Archive for category Firefox

Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?

One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on Mac OS X is the way it spawns a second dock icon for itself after it applies any sort of update to itself (including plugin updates).

Here's a screenshot of the offender in action (I removed some icons from the middle of the dock to make it easier to see:

dock problem Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?

For those of you who might assume I am a moron, no, I don't have two copies of Firefox, and no, I am not running one copy of Firefox from a DMG or anything like that.

Nobody on the web seems to have found a solution for it yet — as far as I can tell from Googling. There are several bugs on Mozilla's Bugzilla system related to it, and the main one seems to be bug 432520, which is unfortunately not yet assigned to a developer for resolution.

One of the big problems has been that nobody's been able to define a clear set of steps to reproduce the problem. I believe the second dock icon appears after Firefox auto-updates an extension at startup time, and then silently restarts itself to allow the extension update to take effect. However, it's difficult to test because the hypothesis requires an updated extension to be available — which only happens every now-and-again.

Anyone else got ideas?

Firefox: how to disable the backspace keyboard shortcut

Ack, don't you hate that? You're working on the best blog post you've ever done in your life, then you hit the backspace key to correct a typo, and because you accidentally clicked outside of the text editor before hitting backspace, Firefox thinks you are a retarded Internet Explorer user trying to go back, and sends you to the previous page.

Fortunately, in modern browsers you can usually click 'forward' again and your text will still be in the editing box, but it's not guaranteed. If you want to disable this horrendous overhang from the days when Microsoft decided to reinvent what the backspace key was for, the fix is fortunately very simple.

1. In the Firefox address bar, type about:config
2. In the search box that appears, type browser.backspace_action
3. On the right, double click "0" in the value column and change it to "2" in the dialogue box that comes up.

Voila — you can close that page and the setting is in effect. No more estupido accidental go-backs for you any more.

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