Tag: Mozilla

I’m not sure if qualifies as a real bug and not just a feature, but I’ve been having the problem described by the title for quite a while now: sometimes when I’m typing something in a web page, such as a new e-mail message in Gmail, pressing enter suddenly opens up a new tab with a Google search, with search terms picked up from the tab where I was typing.

Now, I know that Google, respectably, hasn’t been as cooperative in giving up their search data to government officials as other search engine companies have, but still, I wouldn’t trust them with the contents of my e-mail messages like this every now and then. So I’ve tried some tweaks to try and stop this behavior.

I first adjusted the settings of Paste And Go 2, which is always the first extension I install right after I’ve installed Firefox. From the Interface tab, I disabled Enable Paste and Search by click search engines button with middle mouse button. Then, on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, I unchecked all keys and wiped the key field clean, so that in effect, P&G2 now has no keyboard shortcuts. This doesn’t matter to me as I never use them anyway.

Then, in about:config, I set keyword.enabled to false. I generally dislike any guesswork being done by applications for me and prefer that they just fail when I fail to communicate my intentions properly (I guess that’s pretty oldskool thinking nowadays, or at least that’s what I’d like to think), so this setting suits me better anyway than the default (which seems to be true).

I’m writing these down here and try to keep an eye out on whether the problem persists, and report back if these seem to have solved it.

Next day: My suspicions of Paste And Go 2 being the culprit were heightened, since I discovered that after the abovementioned changes I could no longer access about:config, nor use enter as a hotkey for “Submit” on pages (such as Google – so that I had to select “Search” using my mouse to actually make the query), as pressing enter had become synonymous for the “Paste And Go” function. After disabling P&G2 I could again access about:config, and so also it seems after changing both keyboard shortcuts to [all meta keys] + §.

9.5.: I was about to declare my experiment a success, but it just happened again.

27.6.: I think I found the culprit: Feeling Lucky extension adds a hotkey (Enter) for searches. I haven’t verified this yet, but I’m pretty sure disabling the hotkey fixes the problem.

After updating Firefox to 2.0.0.2 the passwords management began to act strangely in my Firefox: the passwords would not be recalled with the login as before, but only after a reload or one attempt to login with the password field empty. MozillaZine forums had a workaround involving editing signons2.txt.

Unfortunately the encrypted passwords and logins don’t make much sense when multiple logins are stored for a single domain (as I have for my own) so you have a hard time trying to add the correct URLs to their ends. Deleting the logins from Firefox’s password management and then re-entering them with the passwords does seem to do the trick too, so I’ll have to resort to that in these cases.

I haven’t usually spent much time on MozillaZine’s Firefox Bugs forum right after updates have been released, but the number of open support requests for 2.0.0.2 in its front page seems a little high to my eyes. Maybe it’s just me, or did 2.0.02 introduce more new problems than previous updates?

I’m hoping the XPCOM problem I was struggling with earlier today is now gone, and it looks like Firefox wasn’t the only culprit. At the root of the problem was Dorgem, which I use for my webcam. I’d installed a nightly build – should have known better than that…

I’m not giving FF a full pardon for this however, because the the bug manifested itself only when running Firefox with Dorgem in the background. Nothing else (not even IE7) triggered the issue, which tells me there could be an actual bug in FF in addition to the obvious one in the latest build of Dorgem. At least there might be room for improvement with the way FF behaves under some unexpected circumstances.

Update: Apparently, still not out of the woods. Shortly after writing the above, the network became unresponsive again and at shutdown the XPCOM error was back. I managed to get a screenshot of the alert box telling me that initializing the application failed, which is all I get when trying to open Task Manager. Googling 0x0c0000017 gives no hits at this time.

I’d replaced Dorgem’s daily build with the latest stable, and was running it in the background. Currently I’m not running Dorgem in any incarnation, we’ll see how it goes.

21:35 Update: the problem persists.

So far I’ve tried disabling the DOM Inspector and Talkback in Firefox and also Windows XP’s Webclient service (which has been cited among others as a possible culprit of the XPCOM Event Receiver problem) – none of this has helped.

For me the problem seems to be a tad more serious than for others reporting this, since just by running Firefox for a while the system eventually loses all networking capabilities and refuses to open the Task Manager (I’ll try grabbing a screenshot, of the alert box notifying about the failure, if I can the next time it appears, although it is in Finnish), at which point the only working solution is to reboot – which, of course, is when I’m greeted with the XPCOM not terminating properly nag.

The strange thing is, if I open up the Task Manager and leave it lurking on the side while FF hoses the system, from there it looks like there’s nothing alarming going on – no single process is eating up all the resources. The only abnormality is the firefox.exe process not terminating when I close the application window.

Right now I’m running Firefox in Safe-mode and with anti-phishing disabled in addition to all the stuff mentioned above. I’m hoping I’ll come across something that works, because otherwise I’ll have to switch to Opera or something, and I’d really, really hate to do that.