As a start to the new year online, I decided to try the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and see if the “awesome bar” piece of crap “improvement” on a functional address bar would be faster. So far so good. When I begin to type something, it doesn’t hang for ten seconds after the third letter. That’s a good sign.
I got a motherboard and processor from my brother that would be a great upgrade to my old P-III. I quickly secured a cheap stick of RAM and hooked everything up. The problem is that I couldn’t seem to get anything to install on the drives. It was always coming up with errors, causing a total failure. So, I bought a replacement motherboard, thinking that I might be having problems with the IDE connectors. I really wanted to use the board my bro gave me, though, as it had better capabilities.
I had the same issues with the new board, although the operating systems that were currently on the hard drives in the machine recognized the board and booted. I still received compression errors and files weren’t saving properly. Even after installing brand new IDE cables (the pretty round ones that glow under UV light), I still had these issues.
Programs that are memory intensive, like Firefox (yes, it is, all you naysayers – its the browser that I use, and likely a lot longer than you have, but its still got leaks), would crash for no apparent reason. Many games would just refuse to load. I began to suspect something else (which I should have checked before spending money).
It turns out that the cheap used memory module was priced so low for a reason. Its crap (to quote Fab from Linux Outlaws). A quick memory test with memtest86 indicated that there were errors on 5 of the tests in the thousands. Its a guarantee that I will have better luck with a good memory stick.
So, remember, if you’re getting I/O errors, check your memory first, as its pretty much the cheapest fix, and a likely suspect.
Now that Firefox 3.0 is out, I bet there will be a ton of reviews of this milestone release. I must say that it seems to be a lot more stable than it was. The Mozilla team have really created an interesting monster this time. I’ve been using the version on and off since it was first branched in the trunk. it was scary to run at times back then. I must say, though, that, since the RC1, its been quite stable and I don’t even know if I remember when it crashed, which is more than I can say for any of the 2.x versions. I am not going to go ahead now and review what I’ve already commented on in earlier posts. Kudos to the Firefox team, I say. Now, guys and gals, can you somehow get your heads out of your asses and provide a switch to turn off your “improved” address bar? Its the ADDRESS bar, not the “lets search any goddamn browser/search slowing term that you’ve ever typed or not tymed so that we can be your browser of choice for longer than you want us to be” behavior??? That’s my only peeve about the 3.0 version of Firefox. The address bar is no longer an address bar. Its a way to make you think Firefox sucks. Give us a choice!
Of course, I write this in the new and improved, but hardly hyped, Opera 9.5 Kestral. The Wordpress editor is still funky in Opera, but its a lot better than it was. Like, what’s the deal with you hitting “enter” like you would in any other browser to go to the next paragraph or thought and to be thrown to the TOP of the paragraph you just wrote? That behavior’s just gotta stop! I do like all of the other reasons that I’ve liked Opera, though. Its FAST and its FAST. Yes, its fast. Pages seem to want to render like they’re supposed to and they arrive in front of my face in a speedy way. Its too bad that it crashes on java applets all the time, though.
Damn, this is starting to look like a review. Its not – its just a rant. Rant, I say!
So, a few weeks ago, Ubuntu “upgraded” Firefox 2.0.0.12 (which is a decent release) to Firefox 3 Beta and I couldn’t view any java applets any more. The reason is because some of the file paths are changing and the plugins need to be linked to a different spot. I had to try Opera but it crashed. That left me with Konqueror, which is not native to Gnome, for the time being.
That has just changed. I just found Bug #173966 and there was a hack proposed that helped me to get back on track. The solution, for now:
cd /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so . <–note the “dot”
Your plugin path might be different, but that’s where one place mine can be found (actually, its a symbolic link to the plugin, which is in /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so)
