Calamity James

Forget all that IE7 crap, the real news this week is the launch of Firefox 2.0! Apparently this was just a startling co-incidence that the two were released so near to each other, but we’ll leave that for Bill Gates to decide

Interested in what I have to say about 2.0? Then read on…

They’ve given this new version of Firefox some very nice new features, and a very web 2.0 look to it. One of the most useful features is the automatic session restoration if the program crashes. Also apparently MANY of the memory leaks have been plugged, which means when you close a tab, you get the memory back! Woohoo!

Another cool addition is the spell checker, what this does is hook into any text area (be it rich or plain text) and provide a Microsoft Word-style spelling mistake highlighter, adding dotted red lines to spelling mistakes. Right clicking shows all the suggestions, just like Word would too. Here’s an example:

I have noticed a couple of niggles, and I will show you how to fix them here…

1. If, like me, you use accesskeys more than most (mainly for posting on forums – Alt+S ) you may notice that Alt+S no longer posts your reply, but brings up the blasted History menu! In fact, now, Windows users must use Alt+Shift+Key to use their accesskeys, not a major change, but it annoys the crap out of me. Luckily, there is a way to restore the old functionality.
   • Open a new tab (or window if you wish)
   • In the address bar, type “about:config” and press enter.
   • In the filter, type: “ui.key.chromeAccess”, double click on the value that comes up and change this to 5
   • Then clear the filter field and type “ui.key.contentAccess” and change that value to 4.
   • There you go! You have Alt keyed accesskeys again! ((Thanks to ianx from the Digital Spy forums for that tip))
2. Natwest Online Banking employs a VERY primitive browser checker, which in laymans terms only checks Firefox like this: “If Firefox Version = 1.* then load site, else give this error:”
   
   To solve this problem, you need an extension called “User Agent Switcher”. Download and install from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/59/
   Then add a user agent with the following details:
   Description: Firefox 1.5
   User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/1.5
   App Name: Mozilla Firefox
   App Version: 5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1)
   Platform: Win32
   This problem has now been fixed at NatWests end.

These are all the problems i’ve encountered so far, but if I come across any more, i’ll be sure to share the solutions with you all

James