• Tutorial: Remove/Delete Keys in Firefox about:config

    The other day I was doing some routine maintenance on my system and while navigating inside my Firefox configuration (yes, the about:config command that you put in the URL field) I’ve found quite a few old keys related to addins that I’ve removed quite long ago.

     In order to remove them I’ve seen that there are two simple ways:
     
    The first method is good if you have to remove a small number of entries: right click with the mouse on the entry you want to delete and select Reset. Now you will notice that after restarting Firefox, that entry value will be reset to its default value if it’s one of the Firefox internal ones, otherwise it will be deleted.

    The second method is good if you have to remove a big number of entries:

    1. Close Firefox
    2. Open the file “prefs.js” that is located under your Firefox profile at ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxxx.default/ (where the x’s stand for a randomly generated code that will change for each profile) using your favourite editor.
    4. Delete all the entries you want
    5. Save the file and restart Firefox

  • Tutorial: recover lost saved session in Firefox

    Have you noticed that sometimes the saved sessions in Firefox are lost after a crash, leaving you with a clean, default homepage when launching it?

    However if this happens to you, you’re not alone! There is a quite simple way to recover it.

    The Saved Sessions are saved in a file called sessionstore.js under your ~/.mozilla/firefox/yourprofilename.default-backup-crqashrecovery-date

    Your profile name has a series of letters and it finishes in “.default”. For example: mcwubzdq.default

    Now if you list the files in ~/.mozilla/firefox you will see various of these files, ending with a date and time (for example: mcwubzdq.default-backup-crashrecovery-20140217_075716). The trick here is to save an old sessionstore.js file and overwriting the empty one in your profile.

    So first of all close Firefox and go to your profile directory and rename sessionstore.js:

    cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/profilename.default

    mv sessionstore.js sessionstore.js.old

    and now let’s assume that you want to use the session from the 17th of February 2014:

    cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/profilename.default.default-backup-crashrecovery-20140217_075716/sessionstore.js .

    That’s it! Now you can launch Firefox and enjoy your saved session tabs!

  • Which is the perfect web browser for your HTML5 implementation

    Are you on the way to implement new websites or web applications and you want to see if Internet Explorer 9 will behave better than Firefox 6?

    Up in the sky

    The most obvious performance/support test would be to use the HTML5 application and see how well reacts within different browsers but… What if you don’t have the application ready for testing yet?

    Bear in mind that the HTML5 standard definitions are not completely standardized yet.

    I’ve found a very good Microsoft website that has put different HTML5 support and benchmarks tests in one place. The site has been designed to see the level of support and speed of Internet Explorer 10 against older IE or other browser.

    The page can be used to see which of your browsers with your addins/plugins behave better with different HTML5 pages.

    https://stefanoprenna.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/menu1.jpg

    Every test on the page is explained so you can even ask to the HTML5 developers inside your company which specific features they are implementing and see if you can test that in the Microsoft Testdrive page.

    I did a few tests myself and saw how differently behave different browsers with very different speed and visibility results for each.

    Now is your turn to surf into this interesting site and see which will be your favourite browser! Which is the winner for you and your company?

    HTML5 Menu 2