TOPIC: MOZILLA
Firefox spell checking: getting rid of a mispelling from your dictionary.
22nd October 2007Mozilla Firefox includes a spell checker and, like any such function, it offers a chance to add words to a custom dictionary. Of course, you can also add misspellings too, and these definitely need to be removed. With Word, it's a matter of looking for custom.dic and deleting the nefarious item. With Firefox, it's similar, at least on Windows anyway. The file that you need to edit is persdict.dat which you'll find it in C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[random name].default. My search for the relevant information took me over to Lifehacker.
Update 2012-12-11: For users of Linux, the location of the above file is as follows: /home/[user id]/.mozilla/firefox/[random name].default. Once you find persdict.dat in there, the required editing can be performed.
LVHA…
12th October 2007On my web design journey, I have learned the wisdom that CSS styles for hyperlinks should be defined like the following:
a:link {...}
a:visited {...}
a:hover {...}
a:active {...}
List out the names of the pseudoselectors, and you'll soon work out where they got LVHA: Link, Visited, Hover and Active. However, I have recently spotted the following being used:
a {...}
a:hover {...}
The trick here is to define your style globally and only define specifics for the relevant pseudoselector, hover in this example. It works well in the likes of Mozilla and Opera, but Internet Explorer is another story. Even IE7 needs the LVHA treatment. I spotted this when I observed unexpected changes in the appearance of link text after visiting the link: visited links starts to change colour. While I know that the likes of Jakob Nielsen frown upon non-changing link colour, I choose to ignore this and keep it constant, so following the LVHA approach is needed to keep things as I would like them.
The return of the Navigator
13th June 2007
With the launch of the ill-fated Communicator, Netscape dispensed with the Navigator brand that had served it so well up to that point. And it continued the practice when it turned to re-branding the output from the Mozilla project. The new Navigator is, in essence, a tweaked variant of Firefox's latest incarnation and has the spelling checking capability that I have been missing when giving Safari a spin. You have to ask why, and I am not certain that I have the answer. That said, it does feel slick and works well, a definite change from some of it predecessors then.
Wonders of the middle mouse button
26th February 2007My installation of Firefox seems to have stopped listening to the target attribute of hyperlinks. Thankfully, the middle mouse button comes to the rescue. Clicking on a link with the middle button opens it the destination page up in a new window or tab, depending on how you set your defaults. The behaviour goes even further than this: the trusty middle mouse button does the same for bookmarks and the Google search bar; all very useful. And it is not just a Firefox thing, either. IE7 does the same thing for web page hyperlinks and bookmarks while in Opera, it is limited to links on web pages.
New Firefox, new ForecastFox
25th February 2007Firefox 2.0.0.2 has made its appearance and the CPU usage bug seems to have gone away. We'll see how it goes... Also, a new version of the Accuweather.com powered ForecastFox plug-in has come out. It was when I was using it that I noticed heavy CPU usage, but the behaviour has yet to make its reappearance and I hope it never will. Now, I can get back to enjoying this very useful widget.