Firefox Crashing When Opening a New Window in openSUSE 12.2

11. September, 2012

Does Firefox crash for you when you open a new window?

Report the crash using the built in tool, then browse “about:crashes” (shows you which crashes you reports), click the topmost link.

If frame #0 in “Crashing Thread” (bottom of the page) reads “libtracker-sparql-0.12.so.0.1205.0”, then this package is the culprit: tracker-miner-firefox

Delete it and Firefox should work again. If that helps in your case, you’ve been hit by this bug.

What’s this piece of crap do? From the web site:

Tracker is a semantic data storage for desktop and mobile devices. Tracker uses W3C standards for RDFontologies using Nepomuk withSPARQL to query and update the data.

If you don’t know, Nepomuk is the great technology that builds search indexes over anything on your disk. Unfortunately, it’s developed by people who believe quality in software is nice to have. So it tends to hog the CPU wasting your time, it can fill your harddisk with useless junk, and please, don’t run it on computers with more than 100 MB (that’s 0.1 GB) of disk space or more than 1’000 files; otherwise, it might never finish. If you try to search something, bring some time – useless results take a moment to come up with.

Don’t disable it either, or apps like Dolphin will be unhappy. It’s already beyond the abilities of these people to hide the UI elements for rating and tags when you try to protect yourself.

I opened a bug to have Nepomuk removed from KDE until it reaches alpha status but that bug was closed.

‘Nuf said.


Safe Browsing At Home

13. May, 2011
The logo of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 from t...

Image via Wikipedia

If you’re worried about security while you’re browsing the web (and you probably should), here is a simple solution that might actually work (or at least raises the bar quite a bit): BitBox (German)

In a nutshell, it’s a secured Linux system running Firefox 4 inside of VirtualBox. The browser can only access the resources of the virtual PC.

So to infect your real system, the hacker must: Break Firefox on Linux (which is hard), break Linux (hard), break through the virtual PC layer (not that easy either) to be able to infect your real PC (as opposed to just infect your PC).


When JIRA Hates You

10. May, 2011

Ever had the problem that JIRA would not allow you in? Every time, it would say “wrong user name and/or password”?

Using my crystal ball, I can see that you’re using Firefox.

You’ve been hit by the extra space bug. It’s open since October 2009.

I’ve opened an issue against JIRA: JSP-79797Password mail contains space after password

Let’s see who moves faster.


Missing Icons in Buttons (Firefox, Ubuntu Natty)

5. May, 2011

If your firefox has forgotten about all the nice icons for button in the UI (i.e. if there is a back button but it has no label or icon and all the “close tab” buttons are just tiny little invisible buttons), this bug is for you: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/641056

If you start Firefox from the console, you’ll see errors like this one:

(firefox-bin:30535): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading icon: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64


Flash in Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 10.10

17. March, 2011

Trouble getting Flash to work on Ubuntu 10.10? Use Flash-Aid.


Firefox performance

24. November, 2010
Mozilla Firefox Icon

Image via Wikipedia

It’s 2010, Firefox is going 4.0 soon and it still has no way to tell why it’s sluggish.

Yes, it would be nice if the FF developers could make the browser so fast that it would never become sluggish in the first place. I just fear that this is simply not possible with the current design. Look at Chrome: Every tab runs in it’s own process. So what if one of them is slow? All the other still feel crisp.

On FF, if one tab takes over the machine, you’re doomed. Yes, I could disable JavaScript and every add-on individually. Why bother? Starting Chrome solves the issue in no time.

If you care, support Bug 505104: Please add a tool to gauge Addon performance.


No Adblock Plus button in toolbar

23. November, 2010

With the update to Firefox 4.0, the Adblock Plus button (ABP) vanished:

ABP Button missing

Where did it go?


Firefox 3.0.1 and GMail: Gray Background???

29. September, 2008

Am I the only one who gets a gray background on many websites after the update to Firefox 3.0.1?

Update: Apparently so. If not, browse to about:config and search for “browser.display.background_color”. In my version of FF, that was set to #C0C0C0 for some reason (when it should have been #FFFFFF).


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