| Firefox Suckage
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Date: 11/8/2004
| If you, like me, thought that installing firefox on Linux in root mode was a good idea then heres a little tip. Don't. Install it in your home directory as yourself. The installer is a peice of crap when it doesn't crash.
And if you get a message along the lines of "Can not initialize security component..." then the permissions on your profile directory are borked up. I used this sort of command to "unbork" them, login as root or sudo, then go to your user's directory and:
cd .mozilla
find -uid 0 -exec chown <user>:<grp> {}\\;
Where 'user' and 'grp' is your username and group.
Basically it sets all the files in your .mozilla directory that are owned by root to be owned by yourself, so that firefox can read/write them.
In unrelated mozilla/firefox news, I tried to install Mozilla as the default browser on the shared Win2k machine at home and she can't stand how slow it is and has found the IE shortcut again. I swear it's not that much slower than IE, but obviously milliseconds count with the non-technical crowd. Can you imagine how dreadful trying to sell Linux/X11 to her would be if she complains about Mozilla vs IE? X11 is an order of magnitude slower than Windows, maybe more... yeah actually definately more. X11 is a good reason why Windows should win the OS war.
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| Comments:
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SnappyCrunch
11/08/2004 8:06am
| Yep. You can't win over the non-geek crowd with a feature set. The only thing that people care about in almost all areas of their life is convenience. People don't care about what's "best", because they don't have to. I don't care if I'm driving the "best" car, or using the "best" headphones. Yet there are people who care passionately about these things. Similarly, most people don't care what kind of OS they're using or what kind of browser they're surfing with as long as it doesn't get in their way.
I personally will never go back to IE, or for that matter, any browser that doesn't feature tabs. But I couldn't convince my father or my girlfriend to use Mozilla, until IE started crashing on them. Because IE was crashing randomly, Mozilla became more convenient. It's tough to convince people that their "good enough" solution isn't good enough.
Oh, and if you really want her to use Firefox, you might want to set the IE homepage to http://www.ecqurity.com/adv/11.html . It causes an instant crash in the latest version of IE in just 11 bytes :-P After a few days of IE crashing when she tries to start it, I imagine she'll switch over to Firefox and never look back. |
Pixador
11/08/2004 12:18pm
| Just tell her how dangerous it is to use IE, with all those exploits flying around. Hummm... I guess she is not using Outlook Express, right? :D
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fret
11/08/2004 1:34pm
| Hehehe, I tried the exploits angle... you know "someone could steal all our bank details and therefor money... or I could lose all my source code / business". But it didn't wash.
No she uses Scribe thank goodness. I managed to fork off a really stable build at one point that she never has issues with. So I dare not change it... don't break what isn't broken I say. I remember before I got to that point comming home one lunch time because it had crashed on a really important email mid compose. And I clicked the "Debug" button on the crash dialog and scanned through the raw memory dump of the address space, found the text of the email in memory and saved it out to a text file. "My hero! My Hero!". I grimiced and scooted back to work. Hehehehe. |
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