The cloud: Firefox bookmarks sync

Using Firefox at home, at work, and having several computers that I use, syncing all the bookmarks started to get to be a large problem…

So after upgrading to version 3.5 of Firefox, Mozilla Weave Is a good solution, mainly because of two things:

- You can synchronize all your data across computers, including passwords

- You can deploy and use your own Weave server, which solves the lingering question about the privacy of my data: http://phaseshiftllc.com/archives/2009/10/09/setting-up-a-custom-weave-0-5-server

Anyway, after a few days of use, synchronization is not always without any problems. It works, but some times, I get duplicated folders, and bookmarks that I have to delete by hand… Not good. I’ll try to use it a bit more, to see if this is due to the number of computers and bookmarks that I have. One neat solution for finding duplicated bookmarks is the bookmarkDD plugin at http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/

If these issues keep going I’ll have to try Google Toolbar…

Kubuntu and Firefox looks: It looks bad

As I’m fully installing my new computer from scratch with Kubuntu 8.10 64bit, some things aren’t quite right.

One of the most annoying is that Firefox on Kunbuntu doesn’t look very good…

The radio buttons for example look belong to a different complete theme than Firefox. Not good.

The solution?

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-qtcurve gtk-chtheme

Then goto System Settings, select Apearance and then GTK Styles and Fonts. On GTK styles choose to use another style. On the dropdown box you should have now QT4, QTCurve and Raleigh.

Choose QTCurve.

Restart Firefox, and pronto/listo/voilá!

[K]Ubuntu and Netbeans 6.1 with Firefox 3.0

One annoying things that took some time to solve was that on the Start page of Netbeans there are URL’s to several articles, blog posts and so one, but every time I’ve pressed one of the it say’s that it could not execute Firefox.

I’ve checked the path, permissions, and so on but with no solution.

Well the issue is quite simple:

Goto Netbeans Tools menu and select the last option Options. It should start on the general tab where you select the browser you which to use.

Select Edit and on the arguments for Firefox remove whats there: -remote “openURL({URL})” and just keep the {URL} nothing else.

Save, close and it should work.

Now back to work…

FireFox 3.0 is here!

Get it here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

So far only the Switchproxy addon didn’t work, but a solution is here

And also it seems that the Portuguese dictionary is not (yet) compatible.

Firefox context menu editor

Sometimes the way Firefox menus are organized is not quite like we want. For example I’ve liked that the first option on the right click over an URL is Open New tab and not Open in new Window.

So Firefox Menu Editor:  http://menueditor.mozdev.org/index.html   can change and organize the way every menu looks like. Take a look…

Kubuntu and Firefox download manager

One of the problems that I had with FireFox (2.0.0.8) on Kubuntu was that on the download manager window, neither “Open” or “Open Container folder” worked. I clicked and clicked and nothing happened. A lot of people complains about this issue on the Firefox bug tracker database, where it seems that this issue only happens with 32bit version on Firefox. Bummer for my computer to be 6 years old… (And it runs Linux!)

As usual Google helped me to find a solution, but with one caveat: The icons on the left side of the bookmarks are lost or changed to the same icon (In this case Konqueror).

What I did was:

1) On the address toolbar write the following: about:config

2) Right click on the page and choose new->string

3) Write the following value: network.protocol-handler.app.file

4) After pressing Ok, double click on the new entry and write: /usr/bin/konqueror

Now try it. It should work now.