Features

These are problems and annoyances I ran into when first installing FireFox on several computers. Thanks to the forums, the problems quickly went away.

Master Password - whenever I signed on a site, FireFox asked if I wanted it to remember the password. When answering, “Yes,” it would asked for a Master Password. WHAT!?!? I never set up a Master Password. Three ways to solve it: 1. Enter chrome://pippki/content/pref-masterpass.xul into the location bar and click the Reset password button. However, this option did not work for me. Furthermore, it will delete all saved passwords. 2. Exit Firebird. Go to your profile folder: http://texturizer.net/firefox/edit.html Delete key3.db (your master password) and signons.txt (all your stored passwords, which are now useless, because Firefox can’t decrypt them). Note: signons.txt was not in my folder probably because it was deleted by the previous step. It worked. 3. Create a new profile. I didn’t like this option because all the bookmarks, settings, extensions that I worked hard to put in place before discovering this lovely password problem were gone and I didn’t have time to import them all again. I had no Profile Manager in my folder list (surprised), so I did the second option and put it in the folder list for easy access.

When I clicked on links from Thunderbird and a couple of other places, it would open something other than FireFox even though I confirmed FireFox as my default browser. The easiest way to fix it is to use a free tool called SetBrowser. The program may show FireFox as the default. Do the steps anyway.

Once fixed, I started getting this error when clicking a link: Firefox loads the URL and the following message appears, “Windows cannot find [add Web URL]. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try it again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search.” The solution.

One more problem. I thought it was just me because of the order I did things, but it happened to Paul, too. If you try clicking on a link in Outlook or something else, it’s possible FireFox AND IE or just IE open. If this is the case, here are the forum notes. The step that worked for me was going into file types and deleting “%1.” Also, check the second route.

I didn’t like the search bar size. Too small. The location bar could stand to be smaller while the search bar should be larger. This is a cool fix because you use an extension that makes life easier. Install ChromEdit. Exit and open FireFox. Open Tools > Edit User Files. Copy the following into the blank page on the first tab called userChrome.css:

/* fix search bar width */
#search-container {
-moz-box-flex: 250 !important;
}

Adjust the number to your taste. It won’t take effect until you’ve exited and opened FireFox.

I use RoboForm for filling forms. It’s worth the investment. Since the program was installed before I installed FireFox, it wasn’t working in FireFox. Easy fix. Download and install the adapter.

I use MovableType to manage this blog and one of the features I immediately missed was the editor buttons B, I, U, and URL. Not anymore. They’re back! Thanks to the kurcula.com hack. However, where second part of the instructions says, “Place the code between <script> tags; put it after the lt;/script;gt; tag as shown in the example.

Another option is the FCKeditor. Bad name (author’s initials), but it is supposedly a great open source editor.

In the past, FireFox froze where I could not do anything (it has not happened since v1.x). Easy fix thanks to Mozilla Backup. I used the last backup and everything worked again. Whew.