Swiftfox + Flash (under 64bit Hardy)

Posted by John
on Thursday, 02 October 2008

Swiftfox is like Firefox, but hellishly optimized for your Linux build, you can get it from...

  • Go here
  • Then download the installer right for your build (if 64-bit, download Athlon 64)

Once downloaded, navigate to the download in Terminal and do,

sudo sh install-swiftfox.sh
Flash

Now to get Flash running first check the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory exists on your machine, if not create it...

mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins

Adobe only provide it as a 32-bit library but with the necessary dependency you can support it so run...

sudo aptitude install nspluginwrapper

Once you've got that you should be capable of handling the 32-bit Flash player,

...grab Flash from here

Download the .tar.gz version, extract it to your desktop, then move the libflashplayer.so into the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory,

sudo mv ~/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so  ~/.mozilla/plugins

And finally restart Swiftfox, navigate to a flash video here and enjoy faster browsing with Swiftfox + Flash!

In Firefox We Trust

Posted by John
on Tuesday, 17 June 2008

firefox 3

After many months of hard work on behalf of the Mozilla corporation, and lots of testing and fixes from so many smarties; Firefox 3 has finally and officially gone gold.

Better standards compliance, security, memory fixes, just tons and tons of new improvements (not to mention the new rendering engine), this one's a goodie.

Go download it now, Ghandi would be proud ;-)

Download Day - English

IE6 on Linux + Safari / WebKit

Posted by John
on Friday, 23 May 2008

webkit

IE 4 Linux

For cross-browser testing you can thankfully run IE6 (and 5/4) on Linux with the handy IE4Linux package.

Assuming you've got WINE you'll also need cabextract, so add a repository to your distro,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt hardy main

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install cabextract

Installing IE6 on Linux is a little tricky, the best way i've found to get it working is doing;

su root
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

Click to create icon on Desktop, it'll run thru downloading packages and prefixes for Wine after which you should have IE on your Linux distro, which will be accessible (if you lose the desktop shortcut) from,

/root/bin/ie6
Safari / WebKit

Apple's Safari browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine, which thankfully is an opensource project and can be installed and tested against on your Linux machine via a few steps (yep, i've run thru this and it does work).

First get the dependencies,

sudo aptitude install autoconf automake libtool bison flex 
gperf libicu-dev build-essential libxt-dev libsqlite3-dev 
libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev 
libcurl4-openssl-dev libxslt1-dev

Now goto http://nightly.webkit.org/ and grab the latest nightly build.

Unzip and Terminal into the archive dir and build the source,

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-svg-experimental
make

Once that's all done (which will take a while) you should now have a mini-WebKit browser in which to test against via...

./Programs/GtkLauncher

Navigate to the ACID3 website to test for standards compliance here http://acid3.acidtests.org/.

You should get 100/100, WebKit is pretty on when it comes to standards.

acid test

Safari 2 escaped characters

Posted by John
on Wednesday, 05 March 2008

Note to self: safari doesn't seem to like escaped characters being injected into an object within the DOM, seems to break them up.

So,

myObj.innerHTML = '<a onclick=\"do();\">execute</a>';

Comes out as...

<a onclick="; do(); ";>execute</a>

Doesn't happen in Firefox 2, IE6/7 or Safari 3 but fails in Safari 2.0.4

Firefox 3 Beta 1

Posted by John
on Wednesday, 07 November 2007

Brand new builds from the Mozilla Team,

FireBug Compatibility

there's a beta release of FireBug out to make this excellent tool work with Firefox 3...