has that functionality.

It appears there is an about:config option for this (browser.tabs.loadonnewtab) that handles this and setting it to 1 should cause a new tab to load your default home page but it isn't working for me.

dagnabbit... everytime I see the title of this thread, I think "They're remaking the Clint Eastwood steals a Soviet superplane movie?"...

Do you still have Tab Mix installed? Perhaps that's overriding it.

I work on a Mac at home (on which I use Safari, which also has tabbed browsing native, but I never use - can't find a purpose for it). At work I am using Firefox 1.something on a POS HP running XP. Is there someplace I can check to see if I DO have a plug-in mysteriously installed?

Tools --> Extensions should bring up a list of whatever you have installed (I don't know what it shows if you have nothing installed.

Because I hadn't chosen to add any actual FF extentions I hadn't thought to check there: d'oh! I DO have the Yahoo toolbar (I think I opted for that when I was messing around with my SBC account) -- and lo: there is "tab mix plus" right underneath. So, maybe I got it with the toolbar...or maybe it was just bundled with my initial DL of FF and I didn't notice. Either way I consider the mystery (for my browser at least) solved! Thanks Alex: color yourself correct!:snap:

After years of using Netscape, we just switched to Firefox today. The latest version of Netscape was a trainwreck, and I hate Exhorror. I must say that I am very pleased with Firefox.:)

I just switched over myself, so far no issues, but I am wrestling with my unmanageable 1200+ bookmarks.

I'm ex-IE now

The spellcheck has spoiled me. Any application I use that doesn't have in-line spellcheck, I'm paralyzed.

I'm late to the party, and didn't feel like reading every post. I quite liked my old Firefox. With sites like LoT, I tend to open everything I'm interested in different tabs, then go through them all. With work, I tend to have multiple sites up for reference and fact checking, so I operate much the same way, except that I don't close the windows down until I'm finished with the work entirely. What I don't like with Firefox 2.0 is that every tab has a X for me to accidentally click when I just mean to look at the page on that tab.

I *knew* that Firefox 2.0 had that, so I avoided downloading it. IMO, the best features to Firefox were already in the original, so no need. I got tricked. I don't even know when... I don't even know how... but a couple of weeks ago I opened up my Firefox and... it was 2.0!! I was horrified. I keep closing tabs I just mean to look at. Not to mention, there doesn't seem to be a way for me to revert back to the "old tab closing method." In the interim, I've double-checked the "download new updates" option. It has to ask me before it does anything... Grrr...

I'm too lazy to research a way out of this catastrophe, and frankly, it has me depressed. I should probably see a doctor.

;)

But other than that - I've been a Firefox proponent since I had to switch to a PC. Even with it's stupid X next to the tab, it's the best thing out there. Well, next to the Old Firefox, that is...

blueerica, you want to read post #28 above.

I love you Alex.

Adding: You know, in that friendly kind of way. It's like kissing someone who saved your life. Except less dramatic.

Crap. I'd already packed my bag and was about to PM you for your address.

OK, just downloaded 2.0. Where is the spell checker? I'm looking at the extension site but I can't find it.

Try mispelling something in a post. I just misspelled 'mispelling', and it shows a red line under the word.

ooo than you WB!!!!!!!!!!!

:)

I am really appreciative of Firefox after the rotten experiences of the past week with my old browser. Isn't the spell check great?

Ys, I love th spelchek feeture, but here at the offis, still on iE

Oh damn! I've missed my opportunity!

Not really: he's a terrible kisser. Don't ask me how I know.

That can be fixed, you know.

Question re websites display in Firefox
 

Okay, so far I love Firefox. I did notice one thing, and this happens with LoT as well as my own website. On LoT, the quotes when I check in to the site do not wrap but the text goes right off the screen.

On my website (for those of you on Firefox now, www.rudolph-valentino.com), my upper navigation bar does not wrap either within the table, but the menu option scroll off the screen.

My question is this, is there a setting I need to configure in Firefox to view or is there something I need to add to the coding in my site so that the menu will wrap. I am assuming if it shows up this way for me, it's the same for everyone.

Or maybe I need to adjust my screen resolution? It's 1024xwhatever right now.

The short answer is, it's a matter of differences between how IE interprets HTML vs. how FF interprets it. It would take a re-work of the coding to resolve that.

The longer answer includes, wtf? If anything, I'd have expected IE to be the one where you see problems with the quotes. Ever since the last upgrade of the quotes system, the IE formatting has been kinda heinous and I've been furiously trying to resolve that. That's the first I've heard of it looking bad on FireFox. Dang.

Snowflake:

I don't have any problems with the quotes and I'm on FF2.0. I tried to look at your Web site to see if I found any coding issues (I do get the same unwrapped nav section), but am really curious how you got that page developed.

Did you do it yourself or someone else? If yourself, did you use some weird software to do it?

Your site appears to have been coded by someone extremely worried that their code will be plagiarized and so made it difficult to view code. First, right click is disabled and your HTML was first translated into unicode character codes and then uses javascript to decode it back into usable HTML.

This first has the effect of rendering your page completely unviewable to anybody with javascript disabled. It also makes any code tweaking difficult.

Just to demonstrate, if you do a view source on your home page, this is how all the code and text is represented:

%3C%53%43%52%49%50%54%20%4C%41%4E%47%55%41%47%45%3 D%22...

But I did translate it back to see the code that renders and there are some oddities.

First, you have this little bit of code:

Essentially, what this does is prevents anybody from printing a page from your site. If they try, all they get is a header and a blank page. Not sure what reason there would be for doing that.

Then there's this:

Whoever did this used MS Front Page, one of the most godawful WYSIWIG HTML generators on god's green earth. If you're using it, I strongly recommend finding one of the many alternatives. However, on its own by default even FrontPage does not do the encoding I'm seeing here.

I'm not immediately seeing why the navigation links wrap in IE but not Firefox, but one thing to note is that a "feature" of IE has always been that it is somewhat forgiving of incorrect code that then breaks when put through a different browser that tries to enforce standards.

Hi Alex

to answer some questions further on, yes, I use FP to do my site (after years of hard coding, I gave it up) and went with a template.


I encrypted my site simply because some clown right clicked my entire site and began selling photo Cds on ebay (this was before I was using low-res images and such), but because of the writing I am doing now, I decided it was easier to just encrypt the whole site and avoid the issue entirely. I know it is not 100%, but it has prevented stuff I consider proprietary from showing up all over the place, as it was doing with my old site.

So, the template I am using was designed for FP, I went with it because it works in similar fashion to all other MS products (and I am a simpleton, if I can work on word, I can work in FP, if you get my drift) not that I am unwilling or unable to use another program. At this point, I don't know that I will willing to make the switch and go through a redesign again. That said, I'm open to suggestions :)

I'd never seen the unicode trick used for an entire site before (but it used to be a good way to hide email addresses from bots) but there are so many tools out there for re-enabling right-click that my recommendation would be that this is probably more trouble than it is worth and also completely blocks non-javascript users (according to our workplace stats, about 3% of surfers do so with javascript turned off). And more importantly, it will block many search engine crawlers since they frequently ignore javascript (Google seems to have you indexed, though).

Is there a reason for disabling printing of your pages by hiding the body in a print stylesheet?

My recommendation would be to re-enable that stuff and watermark your photos and images. This will ease traffic to your site (while your text is indexed at Google, it seems your images are not) and make even theft a form of advertising (and theft will happen anyway if someone really wants to and it doesn't even require going around your code, all the photos are in their cache.


I haven't done it yet but you might want to run your HTML and CSS through the W3C HTML and CSS validators to see if there are any big errors (though it will generally only find syntactical errors these are the cause of a lot of display disparities between IE and Mozilla browsers).

As for other products, if you're willing to pay, Dreamweaver is much superior to FrontPage though still not great. No WYSIWYG editor is great. There are a lot of freeware and shareware editors out there but I'm not really familiar with any of them since it has been so long since I worked somewhere that allows deverlopers to do anything other than hand coding and I am most comfortable doing that as well (I use HomeSite, which is not WYSIWYG).

By the way, another obvious coding problem is that you have your initial javascript declarations before the <head> section of the page. Browsers are generally smart enough to work with that, but it could cause problems (and will throw errors if you run the validators).

I use webcryptpro, I can enable and disable exactly what I am encrypting. So I will do that next time I update. as you suggest below.

A good idea, since all my new images are not up yet, this might be the best and easier route.


A very capital suggestion! :snap: I will investigate this and do this, I'm all for having correct and readable code (of course you should have seen the horrible mess my hand/hard coded site was, UGH)


Not that money is an object and I have no problem paying for software, I'll have to look into it to see what I can come up with that will work for me.

Hmm, I will look at that as well. Not sure if the original template is formatted this way or I stuck soemthing in the wrong place (the second is the more likely scenario)

Thanks for your wise consul and good advice!

Now, back to Firefox!

Hey, that's been happening to me too lately - is there a Firefox setting to fix that or is it LoT?

Gack. This really throws me for a loop. Like I said I've been fighting with the layout of the quotes for a while, but Firefox has always been formatted right for me, it's IE that gets out of whack. Hmmm...

BTW, is it just the quotes that you lose off the right side of the screen, or is it the whole page? Because I've seen that before in FireFox, where I'll have minimized or something and when I come back, all of a sudden everything's extending off the right side of the screen. That seems to be a FireFox bug, and I saw it in the 1.x version. Exiting FireFox and launching again resolves it.

For me it's the mouse-over text boxes - I notice it especially after opening a thread - a residual mouse-over box appears for that thread, spanning across the page.

(Oh, and I still can't get the Today's Posts to work when I'm logged out - the one time I got a listing it was for something that just posted, so I'm thinking whatever should be set to "today" is actually looking at "this minute")

Thank you tech genius of swank

Okay, it should now show you posts from the last 24 hours when you click it.

woohoo!

(That other issue must be a firefox setting, it does it to all the vBulletin sites I visit)

If I am understanding what you're describing, this doesn't happen to me.

Do any of you stumble?

Only when I'm extremely bored. But it does eventually provide something interesting.

Just testing out the spell check on Firefox 2.

Hmm... gonna have to read this entire thread to see how to bypass the fact that Alt-S won't let me submit my post.

Alt-shift-S

Sorry for rehashing an old post, but I was amused that in a post thanking someone about the spell check feature shows that spell checkers aren't perfect (assuming that "than" was supposed to be "thank").

Argh! Now I have to re-learn the keystroke. It's going to be a hard habit to break (in fact, I just hit Alt-S, no shift).

It's gonna be a long life.

Eh, it took me about 2 days.