note to self....

Okay, here's a solution to one that's been bugging me for awhile:

The problem is that Mozilla Firefox 1.x under SuSE 9.2 KDE 3.3 has some weirdness with the text select foreground / background color. The fix for this was found [tweaked] from http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs.

This fix is documented on the mozilla.org website for Mozilla, but this works [seems to] for Mozilla Firefox [curr ver 1.5.0.4], as well.

The tweak was that my X server didn't like the color names that were used in the example from the website - not sure why "green" or "white" are not being mapped by the X RGB color database, but using the [somewhat] standard HTML color hex number format ('#rrggbb', where rr == red, gg == green, bb == blue, and each color is a 2-digit (8-bit) hexadecimal color component value) seems to work fine.

Note that this fix might be possible in the ${ff_user_app_dir}/chrome/userChrome.css file, but I haven't found the CSS definitions of Firefox user interface elements, yet. That should exist, I believe, but it may be wrapped some sort of XUL implementation verbiage.

Anyway - here are the pertinent entries from my newly created ${ff_user_prof_dir}/user.js file [user.js did not exist by default for Firefox - simply create it and add whatever of the available Javascsript UI style commands are desired - the page linked above has more examples]:

// Set select colors for text:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackground", "#00ff00");
user_pref("ui.textSelectForeground", "#000000");
// Select color for typeahead find is slightly different:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention", "blue");
// Not clear when/if widgetSelectBackground ever gets called: let's find out.
user_pref("ui.widgetSelectBackground", "orange");

Notes:

For the shell variables used above -

${ff_user_app_dir} - this is the user's application config and state directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/)

${ff_user_prof_dir} - this is the Firefox user profile directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/${profilename} where ${profilename} is a string randomly generated for the [default] profile when Firefox starts up - usually the first time.

Labels: 1.5, 3.3, 9.2, color, config, firefox, fix, hack, kde, linux, mozilla, rgb, suse, x

Apparently the blogger.com | "Publish Status" | "Publishing in progress..." throbber page is causing memory leakage and ultimately crashage in Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 (Linux) - I caught it when the CPU load was up to 37%, and the available RAM was down to around 20M (these numbers according to Gkrellm) - I killed it (successfully) before it locked up X, but I am becoming more convinced that it is page content like this that is crashing the bitch...

Labels: 1.5, firefox, linux, mozilla

Well, it seems like it's been about a day now, and wurx is still up and running - have not started Mozilla Firefox this session. Posting this under Opera 8.52 -

Went so far before now - okay here it is:

a) Firefox 1.0.7 with various extensions and themes loading was crashing a not-quite-stock install of whatever X server shipped with SuSE 9.2

2) Remove 1.0.7 and install Newest Whizbang 2.5.0.2 or something

[NOTE: Couldn't figure out how to do a system-wide, multi-user install for the newest Firefox - may want to look into that later - running local this time]

3) Only a few extensions plugged in this time.

BANG) it didn't work anyway.

So what do YOU think. This is not life it is a SOAP-OPERA

For the record, just a few moments ago,

$uptime
10:01pm up 10:29, 3 users, load average: 0.05, 0.31, 0.31

Labels: 10.07, 2.5, add-ons, crash, extensions, firefox, linux, mozilla, opera, problem, suse