Firefox

From Peyton Hall Documentation

Revision as of 18:54, 22 April 2010

Firefox is a web browser created by the Mozilla foundation. It is the web browser portion of the Mozilla suite spun off into its own application, though it's matured and changed from that initial fork.

If you're looking for the e-mail part of the former Mozilla suite, have a look at Thunderbird.

Installation

Firefox is installed by default on the Peyton network (in /usr/peyton/bin) so you can run it on any Linux machine, and Macs have it in /usr/peyton/Applications. If you would like to install it on your personal machine, use whatever browser you have to go to http://www.mozilla.com. The front page should have a download link based on what platform you're currently using to browse there (ie, if you're visiting from a Mac, the Mac download should be on the page). Click "Other systems & languages" if you wish to choose a different version - such as downloading the Linux version from a Windows machine.

Actual installation varies slightly by platform:

• Windows

  Run the downloaded program to launch the installer

• Macs

  Double click the downloaded disk image, then drag and drop the Firefox application where you'd like to install it (such as /Applications)

• Linux

  Uncompress the tar file, which will create a "firefox" directory. Move that directory to where you'd like the program installed (such as /usr/local/ or ~/Installs).

Extensions

Much like Thunderbird, Firefox can be modified with extensions which give new functionality or change the appearance of the program (and in fact, many extensions work on both programs). They can be downloaded from the Firefox website. Here's a few extensions that are quite useful to have installed:

• Adblock Plus does a great job of filtering ads from web pages, while still leaving the necessary parts available (such as funny scripts that banks use, etc). Includes an updater which keeps its internal list of sites and regexps current.
• Download Statusbar adds a bar at the bottom of the screen for your downloads, instead of the normal download window.
• PDF Download will detect when you've clicked on a PDF link, and offer options for what to do with it - download as a file, view within the browser, or launch an external application to view it.
• Update Notifier will notify you when new versions of your extensions are available for download, and offer to download and install them for you.

A couple more advanced or geeky extensions are Server Spy (tells you information about the web server you're connecting to, such as what software it is running) and Web Developer (gives you a new toolbar that lets you view CSS information and much more, great for debugging websites or site development). Most people won't need these two, but some have found them handy for debugging.

Plugins

Because these plugins can sometimes contribute to instability, and because not everyone needs them, we don't install these system-wide; however, you will sometimes find yourself in need of them, so we keep a known-working copy of the following plugins on-hand. You just need to take a few easy steps to install them. Before installing any of these, you will need to have a directory where FireFox can find them. Just run mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins at the command line. If the directory already exists, no harm done.

Adobe Flash

We have a copy of the flash library in /usr/peyton/adobe_flash. Instead of copying this library, symlink to it. That way, if we update it in the future, you'll be kept up to date.
To install:
ln -s /usr/peyton/adobe_flash/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Once you run that command, make sure you restart FireFox to ensure it loads it. You can then go to Adobe's Homepage to see whether it works.

Java

We have a full copy of Java installed in /usr/peyton. You can't just copy the plugin to your directory; it needs to be symlinked.
To install:
ln -s /usr/peyton/java/plugin/i386/latest/libjavaplugin_oji.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
You will then need to restart FireFox for it to recognize the plugin. You can test that it's working by visiting Sun's Java VM Test.

Adobe Acrobat

We have Adobe Acrobat Reader (PDF viewer) available on the network. In addition, we have the Adobe Reader plugin available, should you want to view PDFs right inside your browser window.
To install:
ln -s /usr/peyton/acrobat/Adobe/Reader/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so ~/mozilla/plugins/nppdf.so
You will then need to restart FireFox for the plugin to load. This is a symlink to the latest version on the network. This way, you will always have the latest version, rather than having to manually update it.