Firefox

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Revision as of 21:24, 7 August 2008 by John.ennew (talk | contribs) (Firefox doesn't run)

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You might want to use Firefox as the integrated MythBrowser, although there are some limitations. You can still use the MythTV bookmark manager to launch webpages. Firefox might need some addons to behave similiarly to MythBrowser (fullscreen, page-zoom, single-window-mode).

Configuration

Simply replace /usr/bin/mythbrowser with /usr/bin/firefox in Configuration: Web Settings

If you are using Firefox on a machine that you also use as a desktop computer, you may wish to use a separate Firefox profile to keep your MythTV browsing separate from your usual browsing. You can create a new profile by starting Firefox from the commandline like this:

firefox -ProfileManager

Then if you create a profile called "mythtv" you can launch Firefox using that profile with:

firefox -P mythtv

You can then install addons and configure this profile totally separately from your default profile. Your default profile can be accessed like this:

firefox -P default

If you have no other instances of Firefox running then simply running Firefox with no arguments will use the default profile. However, if an instance of Firefox is already running using a profile that is not the default, then running Firefox without any arguments will open a new browser window using the same profile as the window already open.

Addons

  • Autohide - for a nice fullscreen mode. You decide which toolbars you like to have. Install the extension and change the commandline to have a fullscreen mode on startup:
/usr/bin/firefox --fullscreen
  • PageZoom - Allows users to magnify the whole page (not just the font size), but it does not work as well as MythBrowser's page zoom. To have a default page size check the configuration of the addon. It is sometimes possible to remove intrusive images and panels that overlap with text as a result of using PageZoom from websites that you commonly visit using Adblock Plus together with Adblock Plus: Element Hiding, or with Platypus and Greasemonkey, or with Stylish (see below).
  • Tab Mix Plus - enhanced tab preferences with many options including a single-window-mode where everything is opened in a new tab instead of a new window.
  • Keyconfig - Allows users to change the key bindings of common firefox shortcuts. Useful for people with limited remote controls.
  • NumberFox and FocusingFrame - Provide two different ways to select links on pages without using a mouse.
  • Titlebar Tweaks - Use this to change the browser window's titlebar to display only the application name, so that you can send keypresses to it via LIRC with irxevent.
  • Cellphone Keyboard - Greasemonkey script that uses number keys like a cellphone to type text into forms. Useful if you only have a remote with number keys.
  • Stylish - Can be used to tweak pages to make them more readable, especially if they have been mangled by the PageZoom addon. Can also be used to highlight focused links to make them clearly visible from a distance, for easy browsing with TAB and SHIFT-TAB keys. For example, this can be achieved using the following style with Stylish:
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://), url-prefix(https://), url-prefix(file://) {
  a:focus {color: red !important; background: yellow !important}
  :focus img {border-width: thick !important; border-color: red !important; border-style: solid !important}
  input:focus, textarea:focus {color: red !important; background: yellow !important}

  /* NumberFox addon displays numbers that are too small, even when set to their largest,
     and do not resize with PageZoom addon, so lets make them even bigger... */
  bbnspan.bbn_linknode {font-size: 35px !important}
}
  • My Portal - View bookmarks as a conveniently browsable web page.

Troubleshooting

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 appears to have removed the fullscreen command line option. If you use this option in firefox 3 then the last parameter, the URL, is ignored and the standard homepage is opened.

Firefox doesn't run

If firefox doesn't run at all after following the instructions at the top of the page then it is probably because MythTV is passing some parameters firefox doesn't like. The solution is to create a script file which acts as a wrapper to remove the bad parameters and only passes the good stuff to firefox.

Create a file called /usr/bin/firefox-wrapper using your text editor (e.g. nano):

sudo nano -w /usr/bin/firefox-wrapper

Put these lines into it:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/firefox $11
exit 0

If using nano, you can save and exit using ctrl+x followed by y

Make this file executable using the following command:

sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/firefox-wrapper

Then, back on the MythTV frontend, go to Web Settings and change the browser to

/usr/bin/firefox-wrapper