darkness

Mozilla randomly stopped working for me tonight. I went to a web page and it locked up. I figured it was the lock up I get when I visit a Java page and Mozilla has to load the Java plug-in. After five minutes I decided something worse had happened. killall mozilla-bin then restart. Go to, say, Penny Arcade. Lock up, no page display, spinner is dead. Repeat several times. Play with profiles. Disable Privoxy proxy settings. No luck.

So I crammed Firefox on top of my disgusting installation which was once known as “FC2,” before I let some third party repositories run amok by accident. I installed the Firefox 1.0 RPM from FC3 updates with little other problems: compat-libstdc++, gcc, and a few other usual suspects. I was surprised.

Firefox seems to be working well. I anticipate having the same focus problems I had with Mozilla, but I haven’t confirmed them yet. (Of course, I’ve only been running with Firefox for about 10 minutes.)

Some extensions I like in Firefox:

• Session Saver 2 automatically saves all the tabs you have open upon crashing. I find this magical, but it has worked for me - and saved me time - in Windows. I hope to see the same effects in Linux. (Note that I don’t think the site this extension is distributed from sends the right MIME type for XPI files. I had to save to disk then run firefox whatever.xpi to get Firefox to prompt me to install it.)
• Tab Mix is some conglomeration of other tab-related extensions. I have found it to work well and offer many useful features. Among them: a close button when you mouse over a tab, dragging tabs to rearrange them, stacked tab bar when you’ve got a bunch of tabs open, progress bar on the tab, and best of all: force new windows to open in tabs (which I’ve grown very attached to in Konqueror).
• Adblock, which I’ve been using instead of Privoxy on Windows, and hope to continue that trend now on Linux. I use Filterset.G.