Linux Commands Examples

A great documentation place for Linux commands

firefox

a free and open source web browser from Mozilla

Synopsis

firefox [OPTIONS] [url]


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examples

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Limit CPU usage for flash in Firefox?

I install NoScript on every system with Firefox, which blocks Flash along with Java and Javascript until I allow it from particular sites. This cuts down on sites loading flash widgets for something ridiculous like their site banner, or advertisements that are sneaky and hiding.

It also has the added benefit of security. Yes, its a pain to whitelist sites you trust, and you really must be careful of what you're going to allow; whitelisting everything defeats the purpose of the plugin. Security and convenience are mutually exclusive, anyway.

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function firefox {
apt-get install -y firefox
}
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How to install the real Firefox on Debian?

First, you need to remove the existing Iceweasel package (I think you can use aptitude as well):

apt-get remove iceweasel

Then, download the latest Linux build of Firefox directly from Mozilla. Extract the files, and navigate to that folder, and run it. If you want, make an icon on your desktop. You can also make a link to the binary in /usr/bin/firefox to make it easier to launch.

If you want a package-based one, you can use Linux Mint's Debian package repo. To do this, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com debian import

And add the GPG key for that repo. Then, just run:

apt-get update
apt-get install firefox

And you should be good to go!

The default install is German, to install in any other language, you can manually run:

apt-get install firefox-l10n-en-us

Or use firefox-l10n-en-gb for British English.

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Make Firefox use the favicon as window icon under Linux

One option is using Mozilla Prism firefox extension which allows you to run a webpage in its own dedicated window. It will use the favicon for the browser window icon.

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How can I register a custom protocol with xdg?

At least in Fedora 13 and various Debian-based distros xdg-open opens all URLs that don't have a file:// scheme in a browser if it doesn't run in a supported desktop environment. The way it tries to detect which browser to use depends on the distribution.

As xdg-open is just a shell script you can easily adapt it to your needs.

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Abort drag-and-drop from a busy program

In most operating systems or window systems you can abort a mouse drag handler by pressing the Escape button. And sometimes you can cancel the even by finding or using a "drag cancel" target like Mac os's top menu. For example in most Windows you will notice cursor changes to circle with line through it, like a classic No Smoking sign or No Diving type of sign in the real world ;)

In the case of OP, they are using GNOME / Firefox:

In Gnome, in most cases hitting escape key before letting go of mouse button will (should) cancel the drag/drop event. It is even part of their dev guidelines:

http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.2/input-mouse.html.en#drag-drop-override

Allow all mouse operations to be cancelled before their completion. Pressing the Esc key should cancel any mouse operation in progress, such as dragging and dropping a file in a file manager, or drawing a shape in a drawing application.

and..

Allow the user to cancel a drag and drop operation by all of these methods:

  • pressing Esc before releasing the mouse button dropping the object
  • back on its original location performing a query drag and selecting
  • Cancel on the pop-up menu (see Section 10.1.3.1.2 ? Query Drag)
  • dropping the object on an invalid drop target.

I am sure it is the same in KDE from doing a few searches

On Mozilla dev's Drop Event

drop The drop event is fired on the element where the drop was occured at the end of the drag operation. A listener would be responsible for retrieving the data being dragged and inserting it at the drop location. This event will only fire if a drop is desired. It will not fire if the user cancelled the drag operation, for example by pressing the Escape key, or if the mouse button was released while the mouse was not over a valid drop target. For information about this, see Performing a Drop.

I never said this would work all the time in EVERY setup, for example I don't think this works on Ubuntu which is kind of lame. I remember the drag event abort working with the Escape key since in wondows since version 3.1.

In all MS Windows operating systems in almost all (properly coded) applications: - hitting the escape key before releasing the mouse button during a drag/drop mouse event will cancel/abort the handler function.

For example in Google Chrome on Windows7: - drag a tab off the toolbar as if you are going to detach it and before letting go, hit your keyboard Escape key. It should abort the drag and return your tab.

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How to set default "Page Setup ?Page Size" as A4 in Firefox?

  1. In the address bar, type "about:config".
  2. Enter "print.postscript.paper_size" in the filter box and press Enter.
  3. Double-click the entry named "print.postscript.paper_size".
  4. Enter "paper" in the dialog box and press OK.
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How do I recover a form in Firefox *without* installing a plugin?

Do not restart your browser!

This solution is hit or miss, and works on Linux. In short: dump the memory of the Firefox process, and search through it for fragments of your text. It's ugly, but it's your last resort.

First, dump core using the gcore utility, which requires gdb (the GNU debugger) to be installed:

$ ps -e | grep firefox
 7089 ?        00:02:23 firefox
$ gcore 7089
[New Thread 0xa8ffeb70 (LWP 8924)]
[New Thread 0xb25feb70 (LWP 8531)]
[New Thread 0x9d7feb70 (LWP 8527)]
... snip ...
[New Thread 0xb5ffeb70 (LWP 7099)]
[New Thread 0xb67ffb70 (LWP 7098)]
[New Thread 0xb72f8b70 (LWP 7097)]
Saved corefile core.7089

Note that a core dump may take several hundred megabytes of disk space.

If it succeeded, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. If your text was lingering in memory by chance, it has been captured in the core dump.

Now, try to remember a phrase from your essay (for example, "a profound effect"), and use grep to see if it's present in the document:

$ grep 'a profound effect' core.7089 
Binary file core.7089 matches

If you get "Binary file ... matches", good, it's there! If not, try more phrases. If all of your grep attempts produce empty output, then your essay is probably gone forever, and there is nothing you can do about it. (You can try grep -R 'a profound effect' ~/.mozilla, but I doubt it will work)

Assuming you do get a match, the next task will be to slice out pieces of the core dump containing the text you're looking for, and use less to look at it visually:

$ grep -B 20 -A 20 -a 'a profound effect' core.7089 > /tmp/out
$ less /tmp/out

(You could omit the first line and just say less core.7089, but I've found that less tends to blow up in memory usage when searching through such a large binary file.)

Now, type /a profound effect, hit enter, wait, and page down until you see something recognizable:

alt text

Bam! If you don't like this result, see if there are any others by typing 'n'. Also, be sure to proofread the garbage so you don't end up posting:

my mind will often generate mush express ideas in that language.

I imagine it gets clobbered like this because the memory holding your essay fragments is no longer allocated and gets trampled by subsequent allocations.

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How to set Default Browser on Ubuntu from command line?

From the terminal, use

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

This will provide a list of installed browsers, similar to the following (which is mine):

There are two alternatives which provide `x-www-browser'.
Selection    Path                         Priority    Status
-------------------------------------------------------------
* 1          /usr/bin/chromium-browser    40          auto mode
  2          /usr/bin/firefox             40          manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

Just hit the selection number for the browser you want.

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Why is Firefox 3.0 so slow in Linux?

One of the cited reasons is that Linux version of Firefox is not built using PGO. PGO stands for Profile Guided Optimization. Windows version of Firefox is built on Visual C++ with PGO

IIRC Even Mozilla does not provide PGO compiled binaries for Linux. They have given a HOWTO for building Firefox with PGO, but how many of us can really do that?

If you want to get PGO compiled binaries, check Ted's PGO builds

OTOH Benchmarks show that even Windows Firefox over wine beats native Linux Firefox. If you are really unhappy, then use Chrome. Trust me, it is blazing fast.


There is a risk with PGO, since if the data provided is not proper, the performance of the final build is even worse than what it would be without PGO. Quoting from Wikipedia

The caveat, however, is that the sample of data fed to the program during the profiling stage must be statistically representative of the typical usage scenarios; otherwise, profile-guided feedback has the potential of harming the overall performance of the final build instead of improving it.

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Is it possible to find the CPU hogging tab in Firefox?

Heavy CPU usage when you're idle is usually the sign of a misbehaving website (as opposed to user actions taking a long time, which often points to a misbehaving extension). It could be a plugin, or it could be Javascript.

Identifying troublesome sites can be hard. Visually, look for something that moves — most CPU hoggers are there to animate something (automatically scrolling text, rotating ads, movies, ...). (Animated gifs don't use much CPU.)

If you're lucky, the CPU hogger also makes network accesses. These are a lot easier to pin down to a site. Run tcpdump, wireshark, or whatever your favorite network traffic observer is. Web traffic is TCP and usually to remote port 80. This might point to a site you're visiting, or it might point to a site that embeds into a site you're visiting, typically an ad.

Ads and flash are common culprits, so Flashblock and Adblock can save you CPU time.

Chrome runs one process per tab, so there finding a CPU hogger is trivial. It's also faster than Firefox (but even more of a memory hog if you have many tabs open). You might want to give it a try, though it definitely has fewer bells and whistles, so it's not for everybody.

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How to secure Firefox traffic (+DNS) through SOCKS proxy under Ubuntu 10.04?

You can verify that all your traffic is going through the SSH proxy by viewing the packets coming from your computer. This can be done by putting your NIC or wireless card into Permiscuous Mode and using a program like TCPDump or Wireshark(I recommend wireshark).

Using these programs you can see the network traffic and filter for a specific protocol of packets such as DNS. If you filter for DNS while the proxy is on and receive any packets (labeled as DNS) then at least some DNS requests aren't going through the proxy. The reason for this is because if they are going through SSH the only traffic you will see will be SSH.

There's a few things you need to watch out for, some plugins such may access the internet without using the proxy setting and can leak information. Firefox has a host of great addons which help make sure that everything goes through the proxy, check those out.

Good luck!

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Firefox, two Linux machines, one X-server

Ok...don't know if this will work, but it's the first thing I'd try:

How about if you create a second script on each machine, which doesn't try to create the new tab, just a new instance. If you don't have FF currently running on that machine, you use this new script, but if it's already running, you use the old script that creates the new tab.

If this works, you might be able to do some regex parsing of ps output in a single script to see if FF is already running on the machine, and either use the -new-tab switch or -no-remote, depending on what it finds; but you probably want to wait until this method is tested, as it's a fair amount of coding for something that might not work....

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How to install the real Firefox on Debian?

First, you need to remove the existing Iceweasel package (I think you can use aptitude as well):

apt-get remove iceweasel

Then, download the latest Linux build of Firefox directly from Mozilla. Extract the files, and navigate to that folder, and run it. If you want, make an icon on your desktop. You can also make a link to the binary in /usr/bin/firefox to make it easier to launch.

If you want a package-based one, you can use Linux Mint's Debian package repo. To do this, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com debian import

And add the GPG key for that repo. Then, just run:

apt-get update
apt-get install firefox

And you should be good to go!

The default install is German, to install in any other language, you can manually run:

apt-get install firefox-l10n-en-us

Or use firefox-l10n-en-gb for British English.

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Launching firefox on remote server causes local firefox to open the page instead

The -X switch forwards remote X clients to your local X server. Firefox must use some internal X Window system communication mechanism to detect that it's already running on your display and tell the already-running instance to open a new window.

description

See http://support.mozilla.com/ for help using the browser. This manpage only describes how to run it.

options

-h, --help

Prints the command line options.

-g, --debug

Starts firefox in a debugger.

-d, --debugger

Specify the debugger in which to start firefox. The default is gdb. Used in conjunction with -g.

-a, --debugger-args

Specify arguments to pass to the debugger. Used in conjunction with -g.

-no-remote

Don’t connect to any other running instances of firefox. Use this if you want to run firefox in an entirely new process. By default, firefox will delegate a command to an already running instance.

-ProfileManager

Start the profilemanager. Use this to choose the profile you would like to run firefox with. You will need to also use -no-remote if there is already a running firefox instance.

-P profile

Start firefox with the profile named profile. Will start the profile manager if a valid profile name is not specified. You will need to also use -no-remote if there is already a running firefox instance.

-safe-mode

Start firefox in safe-mode. This disables all third-party extensions, and may be necessary if you are having problems with an extension you installed.

-new-tab url

Open url in a new tab.

-new-window url

Open url in a new window.

-v, -version

Print the current version of firefox.

-UILocale locale

Start firefox with the specified locale locale. Use this to override your environment

-preferences

Open the preferences dialog.

-private

Start firefox in private browsing mode

-private-toggle

Toggle private browsing mode

-setDefaultBrowser

Set firefox as the default web browser

-search term

Search for term with your default search engine

-jsconsole

Open the Error console. If firefox is not already running, this will open a new browser window too

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