Firefox 3 Add-Ons and Other Stuffs

As a person who uses Firefox on three different computers regularly, synchronizing bookmarks is very essential to me. Earlier I was using Google FF Sync, but it is discontinued with FF3. Fortunately I found Foxmarks. It works great for my need.

Another problem I had was that I can not access some of the private web pages of my research group at UofT from home - the access is denied for external (to UofT) IP addresses. The proper solution is to setup a VPN connection. But, once the VPN is activated, everything goes through the VPN resulting in unnecessary traffic going through UofT. FoxyProxy is a great FF extension to solve this problem. It can filter my http queries so that only a selected queries go through UofT. The only problem is to create an ssh connection to my lab computer and keep it alive all the time. Still, you can safely put the ssh connection in the background using -fN options. The additional benefit of using FoxyProxy is that now I can access premium websites like IEEEExplore and Oxford Online Dictionary from home (UofT has a enterprise subscription to these websites.)

Another excellent extension I am using is FireGestures: it let you perform many menu actions by drawing figures using mouse (like the graffiti handwriting recognition.) If you are a "mouse-man", it is an essential FF extension; but even for a "shortcut-key-man" like me, it helps a lot.

Do you know now you can now make the FF to call gmail compose box whenever you click a "mailto:" link? It is a new feature introduced with FF3. This link has detailed instructions.

Firefox 3 Look & Feel

Yeah, yeah, I too downloaded it on the "Download Day" -- in three computers actually: office Linux, home Linux, and Laptop Windows. :-)

One of the nice features of the new Firefox 3 is that its look & feel is integrated with the native look of the operating systems. It is generally not obvious in Windows, because all the Windows applications have to follow the rule. But it is very obvious in Linux (no idea about Mac platform.)

However, there is a catch using Firefox 3 with KDE desktop environment, because Firefox 3 is incorporated with the GTK widget set, whereas KDE uses the QT widget set. Still I was able to get the KDE look & feel in Firefox 3 in my Kubuntu system using Kubuntu's system settings. Go to the System Settings -> Appearance -> GTK Styles and Fonts and make sure all the GTK components are set to use the KDE settings.

Before I realized that FF3 is using native look & feel, I had this irritating widget set in FF3. Only after I searched through Google for a while, I realized that I can not change anything in FF3, but have to change my KDE look & feel. I was using Domino widget style, which was fine outside FF3 but terrible for gmail. Once I switched to QtCurve widget style (just my preference, nothing particular), everything was good.

FF3's native theme on Linux is boring, and many other themes from Mozilla web site behave oddly. After a few iterations, I am now settled with "Phoenity Reborn" theme; it looks pretty good!

Enabling Java API Documentation Inside Eclipse

If you enable Java API documentation inside Eclipse, you can access relevant part of it, using mouseover or F2 key on any Java native class and method names. For this, you have to first download and install java documentation (if not already installed) and specify its location in the Eclipse properties:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=476280

Clock Speed-Up After Kernel Update

My Kubuntu desktop suddenly got a clock speed-up after I upgraded my Kernel to 2.6.24-19 -- the mouse pointer blinked twice as fast and video and audio started playing with 2x speed by default! I found out that it is probably because I am running a 32bit system on AMD64 dual core. I then found a nice hack on the grub entries to correct the speed-up:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75281
I used the "noapic acpi=off" option and now things are fine.