Firefox
computing: software: web browsers: Firefox
Overview
Firefox is a free, open-source web browser.
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Reference
- official home page
- Wikipedia
- Firefox category at MozillaZine KnowledgeBase wiki
Shortcomings
- (v1.5.0.8 and 2.0) The History view shows only site titles, which makes it very difficult to find a previously-visited page when you can only remember the domain name. The History view should both allow viewing by domain/URL and searching by URL.
Notes
when things get munged
From Tene's comments after he solved a problem we were having where Firefox was displaying all fonts (in menus as well as web pages) as blanks or underlines:
| The problem was FireFox using Pango and there being an issue with the version of pango and FF, or something like that ... I think it's a remnant of the weird stuff atrpms did ... like, they just shut down, because new FC had all that stuff in it ... so they left a lot of stuff with unresolved deps, etc. ... so I edited /usr/bin/firefox (which is a wrapper that sets env vars and calls firefox-bin in some lib directory) and uncommented the DISABLE_PANGO lines |
When a session gets munged, you can fix it by backing up the user profile data and deleting all the profiles (perhaps uninstalling/reinstalling Firefox if needed), then restoring selected bits of session data as needed:
- bookmarks.html contains all the user bookmarks
- session.rdf contains TabMixPlus session data
The Hypertwins highly recommend using a session saver, especially if you use the browser for a lot of online editing (wikis, blogs, etc.) TabMixPlus and SessionSaver .2 both seem to work well.
optimization
This site recommends making the following changes in about:config:
| setting | change to |
|---|---|
| network.dns.disableIPv6. | true |
| network.http.pipelining. | true |
| network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. | 8 |
| network.http.proxy.pipelining. | true |
Firefox DNS cache?
I'm running into a situation where some Firefox is completely unable to load web pages on certain domains which Firefox recently loaded when the network was having issues. In general, it displays a page with the message "DNS error: URL". All other methods of resolving domain names (nslookup, net lookup, ping, etc.) work correctly for the domains in question. One of the domains in question started working after awhile, with no change being made that I am aware of... leading to the question: does Firefox have some sort of internal DNS cache? Going on this theory I've cleared out every cache I could find in Firefox, and even closed/reopened it, but this had no apparent effect. Update: Actually, it can't be Firefox-specific, because Konqueror is having the same problem. So I'll keep this posted here for now, until more info comes along that suggests a better place to put it. --Woozle 10:45, 21 December 2006 (EST)