[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Firefox

Firefox is an opensource web browser from Mozilla.

Installation

Firefox is distributed with Slackware.

Tips

Make firefox understand downloaded files

It is quite annoying that Mozilla Firefox always forgets what application to use for “opening” a file which you just downloaded. Also, the context menu “Open containing folder” in the Downloads overview does not work.

Using “xdg-open” you can improve the integration of Firefox into your Desktop Environment a lot:

  1. Stop firefox if it is running
  2. Delete or rename the mimetypes cache (where firefox keeps its file association settings):
    $ rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/<yourprofile>/mimeTypes.rdf
  3. Start firefox again
  4. Download any file if you had not done this before
  5. Open that file from the “Tools > Downloads” menu (by right-clicking on it and selecting “Open“).
    When asked to choose the application for opening the file, browse to (or type) “/usr/bin/xdg-open“, then check the checkbox to “Remember your choice“.

After you’ve configured Firefox like that, both the “Open” and “Open containing folder” context menus will work. If you are running KDE then you can then change the preferred programs through KDE’s “file associations” settings.

The same trick works for Mozilla Seamonkey as well.

Enable the builtin PDF viewer in Firefox

The “pdfjs” PDF viewer is built-in in Firefox since version 15.0, this means that there is no need to install a PDF viewer plugin like Adobe Reader additionally. The built-in PDF viewer renders PDF using HTML5 and JavaScript.

The PDF viewer is disabled by default, but that is likely going to change in the future, when the functionality has proven itself. In the meantime, you can enable it as follows:

  • In “about:config” set the property “browser.preferences.inContent” to “true”:
    .
  • Also in “about:config” set the property “pdfjs.disabled” to “false”:
    .
  • Finally, in the Firefox “Preferences > Applications” menu, search for the extension “PDF” and make sure the associated action is set to “preview in firefox”.

That's it! You don't even have to restart Firefox. Try opening a PDF, or even drag a PDF file from a filemanager into the Firefox window.

Troubleshooting

“Open folder containing” opens Audacious instead of a file manager

Known to work with: [Slack 14.1]

  1. Edit /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache
  2. Find the line containing
    inode/directory=
  3. Delete the following string
    audacious.desktop;

This should fix the problem.

Here's a one-liner to do it:

sudo sed -i 's|inode/directory=audacious.desktop;|inode/directory=|' /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

(I made an icon on my desktop with it in the COMMAND line)

Sources

 howtos:software:firefox ()