Articles by ElGuru

Weekly Update 2007-08-20

Here’s an overview of this week’s Update Meeting: Fx 2.0.0.7 – No report TBird 2.0.0.7 – No report TBird 1.5.0.13 – Going thru QA at this time and could be released this week TBird Major Update (TBird 1.5.0.12 > 2.0.0.6) – Released last week TBird 3 – Fx3 – New features released and soon-to-be released Released Items: Plugin management (mwu, carryover from last week) Plugin blocklisting (mwu) New Downloads Manager UI (sdwilsh, carryover from last week, number of bugfixes) New Bookmarking UI with starring and tagging (mano) Soon-To-Be Released Vista Parental controls Post-submit pwmgr prompt (infobar, not modal) Unified history/bookmarks…

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Speed Up OpenOffice Launch

One thing that bothers me about OpenOffice is it seems to take a long time to launch (not as bad Adobe Acrobat). Try these simple tweaks from an article (How to make OpenOffice run faster) I found on the CybertNet Forum. You should see a significant reduction in the start time. A couple notes: These directions were written for the Ubuntu version but work just as well with Win XP and Vista (some default settings may differ in Win32 versions). Most of us on the forum did not bother enabling the pre-loader but still saw a nice increase in the…

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Change Default Text Editor in Fx

By default Firefox uses Notepad its own viewer when viewing the source of a page (CTRL+U or View, Page Source or selecting View Page Source from the Context Menu). You can select which text editor (such as Notepad++) Firefox uses by default with this simple tweak: 1. In a new tab type about:config in the address bar 2. In the filter field type view_source.editor.external 3. Double-click on the entry to set it to true 4. In the filter field type view_source.editor.path 5. Double-click on the entry and in the pop-up box enter the path for your text editor 6. Click…

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Weekly Update 2007-08-13

Here are the details of today’s (very short) Weekly Update meeting: Fx 2.0.0.7 – No Report TBird 2.0.0.7 – Triage on-going no release date yet. TBird Major Update (TBird 1.5.0.13 > 2.0.0.6) – Beta set for 8/13 with Major Update later this week TBird 3 – No Report Fx3 – No Report Gecko 1.9 – More blockers Mozilla Community – Spread Fx2: If we get infrastructure up today or tomorrow, we can have the staging site up for a first review at the end of the week, we hope to release a version for widespread testing on 8/27. Complete meeting…

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Remove Words From Fx Dictionary

The built-in Spellcheck with Firefox 2 is great, but it is very easy to accidentally add a word to the dictionary that you didn’t want to. However, it is not so easy to remove the word or words added in error. Actually it is easy to do just not really documented anywhere. After looking around on Google to help a Go Firefox! forum member with this issue, I found the process: Close Firefox (Firefox saves the dictionary file upon closing) Navigate to your profile folder (Locate your profile folder) Look for the file persdict.dat Open with a text-editor • Notepad…

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Fx 3: Plugins added to Add-Ons UI

The latest nightly builds of Fx 3 have now added Plugins to the add-ons UI (which previously only contained Extensions and Themes). This allows users to enable and disable the installed plug-ins much easier than before. However as Percy points out on his article, there are a couple issue: An option not currently implemented is a way to check for updates for the installed plugins. A periodic check for new, more stable and safer versions and automated updates would be a big step forward security-wise. Then there’s the problem with plugins that involve more than one file. For example, QuickTime…

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HTTP Error Cartoons

Ape Lad has come up with some very creative a graphical represenation of the common HTTP errors.  A couple of my favories: 415 Unsupported Media Type 400 Bad Request 405 Method Not Allowed News Source: New Media & IT 

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