[workaround] Subtle problems with firefox

[doctordruidphd]

I have noticed, since last night's updates, a few things not working in firefox (3.5.3).

1. Yahoo mail notifier - I cannot play the notification sound. It used to -play through pulseaudio, showing up in volumecontrol>playback as a stream, but now there is nothing. Flash works fine, but other "streaming" websites do not.

2. Quicknote extension - I use a text file on another drive, so that firefox in several different systems can find the same file. Now this does not work in karmic, returning only the word "false".

3. There is a website to which I upload some pictures, that has a size limit of 300k. My pictures are smaller than that, but I get an error message saying they are too large. Uploading with aurora works fine.

There may be other things I have not discovered yet.
Number 1 quit working a few (?) days ago; the other two quit last night.
Odd that these would all bite the dust at nearly the same time; makes me think it isn't really a firefox problem, since last night did not include any updates to ff. I notice there have been several updates to xul-this-and-that; I wonder if that sould be the source of the problem?

Anyone else noticing strange, but no catastrophic, behavior like this in FF?

[bossa]

Re: Subtle problems with firefox

Hi
Yeah, I have had some problems with 3.5.3 notably FF freezing when viewing flash movies . I was trying to watch some stuff over on the Channel4 website ( UK ) and invariably ff would freeze .
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/4od

I must add this was also happening on FF that I use on My Ubuntu Jaunty installation.
Anyone else experiencing this?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Subtle problems with firefox

A little further information:

It does not look like either xine or alsaplayer plugins are functional. No audio streams, or clicked on audio files, will play in FF. If I try to start a stream in xine directly, i.e. "xine http://whatever" it works, so the audio chain looks to be functional. It's FF that is messed up. Flash does play, but that comes through as a different application; apparently FF is handling flash stuff differently than plain audio.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Subtle problems with firefox

I found that by installing the firefox version from the firefox website (which I assume is a 32-bit version, my system is 64) I was able to restore the missing audio functionality. Of course I got to reinstall the 32-bit flash player, as the 64-bit just won't work with firefox's version of the program. So I'm not really sure what the problem is with the version in the repositories, but for now, workaround found.

[tomp01]

Re: [workaround] Subtle problems with firefox


I have a problem with the bookmarks, when you go to bookmark this page the dropdown menu will not scroll. This problem doesn't exist in the equivalent Windows version of FF. Anybody else had this?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: [workaround] Subtle problems with firefox

Is this the firefox version from the repositories, or from the firefox website?
Whichever it is, try the other.

[tomp01]

Re: [workaround] Subtle problems with firefox

Is this the firefox version from the repositories, or from the firefox website?
Whichever it is, try the other.

It is from the repositories, I have tried to install Ubuntuzilla but it says that it needs libstdc++5

[doctordruidphd]

Re: [workaround] Subtle problems with firefox

I don't really know anything about Ubuntuzilla. The firefox version in the repositories just doesn't work properly on my system (no sound, among other things).

I found that loading firefox from the firefox website solved most of my problems with it.
It is a 32-bit application, so if you have a 64-bit machine, you will need to install ia32-libs.
If you need libstdc++5, you can get it from the jaunty repository:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/libstdc++5
Install it with

sudo dpkg -i filename.deb

substituting the name of the downloaded package for "filename.deb"