Firefox is probably one of the most versatile browsers out there. I am going to talk about configuring the 64 bit firefox on this page.
Once again, the good news is that Firefox 1.5 is built as a 64-bit application. So, that is one headache you need not worry about. However, what about plugins? Well, this is where you have bad news.
Two of the most prominent plugins used by people are flash and java. Firstly, flash is not available as a 64-bit plugin and so you cannot use any site with flash on it. However, there is some help in this direction. One enterprising french programmer by the name of Gwenolé Beauchesne (see resources) has built a viewer and plugin that allows you to use the 32-bit flash in your browser! This is great news for us if we want to view any flash based page. However, there are caveats. Currently, if you leave your browser on all the time, very soon your processor will be operating at 100% capacity. This will not slow you down however. But your fan might go crazy. The browser does eventually crash. Also, the viewer segfaults constantly. But it is usable with this caveat. I have sent emails to the author but have not heard anything back.
So, if you see the following in your logfile, don't panic. Simply restart your browser.
kernel: npviewer.bin[20329]: segfault at 0000000000000000 rip 00000000f78bb69f rsp 00000000f70c9b60 error 4
You will sometimes have to manually kill remnants of Firefox from memory. This is an easy task if you have loaded the system-monitor applet which can be installed in the upper right hand corner of the desktop. If you have done so, simply click on it to bring up all the tasks and then select npviewer (if it is still in memory) and Firefox and kill them. You can select multiple tasks using you guessed it the control key and then selecting with your mouse. Otherwise, simply grep for them on the command line and use the
kill -9 pid
command. This will do the same job. Really, it is much easier to load the system-monitor applet.
One of the features of Firefox that I dislike is the bold tabs which can be quite ugly. Also, you cannot easily distinguish the tab background. To amend these "features", I use the following CSS (which you can save in a file called userChrome.css in the firefox chrome directory. It should be in ~/random.dir.name/chrome. Add the following to the above file.
/* Change color of active tab */
tab{
-moz-appearance: none !important;
}
tab[selected="true"] {
background-color: rgb(222,218,210) !important;
color: black !important;
font-weight: normal !important; /* change the bold to normal */
}
/* Change color of normal tabs */
tab:not([selected="true"]) {
background-color: rgb(200,196,188) !important;
color: gray !important;
}
That is it. This should fix the tabs and the tab text. You can customize Firefox to your heart's content in this file. This and other tips are available at Mozilla (see resources).
One additional customization that I did was the highly annoying Firefox "feature" is to go back a page if you use the bottom scroll of your touchpad. To eliminate this "feature", type about:config in the url bar and change the following options
"mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action" 0
"mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines" true