Mac OS X : arfore dot com

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One of the small annoyances I have with Firefox is the default URL used for the Google search plug-in.  While I generally just type in a search term and hit enter, I do sometimes just hit enter without a corresponding search term just to get sent to the main Google page.  Why do I do this?  Mainly so that I can view the updated Google logos when they change for holidays.

With a default installation of Firefox the default Google page is the Mozilla Firefox Start Page.  While this is nice from a corporate branding sense, this special page does not have the links to either iGoogle or the Google Accounts login page, nor does is feature the often customized Google logo.  Also, none of the other search plug-ins that I have tested in Firefox exhibit a similar “feature”, they all dump you at the default page for that particular service.
Here’s how to change all of that.

Firefox 2.x for Mac OS X

  1. Quit Firefox.
  2. In the Finder, navigate to /Applications
  3. Right-click (or control-click) on Firefox.app and select Show Package Contents from the context menu
  4. In the window that comes navigate to Contents -> MacOS -> searchplugins
  5. Open the file named google.xml in your favorite text editor
  6. Change the value for the XML attribute named SearchForm as follows:

    Default:  http://www.google.com/firefox
    Changed: http://www.google.com

  7. Save the file and start Firefox.

Firefox 2.x for Windows

  1. Quit Firefox.
  2. In Windows Explorer open the following directory C:\ -> Program Files -> Mozilla Firefox -> searchplugins
  3. Open the file named google.xml in your favorite text editor
  4. Change the value for the XML attribute named SearchForm as follows:

    Default:  http://www.google.com/firefox
    Changed: http://www.google.com

Voila!  Now you have what many of my friends would have logically concluded as the expected action for the Google search plugin for Firefox.

Note that this mod will have to be changed for each successive update of the Firefox application, so it may not be to your taste.

Those of you out there who are running an installation of SCT Luminis 3 may have noticed that the browser check always comes up warning you that the browser is unsupported when using Firefox 2, even though all the features seem to be completely supported.

This is due to the fact that the browsercheck javascript does not know about the new agent string that was introduced with Firefox 2. Generally a new release, or service pack to Luminis fixes this for newer browsers.

In order to change this you will need to alter a couple of files in you Luminis install.

The two files that need to be altered are:

  1. webapps/luminis/js/clientsniffer.js
  2. /webapps/luminis/WEB-INF/templates/portal/browserchk.thtml

clientsniffer.js

In this file you will need to alter the conditional of the big if-statement that follows the assignment for the variable is_nav5.

The problem is that the if checks for the existence of a revision number of 1.8. What you need to do is add an additional check for a revision number of 1.8.1.6. So the if-statement conditional becomes:

if (is_nav5 || agt.indexOf(”rv:1.7.12″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(”rv:1.8″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(”rv:1.8.1.6″) != -1)

The next thing to do is to add an additional Firefox variable that is set to true if the major number is 2. I added this after the existing variable is_fox1_5.

var is_fox2 = (is_fox && (is_major == 2));

browserchk.thtml

In the browsercheck file you need to alter if-statement that sets the variable supported to have a true value. This if-statement should follow immediately after the one that checks for whether java is enabled in your browser.

What you need to add is an additional OR check, so that the if-statement conditional looks like the following:

if ((is_nav8) || (is_nav7) || (is_moz1_7) || (is_win && is_ie5up) || (is_win && is_ie6) || (is_saf1_3) || (is_fox1_5) || (is_fox2) || (is_win && is_fox1))

I have tested this change with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on the following browsers:

  • Mac OS X 10.4.10
  • Windows XP SP2
  • Windows Vista
  • Ubuntu 6.10

Resources

So, I hate developers. Wait, let me clarify: I hate developers who can’t think through the user experience.

When an uninstaller is written it really should remove all file associated with the application.

Case in point, recently I moved to a Windows Mobile-based smartphone, so I needed to cross-grade to Missing Sync for Windows Mobile from the PalmOS version.

When I run the uninstaller it removed a lot of stuff, but the following data was left behind:

  • Missing Sync under the home library Application Support
  • Palm Hotsync under the home library Application Support
  • com.markspace.missingsync.ConduitManager.plist under the home library Preferences
  • com.markspace.missingsync.palmos.plist under the home library Preferences
  • com.markspace.MemoPad.plist under the home library Preferences
  • Palm under the home Documents directory
  • Palm Hotsync under the system library Application Support

Admittedly, some of these files/directories might be valuable if you want to re-install your software for some reason, but at the very least the installer should ask you if you want to remove it.

Also, in the Hotsync folder(s) there are sometimes conduits that are not part of the Missing Sync software, so it was actually nice that those were left behind.

Why is it that some of the essential tools that are used on a daily basis are missing from OS X?

Today I wanted to use wget and found that it was missing.

Fortunately, this is a very easy thing to fix. All you have to do is download the source code from the GNU page on the wget project, then follow the standard compile steps:

  1. unpack the source
  2. ./configure
  3. make
  4. sudo make install

Note: The compiled binary is placed in /usr/local/bin so you will need to add this to your path. This process varies depending on what shell you are using, but the default shell in 10.4.9 is bash.

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