Matt Woodward’s posterous

Matt Woodward’s posterous

Matthew Woodward  //  * CFML, Grails, and Java Developer
* Principal IT Specialist, US Senate
* Open BlueDragon Steering Committee Member
* All-Around Geek

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Firefox

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Jan 27 / 6:40am

Remember Kids, IE Security Settings Affect Firefox Too

by Matthew Woodward
I was configuring a new Windows Server VM yesterday, and the first thing I do on a blank Windows server is launch IE once and once only to download Firefox. To avoid what I call the "trusted site dance" with Mozilla's mirrors since IE doesn't let you add a trusted site and then continue the download you started, I go into IE security settings and make the following setting changes to the Internet zone:
  • Enable file downloads
  • "Prompt" for launching applications and unsafe files
  • "Prompt" for launching programs and files in an IFRAME
Note that these are the settings you need to change if you get the "Your current security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded" error.

This time I decided to be a good boy and change these settings back to disabled after I was done, and then I launched Firefox to download Java and some other things I need to install on this server. This probably shouldn't have surprised me, but when I tried to download anything in Firefox, it would download a 0 byte file and the download dialog box would read "Canceled."

I went back into IE's security options and re-enabled file downloads and voila, I could download files again.

I understand the fact that IE's security settings tab is really a shortcut for Internet Options at the OS level, but this is still pretty irritating. What if I want file downloads disabled for IE but enabled for Firefox? Guess you can't do that. Thanks Windows.

Filed under  //  Firefox   IE   Windows  

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Sep 12 / 4:29pm

Enabling Java on Firefox on Ubuntu

by Matthew Woodward
Since I never remember how to do this, I figured I'd put it up here. This assumes you already have Java installed, and note this is for 32-bit. I'll be getting a shiny new 64-bit laptop very soon, and from what I understand things are a bit different on 64-bit.
  1. In Firefox, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Content and check "Enable Java"
  2. Quit Firefox
  3. In a terminal, cd to /path/to/firefox/plugins. On my machine and for my current version of Firefox, this is in /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.14/plugins If in doubt, locate plugins | grep firefox should narrow it down.
  4. Create a symlink to the Java plugin. Your path to Java may differ, but on my machine I did:
     ln -s /usr/share/java/jdk1.6.0_14/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so libjavaplugin_oji.so
  5. Restart Firefox
Apparently on 64-bit the i386 directory under jre/plugin doesn't exist, but there are some solutions. I'll have to verify when my 64-bit machine (complete with 8GB of RAM and a solid state drive!) arrives.
Filed under  //  Firefox   Java   Linux   Ubuntu  

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Sep 10 / 12:02pm

Bypassing Windows Security Checks in Firefox 3

by Matthew Woodward
Firefox 3 now respects any Windows security settings, such as not allowing you to download MSI and EXE files. Better security if you don't know what you're doing, sure, but annyoing when you're trying to download a bunch of stuff to configure a new Windows server.

Easy fix without changing the Windows security policies at the OS level is to open a new tab in Firefox, and in the location bar, type about:config and hit enter. This will bring up Firefox's configuration settings.

Right-click anywhere and choose "New" then "boolean." For the name of the new config setting, type browser.download.manager.skipWinSecurityPolicyChecks and set the value to true. Hit OK and you're done--no need to even restart Firefox.

Lots more about the Firefox settings related to downloads and security can be found on the mozillazine.org site.

Filed under  //  Firefox   Windows  

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