Mozilla Firefox Windows 7 64 Bit
Mina Delahoussaye
For some reasons, maybe an issue related to memory or crashes,
my firefox windows position on the windows deskbar changes,
unpurposely. I actually need a way either through greasemonkey, stylish
or an addon to make firefox detect where i put my windows
on the taskbar manually.
Frustrated by Internet Explorer, fed up with its security scares, or looking for a more streamlined and safer browsing experience? Why not try the freeware Firefox browser from Mozilla. (Notice the multiple tabbed windows, and the dedicated SOS Search function built into the menu bar).
Firefox (www.mozilla.org/products/firefox) runs under Windows 98 through to Windows XP (as well as on Mac OS X and several versions of Linux), and compared with Microsoft's IE (Internet Explorer) I find it faster, safer, and easier to use. In fact, I wish I'd swapped over a long time ago, since it's revolutionised my web browsing experience in various ways.
The most obvious is Firefox's tabbed browsing: as well as the usual 'Open Link In New Window' option, you can instead 'Open Link In New Tab', which lets you open as many tabbed pages as you like within one Firefox window. This is not only more convenient in many cases, but also uses less system resources than opening the same number of individual windows. It's great for SOS forum browsing, because I can open new windows for the PC Music, Music Recording Technology and Studio Design & Acoustics conferences, and then open dozens of tabs in each window to keep each batch neatly together while I read through them. You can even specify a group of tabs as your home page.
To make the transition from IE easier, you can import your existing bookmark collection during Firefox installation, while most of its default settings are sensible ones for the new user, so you won't have to spend ages configuring it. The Password Manager also lets you save login information for specific sites, to save ever having to type it in again.
Intriguingly, Microsoft are also selling lots of copies of their new Windows XP Starter Edition software, a stripped-down version being offered in Thailand as an alternative to Linux at about a sixth of the price of Windows XP Home. Details aren't clear on just what has been removed, but if it's ever available worldwide it might be of interest to musicians who simply aren't interested in bells and whistles.
Because Firefox is an Open Source application, there are also thousands of coders looking for security flaws and fixing them quickly. There's apparently even a $500 bounty offered to anyone who successfully spots a bug, which augurs well for any future security issues.
MIDI Fish also provides key-mapping functions that anyone with a drum synth will appreciate. Each individual note you play can be persuaded to output any other note value, so you could create a set of drum maps that allows you to always play the same type of sound (kick, snare, hi-hat and so on) from the same set of keys on your keyboard. Those with two keyboards connected to MIDI Fish input ports one and two can set this up very easily: press a note on the first keyboard, then press the desired output-translation note on the second keyboard.
It's also possible to use the key-mapping functions to route specific notes to up to four different MIDI output ports, so you could connect up to four different drum synths and play different sounds from each of them, depending on which keys you hit, or on the velocity of your hit (with optional crossfading between the sounds), or on the current value of any controller. This is a versatile utility for the MIDI performer, with features that would be very difficult to duplicate elsewhere, and is very cleverly written. You can download MIDI Fish from www.talula.demon.co.uk/midifish/index.html.
I've also added a very relevant option to the customisable search bar. SOS Forum user Supermasita has created a Firefox search plug-in that performs a quick search for topics on the SOS web site. You can install this from here.
Firefox already includes a good Download Manager that oversees the downloading of multiple files, and it has a handy pause function, if you want to temporarily suspend downloading to speed up the loading of web pages. However, I also downloaded the 153KB Flashgot extension that allows Firefox to use most of the external (third-party) download managers, so I could use the excellent Leechget (www.leechget.net), which is free for private use and lets you queue up to eight simultaneous downloads and accelerate them by splitting each file into several segments and downloading them simultaneously on different 'channels'.
You can even download an extension that lets you 'View Page In Internet Explorer ' instead, if you come across any IE-only pages. However, so far I've only ever had to do this once. If you do run into any compatibility problems, Mozilla's web site has an excellent knowledge base, but far more important to me is the fact that Firefox has provided a faster and more elegant browsing experience and hasn't yet crashed on me once, which is more than I can say for IE! At least 23 million people have already downloaded Firefox, and I recommend it to any musician who wants more streamlined and safer Internet browsing.
Ironically, on the very day I was due to send this column to SOS, news also arrived that the first beta version of Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7 had been made available to developers. It will run on Windows XP SP2 and (surprise, surprise!), the most obvious features are better security, a search box on the menu bar and tabbed browsing. Does that sound familiar? I bet it won't be a 4.6MB download though!
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Firefox is well known for its large library of add-ons which can be used to add new features or modify the behavior of existing features. Firefox's "Add-ons Manager" is used to manage installed add-ons or find new ones.
Once set, these affect the user's current profile, and may be synchronized across all devices via Firefox Sync. Please note that only a subset of the about:config entries are synchronized by this method, and the exact subset may be found by searching for services.sync.prefs in about:config. Additional preferences and third party preferences may be synchronized by creating new boolean entries prepending the value with services.sync.prefs.sync. To synchronize the whitelist for the extension NoScript:
Firefox also allows configuration for a profile via a user.js file: user.js kept also in the profile folder. A user.js configuration supersedes a prefs.js. The user.js configuration is only parsed at start-up of a profile. Hence, you can test changes via about:config and modify user.js at runtime accordingly. For a useful starting point, see e.g custom user.js which is targeted at privacy/security conscious users.
One drawback of the above approach is that it is not applied system-wide. Furthermore, this is not useful as a "pre-configuration", since the profile directory is created after first launch of the browser. You can, however, let firefox create a new profile and, after closing it again, copy the contents of an already created profile folder into it.
Sometimes, it may be desired to lock certain settings, a feature useful in widespread deployments of customized Firefox. In order to create a system-wide configuration, follow the steps outlined in Customizing Firefox Using AutoConfig:
Firefox uses PulseAudio for audio playback and capture. If PulseAudio is not installed, Firefox uses ALSA instead. Note that by default, Firefox blocks all media with sound from playing automatically [4].
Widevine is a digital rights management tool that Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and others use to protect their video content. It can be enabled in Settings > General > Digital Rights Management (DRM) Content. If you visit a Widevine-enabled page when this setting is disabled, Firefox will display a prompt below the address bar asking for permission to install DRM. Approve this and then wait for the "Downloading" bar to disappear; now, you are able to watch videos from Widevine protected sites.
VA-API usage can be verified by checking Firefox's VA-API logs. Run Firefox with the MOZ_LOG="FFmpegVideo:5" environment variable and check in the log output that VA-API is enabled and used (search for the "VA-API" string) when playing a video for example. Pay attention to these logs as they might indicate that only one of the two possible compositors described before (WebRender or OpenGL) works with VA-API on your particular setup.
To enable spell checking for a specific language, right click on any text field and check the Check Spelling box. To select a language for spell checking, you have to right click again and select your language from the Languages sub-menu.
Starting with version 64, Firefox can optionally use XDG Desktop Portals to handle various desktop features, such as opening a file picker, or handling MIME types. Using Desktop Portals allows you to, for example, customize which program is invoked to display a dialog when you select files to upload on a webpage or when picking a download location using Save as.... See XDG Desktop Portal#List of backends and interfaces for a list of available backend options.
TTS must be setup for the Listen icon to appear in the Reader view. Firefox uses Speech dispatcher which requires a speech synthesis engine. The currently recommended speech synthesis engine is Festival.
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