IMS_Blog

Finally got around to upgrading my Mozilla and Firebird. So now have the much touted Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 4 (cutting edge stuff there). Firefox seems slick as promised (I’m trying to use it more but I think I’m just too much of an original Mozilla geek to give up the UI fest which is the suite), whilst the latest version of the suite offers a couple of enhancements and lots of bug fixes. Particularly interesting in 1.8a4 is the introduction (actually in the previous alpha but I skipped that one) of site specific css selections, which works a little like the @media rule. This sort of functionallity was already provided by the URIid extension and users of Firefox may still like to check that out as the new stuff hasn’t landed on the aviary branch (it plays around with some hefty code so is a bit too risky for that). The new fix is described in bug 238099. Hopefully they’ll put up some better documentation than reading through the comments to that bug, but basically it introduces a new “@ rule” @-moz-document which can then select by a url or domain.

@-moz-document url(http://www.someplace.com/page.html) {css rules}

Applies rules only to the page www.somepage.com/page.html

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.someplace.com/folder/) {css rules}

Applies the rules to addresses beginning with www.someplace.com/folder (so will apply to www.someplace.com/folder/page1.html, www.someplace.com/folder/page2.html, www.someplace.com/folder/folder2/, etc.)

@-moz-document domain(someplace.com) {css rules}

Applies rules to the someplace.com domain

The upgrade went smooth as you like for Firefox, and the update alert has already kicked in for a couple of extensions and to remind me to install the DOM inspector. Pretty slick. The upgrade of the suite was more interesting as I seemed to break my profile so decided to start off with a completly fresh profile. However, it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t live like that but would need things like bookmarks, passwords, etc, so I had to figure out how to get everything across. Mozilla really could do with some sort of profile migration tool. I’m actually quite a fan of Mozilla Backup, but while it will pretty much get one profile to another, there isn’t a way to avoid transferring all the general preferences as well, which isn’t what I want. So it was back to hand hacking. In a future post I’m going to detail how to get things like saved passwords from one profile to the other, if for no other reason than it will be a handy reference if I want to do it again. It seems pretty sorted now though.

Not many extensions additional to the usual bunch but I did note one or two. I’m becoming a fan of the web develepor toolbar (and menu etc). When it first arrived I wasn’t that impressed, thinking that most of the functionality I already had in one way or another, but it is actually quite nice. There’s also clock, which, erm, adds a clock to the menu bar, which can be toggled with a click to show the date. So useful. I don’t think I’ve mentioned keyconfig before either. That really is useful for redefining the keyboard shortcut to a variety of features.

The only problem I have is I can’t remember how to get the Spellchecker working in textareas. I did it with the last install, but I can’t find the instructions or recall how. Spellbound does it for Firefox but hasn’t quite got support for the suite yet (coming soon apparently). I suppose I’ll just have to wait until then, unless things come flooding back to me.