Where Man Wins over ... Firefox

April 2014

Starting configuration: Firefox 3.6 bundled with openSUSE 11.3, 64-bit (end 2010)
Endingconfiguration: Firefox 28 private installation

The case started a few months ago, when Google pages started showing an odd behaviour, often asking to validate a plethora of certificates and exceptions, and sometimes stopping working at all (like Google maps).
More recently some pages started complaining about Firefox 3.6 being not supported, and/or the Flash player not being up to date (it was a 10.1 r102 I sometimes updated to work with NASA CasJobs).
More recently again (and this later proved totally unrelated) some PDF files I retrieved from various sources (like my bank or some hospital) started being marked by Acrobat Reader as "secured" in the title bar, and were not printed (note: there was no message saying printing was forbidden ... they printed but a single blank page came out ... other PDF viewers like Okular printed them OK).

The interim solution for the Google page stuff was to use Chrome for these pages (the idea was, they wrote it so it should work with their pages).
Actually I could not use the Suse chrome rpm for some incompatibility with the version of libstdc++.so bundled with my OS. I had instead to install the unsupported Suse 11.3 version of chromium (which required also to fetch a libv8.so.3 from some other Suse repository).
This one worked and I could use it with google and some other occasional site giving problems in Firefox (like the IAU Commission 5 wiki).

However I never migrated all my bookmarks and preferences to chrome, until recently when I evaluated it systematically. I found that, despite the fact is fast, I did not like some features, like a painful way to edit the history of visited pages (I use to keep only the last day, and often clear selected sections), the lack of possibility of viewing a single frame in a frameset in a window, or to save bookmarks directly into existing subfolders.

So I decided that a final solution™ was to upgrade firefox and possibly other components. In particular I considered:


I dealt with Acrobat reader first.
Here as for most of the rest, I had to cope with the fact Suse 11.3 is now unsupported. (And I do not intend to upgrade until the next change of hardware). So I started looking in the "unsupported repositories" and usually found bundled versions not so recent, sometimes older than what I had.

So at the end I did a private (i.e. under my personal home) installation of Acrobat reader 9.5.5 from Adobe (the OS bundled version is 9.4.1). Both are anyhow 32-bit executables.
No particular trouble installing, 9.5.5. runs, still displays the offending PDFs as "Secured" ... but prints them OK.
The surprise was however that when I tried to print them with 9.4.1, they print too !

So this was done for nothing.
Current explanation is that CUPS was upgraded (on the Institute server, together with the OS) in the meanwhile, and the ghostview engine used by CUPS has some problem, and this was soon fixed by some automatic update.


Coming to Firefox I had some difficulty in locating the latest version compatible with my Suse version. I had a vague idea that Firefox version numbering was somehow reset just after 3.6 - which is actually now called 10 - and Mozilla site, while displaying downloadable vesions for all possible systems and languages, is not very helpful in locating old sources. So, after a quick check on the wikipedia page about Firefox versions I decided to dare installing the latest version, Firefox 28 !

I did a private installation, with the startup script being found in ~/firefox/firefox. I backed up my entire ~/.mozilla directory, and first tried to run the new Firefox using it.

Originally I got a warning complaining that .mozilla/plugins/nppdf.so was a "wrong ELF class", then I was told that my add-ons extensions were incompatible (and accepted the suggestion to disable them) and it started.
The look-and-feel was not terribly different (I had my preferred text buttons instead of the hated image buttons, but they were in a different order) and it looked like it had imported most of my preferences and all bookmarks. Only, while it remembered the customised handlers for some cases (like gv for PostScript files), for PDF it insisted in displaying them in the browser window, and not in an external Acrobat reader as I had it configured.
I soon realized that a new menu of Web Developer Tools provided functionalities similar to Firebug and DOM inspector so I did not worry about it.
But the most serious issue was that the problem which instigated the change, i.e. the trouble with Google pages, was still there !

At this stage I junked entirely ~/.mozilla (of which I had a backup) and started Firefox "naked". This created a new ~/.mozilla, started with a different look and feel, did not recognise any plugin (no Java, no Flash), tries to display PostScript with Gimp and PDF inside the browser, but works perfectly on Google pages !.

At this point I kept two copies of ~/.mozilla, the newly created one and my original, and used a soft link to toggle from one to the other, and compared the two directories with kdiff3.
I also did a scan of all menus and of all tabs in the Preferences in both versions and noted down all differences, including those in the look and feel like absence of permanent status bar, tab bar located on top of the navigation bar, etc.
Then I tried to remove selected files or directories one at a time.

At this stage I had a working version of Firefox 28 with more or less the old look and feel (some buttons were in different positions, and there was no permanent status bar), the same bookmarks, almost the same preferences (it looks like there is no way to tell history expires after one day, or any other period of time), almost the same association of handlers to MIME types (only PDF was different), and no plugins.

It was rather easy to cure or verify most of those:


Then it remained to deal with the missing plugins.

Actually they are not missing, they are installed in the system. So I looked in the old Firefox 3.6 to understand where they are and I found the Java one was a soft link from /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/ to the JRE, and the Flash one was npwrapper.libflashplayer.so in the same directory.

Obviously the OS-bundled Firefox 3.6 finds them, the privately installed Firefox 28 does not. Can I repoint them or shall I install new ones afresh ?

The information on the Mozdev site seems to refer to older or the same version, so I decided initially to try reusing the existing plugins.
To do that in a private installation it is enough to move or link the .so files into .mozilla/plugins !!

This works nicely for the Java plugin (with a soft link). It also works for Flash with no issues for sites like NASA CasJobs, while Google complains it is an old version and ask permission to activate once per session.

Since the old Flash plugin was a wrapper for the 32-bit version but there is now a native 64-bit version on the Adobe site, I retrieved the install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz tar file and looked at the README file inside.
It was not clear to me whether I just needed the libflashplayer.so or I should also install all the files in /usr, but I tried just moviing the .so file in .mozilla/plugins, and that was enough !
The activation can be set to "Always Activate" from the about:addons screen.

Once again, Man Wins Over the Machine !

And what about looking into the undocumented about:about ?


Earlier cases

At a later time I could add notes on cases encountered in the past like:

sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/WWW/WhereManWins/ff.html :: original creation 2014 apr 03 15:57:11 CEST :: last edit 2014 Apr 03 15:57:11 CEST