Firefox 3.0.5 (recent update)..... "noddy" question???
 

One of my recent updates for Kubuntu 8.10 was firefox 3 (3.0.5 to be precise - according to the help/about option).

For the life of me, I can't change the preferences for my home page and save it like that.

when I reopen it to use the browser, It keeps reverting to "about firefox" page and opens a second tab for Sabayonlinux 4.0 (I've never used Sabayon 4.0).

Can someone point me in the right direction of how to change this so that it stays on my choosen home page and not the ones mentioned above please ? preferably without clearing all the cache as I need to keep some of the stuff I've been viewing/using recently.....

regards

John

You could try setting the homepage manually by doing: in the address bar, then type: homepage in the search box and change the value for: broswer.startup.homepage by double clicking it and inputting the url of the homepage you want.

As soon as I saw your reply {BBI}Nexus{BBI}, I thought "oh, yes. How stupid of me to have forgotten that".

So off I went and followed your guidance. Made the change and then thought it best to test it.

After closing and re-opening firefox, the damn thing has reverted to opening the mozilla page about the updates and also reverted to the sabayonlinux home page.

I did a bit of digging and remembered the prefs.js file, so I found and opened that and made the changes again.

To no avail. Everytime I open firefox again it opens the mozilla "about firefox" page and the sabayonlinux home page having reverted it from my changes.

So if anyone else has any ideas then that'd be great.

TVM

regards

John

Put it in your user.js rather than pref.js

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.google.com");

pref.js gets overwritten every time you use the browser, while user.js overrides pref.js

Is that a file that I have to write and save as user.js ? because I've dug down as far as I can and can't find such a file name.......

Only the ubiquitous prefs.js.....

regards

John

Well I seem to have solved this, though I'm not entirely sure how.

Right, so, it wouldn't let me change the home page selection to my choice. Fine. I was then advised that it might seem to be a permissions problem of some sort (and yes I was trying to change the prefs.js file with firefox closed).

I checked the permissions on /home/user/mozilla/firefox, which pointed to me as group and owner. As it did with /home/user/mozilla/firefox/abc123etc, but when I actually got down to the prefs.js itself, it seemed that I was just a user and it was owned by root.

Weird.

I tried to change the ownership of it - wrongly as it reverted to root ownership.

I then went back to "about:config" and I changed not only the homepage setting but a few other things - yes, ok, in a sort of ignorance/hit 'n miss way.

When I reopened firefox it opened at a blank page, but when I clicked home it did open at the homepage of my choice, so I went back and changed all the settings I'd mod'd except the home page one and it now seems to be sticking to the home page of my choice.

It's a bit annoying to find that I've managed to sort this in such a "hit and miss" way, but I'm not that unhappy about it as, well, "works"!

Ha! now all I have to do is work out how the hell I make my desktop look something like it used to do before KDE 4 was forced on me by the dist upgrade to kubuntu 8.10!

TVM for the guidance, it's very much appreciated.

regards

John

p.s. Oh and I'd still like to know why I can't find a "user.js" file.....or is it something I should have made myself ?

Glad you got it sorted. I too don't have this elusive user.js file and from what I gather it's not something you create yourself.

Hum? yes that would make sense.

I was having a few other problems - including a missing task manager on my desktop - I hadn't noticed that when I started firefox it was coming up as firefox(2).

When I sussed that and re-instated the task manager I found that there was already a window with firefox running (and 2 other unrelated apps), after I'd closed them, the problem reappeared.

I also asked about this problem at LXF forums and someone suggested that I tried because when I was digging through, I notice that while nearly everything seemed correct permissions wise, the prefs.js was me as the user but it was in the root group.

Issuing the chown -R hasn't made any difference, plus I logged into my partners user account and checked her /home/.mozilla/firefox/********.default/prefs.js and that one is correct i.e. it reflects our normal home page.

So I'm stumped as to what might be wrong here, obviously it must be a problem with just my profile.

I'd guess that it might be possible to delete a profile and start again, but I don't want to loose any of the customisations, pages, cache info etc, so I'm not really in favour of trying that, unless it's really necessary.

Plus I'd like to learn how to repair this problem but don't know what to do next.......

regards

John

The only time I tried to rescue my home folder settings in an attempt to preserve what I had, I renamed my home/username/.kde folder to .kdeold. I recreated a new one by logging out and back in again. I then set about transferring folders from my .kdeold folder one by one to the new one. It took some time to track down the offending file. Now all I do is export my bookmarks to ensure I retain those, makes life much simpler for me. I know what you mean though, it can be a real pain in *rse recreating your customisations. Although I am in favour of KDE4, I'm not in favour of the way distros are installing it as the default desktop while 3.5.* is still alive and kicking.