For some reason, the auto-update feature of many software programs fails from time to time. On my computer, the number one culprit is the Thunderbird email client. I don’t think it properly tries to get admin permissions when it should and therefore the update doesn’t work. I think this is particularly true if Firefox (another Mozilla product) is already running. Whatever the recovery mechanism does, doesn’t work any better.

It gets so boggled that when I try and manually install it, from inside the program via the Help menu, or by downloading and re-running the installed from Mozilla, it STILL doesn’t work.

Ninite Review – Online Software Install Service

Enter Ninite. I can go to www.ninite.com and click Thunderbird (and a bunch of other software, if I want) and get an installer. When I run the installer, it checks to see if I already have the software, and if so, it updates the installation. Whatever process Ninite uses, it doesn’t get hung up in the same way as the official Mozilla installer, most likely because it does not bother with whatever version check or recovery file the original erred installation generated. It just goes in and updates all the files, without any checking or asking.

Which, brings me to the other amazing thing about Ninite. The installers are all fully automated. There is no user interaction required. The defaults are all used for a new install, or the update leaves all of your previous settings intact. Obviously, if you want to do some customizing, this isn’t the route for you, but in 90 percent of the cases when I install software, I just click Next, Next, Next, Finish, anyway.

There is one exception. When I install software with toolbars, or that wants to make Bing my default search engine, or whatever, I click NO. Sometimes, developers get tricky and that isn’t enough. Foxit Reader, a PDF reader, pulled a stunt like that a while back where you had to make some very unintuitive clicks to avoid getting some junkware toolbar with your installation. Fortunately, Ninite is run by good guys, for good guys. All toolbars and other extra software, no matter how “valuable” are automatically declined with a Ninite installation.

Ninite Tips and Tricks

At this point, Ninite is already a golden member of the Go-To online service club, but wait– there’s more

Ninite does more than just install one software program. Using the super simple check box interface, you can select one, two or even dozens of software packages to install. The file Ninite delivers will install all of the selected software with a single execution and not a single second of user intervention. This comes in very handy to install lots of software on a new computer or to re-install a ton of programs on a restored machine.

It gets even better. Remember how I said that if you already have the software installed then Ninite will just update it for you? Well that works for multiple software installations as well. So if Thunderbird is updating, but Spotify is new, Ninite knows enough to update Thunderbird and do a new installation of Spotify, again with no user interaction.

Now, here is the best software upgrade method you will ever use. Create a Ninite installer of all your usual software programs. Save that file to your desktop, or other handy spot on your computer. Now, just run that installer every so often to keep ALL of your software up to date, with no hassle and no junk toolbars other other garbage. Any software already running the current version is just skipped. You don’t have to create a new Ninite installer file. The installer automatically connects, downloads and installs the most recent version of software available.

For example, if you update Java via the package from Oracle, you’ll get a vampire process installed on your computer that runs at startup and keeps running 24 hours per day, seven days per week. It’s sole function is to occasionally check for Java updates. Turning it off takes a lot more than you might think thanks to a bug that prevents you from turning off the Java updater unless you manually launch it with admin privileges. The problem is, once you kill it, it will come back with EVERY SINGLE UPDATE. But, if you update via Ninite, they’ll keep that little junkware app from re-installing on your computer.

Obviously, Ninite only works with free or open-source software, but that covers a lot of ground on my machine, ranging from web browsers to email clients, to image viewers to developer tools. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Windows Live suite isn’t available which means you’ll have to watch out for seaport.exe getting installed and then kill Seaport on your own.

Give Ninite a try, you won’t be sorry.

Easy Software Installation Online is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

When Google Chrome first came out, the first thing people noticed was how fast it started. The chorus of users claiming that Firefox had gotten too big, too bloated and too slow grew louder. Firefox developers worked hard to streamline the code and make Firefox faster and more efficient, but for some users, the improvements were not enough. Much like me, they began to use Chrome as their quick browser and Firefox as their power browser. Of course, the constantly running googleudatetaskuser process annoyed me enough to keep it from leaping to the front of the good resource usage pack.

It turns out that Firefox’s slower loading may not be its own fault. Users who load their browser down with numerous new addons and plugins are adding not just functionality but more code to run at startup as well. The result is a slow loading web browser that cannot be fixed by making Firefox faster.

No longer willing to take the blame for slow starting web browsers, Mozilla’s Firefox development team began calling add-on developers out by publishing a listing of the most popular Firefox addons showing how much they slow down the boot process of Firefox.

One popular developer plugin, called Firebug, slows the startup time of Firefox by 74 percent. Put another way, the load time of Firefox is nearly twice as long if you have Firebug running. This is sobering news, both for Firebug developers, and Firebug users.

As a website developer and freelance technology writer, I both publish and write for numerous websites. I have the Firebug extension installed on my Firefox browser because I occasionally need some of its features. For example, Firebug can show me which links on a webpage are nofollow links. It is also necessary to run Google’s Page Speed plugin which analyzes how quickly a webpage loads and provides suggestions to make it load faster.

I do not need to use Firebug all of the time, however. In fact, I only use it a few times each week. But, with Firebug installed, my Firefox browser starts slower, much slower. By disabling Firebug and only re-enabling it when I actually need its functionality, my browser starts much more quickly. (I have long disabled unused add-ons to make Firefox snappier, but I never suspected Firebug of being a big speed killer.)

With this new spotlight on add-on speed, developers may refocus some attention on making their plugins more efficient. As a result, Firefox will start faster and load more quickly. In turn, some users may find the startup time of Firefox so quick without numerous bloated add-ons installed that they don’t need a “quick browser” anymore and they can just use Firefox all of the time.

It’s a win-win situation for Mozilla and users. For developers, it’s time to re-evaluate how well their code is written.

Of course, this is only half the problem. Since Firefox is still the only major web browser that requires a full restart to enable or disable an add-on, users are forced to decide what functionality they want to enable ahead of time or wait for a Firefox restart when they change the state of a plugin. No matter how fast Firefox starts up starting (or restarting) it three or four times to get the right functions working makes is slower and less usable than its competition which already allow on-the-fly enabling and disabling of add-ons.

Firefox Calls Out Slow Loading Add-ons is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

A blog post announced that Google Chrome beta is getting a built-in PDF reader. That means that I will no longer have to have a temporary directory to download PDF files into manually just so that I can click on the downloaded file to open it up in my PDF viewer. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer have been able to handle this for years via useful, easy to use, extensions and plug-ins.

The developers of Chrome no doubt claim that their browser lacked such basic functionality because of security reasons. I never like this answer. As the user, I should get to make the decisions about how I do or do not want such things implemented. It’s the same reason that I hate how Microsoft IE has no option to automatically re-open the last browsing session for "privacy reasons." But, it is what it is.

Now, Chrome has a PDF viewer installed by default. When I click PDF links, they should just open and display within Chrome instead of having to open them later in Foxit Reader. According to the blog, the PDF files will be sandboxed. That means that today’s run of the mill PDF exploits won’t work when the file is viewed in Chrome. Guess the hackers will have to come up with something new. In the meantime, it would be nice if Adobe could pull their heads out long enough to make their reader more secure. Oh, and lighter and less bloated would be nice too.

With a PDF reader built into Chrome, the last major feature missing that is keeping Chrome from becoming anything more than my "lightweight" browser is a Print Preview function. Nothing prints with less consistency or more waste than webpages, which makes print preview a critical function for anyone who prints anything off of the Internet more than once in a blue moon. As a freelance technology writer, I need to be able to not only find data and information, but to digest it, compare it to other data, and then keep that data should anyone ever raise any questions about it. Something like Zotero, or OneNote, or a bunch of screenshots helps, but nothing makes an editor feel warm and fuzzy like good old paper.

The ongoing irony about Chrome is that as a browser by the techies and for the techies, it has managed to produce some amazing features, functions, and speed, but it has some glaring holes that are very big deals for the average computer user that Google insists should just be fixed by an extension, or when they really don’t like it, that you "don’t really need it anyway."

Here is to the new PDF viewer. May you be as stable and garbage-free as the built-in Flash support. In fact, may Google build in all Adobe products and extensions so that finally someone can do so in a way that isn’t overstuffed, unsecure, and instable.

Google Chrome Built-In PDF Viewer is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Actually, I usually just do a Google search for how to use the software feature. It’s faster.

That’s why it is a very important aspect of business strategy for successfully satisfying your user community to always ensure that your product manuals are not only available online, but easy to find, and most importantly, indexable by search engine spiders.

LastPass Extension Won’t AutoLogin

I have been using LastPass, which has both a Firefox plugin, as well as a LastPass extension for Chrome, and even a LastPass Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Basically, LastPass is a cross-platform password manager for anyone who spends a lot of time online and needs usernames and passwords on more than a handful of accounts. I’ve tried LastPass before, but came back while looking for a means to improve online security for my small business as a freelance writer.

One annoying glitch I ran into is that LastPass won’t autologin to some of my websites. I checked the LastPass vault and checked the autologon box, but LastPass did not autologon to many websites, especially my own freelance writing projects, like my personal finance blog.

As I tried to troubleshoot LastPass and find out what the error was logging in automatically, it occurred to me that I might be making an assumption about how the LastPass autologin feature works.

You see, it isn’t that the auto-login from LastPass wasn’t working at all, it’s that it would not work on certain websites even after I turned the auto-logon on. What I couldn’t figure out was what it was about some websites that made them work with LastPass and what it was about other websites that broke LastPass autologin. The problem was that I was trying to learn what the issue was with the websites. Turns out that is not the bug.

I finally noticed the issue when I went to set a new autologin account for a website and crossed my fingers to hope that this was one of the websites that the autologon would work for. It did, and I was happy. Then, I added a new account for the same website and suddenly my LastPass auto-login was broken. And, the light bulb went on.

Fix LastPass AutoLogin Feature

Obviously, you can only log-on to a website with one username and password at a time. There are ways around this, of course, but at the time you load a website with a login screen, you can only enter one username and one matching password. If you have more than one user account on that website, you have to pick which one to login with. In the case of LastPass, you would have to let it know which account to use to autologin.

I thought I was doing that by only checking the AutoLogin box on one username and password. Any other accounts for that web address were not set to autologin.

That is one way for the user interface to work, but it isn’t the only way. Another user might say that if there is more than one account, then the software should default to asking which account to use, which is how Last Pass does work today. If you have more than one account, it will not autologin, no matter how you have the boxes checked.

For my WordPress blogs, fixing LastPass’ autologin was easy enough. For security purposes (Wow, security really permeates everything these days, doesn’t it?) I do not use “admin” as my user account on my blogs. However, since I set up an Admin account in the first place, LastPass duitifully remembered the username and password. Actually, LastPass imported the username and password that were saved in Firefox, but the effect is the same.

For each of my websites, from how to make money writing online to my blog about adult ADHD tips, there were two user accounts. One was my “real” account, and one was the “admin” account. Since there were two accounts defined, neither one would autologin when I asked it to. After deleting the admin account from the LastPass vault, the other account does autologin without any trouble.

It’s one of those things that no matter how you design your software, someone will think of another way it could, or should, work. I’d like to see a button or checkbox that allows the user to set an autologin with a specific account regardless of the existence of any other accounts for that website. That way, the other usernames and passwords could be saved in the LastPass vault, even if they are never used for autofill or anything. Even better, would be a way to load a webpage while pressing the SHIFT key, or something, and in that case NOT auto-logging on, which would then allow the user to choose an autofill option.

Regardless, now that I understand how this nuance of the Last Pass password manager works, I can make it do what I want it to do, and that is the most important thing about good software design.

Now, if only I could get Microsoft to implement a way to restore the last session in Internet Explorer automatically the next time the browser is started instead of them insisting that they know better than the user, that would be great.

LastPass Firefox Add-On Autologin Problem Solved is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I’ve been getting an error about how a redirection will never complete on my Google Chrome browser on my main desktop PC for a couple of months now. I’ve mostly ignored it since it was working just fine on my laptop and netbook computers both with Google Chrome and Firefox. (I don’t really use Internet Explorer much any more.) Now, it seems to be happening everywhere.

After typing in www.google.com/webmasters (or selecting a link or bookmark for the same), I click on the button to Log into to Google Webmaster tools, but that is where it ends. This is the error I get while using Firefox.

Yes, I have cookies enabled, AdBlocker turned off (or in the case of Google Chrome, not installed), and NoScript set to allow all google.com JavaScripts.

Internet Explorer 9 beta fails too, although with an even less helpful error message.

Check out my latest personal finance article about Citibank rewards ThankYou network reward program.

A quick Google (ironically) search mentions clearing out the browser cookies, which I have tried to no avail.

Basically, right now, I can’t access Google Webmaster tools on my desktop PC. I get the feeling it is only a matter of time until it affects all of my computer systems. The only change recently is that I have started using the LastPass plugin. That might be the culprit. I say that because unlike most Firefox extensions, LastPass does work across multiple browser platforms including Internet Explorer and Chrome. I guess I’ll try to disable it and see if that gets me anywhere. If not, I’ll live for now, but things will be getting less pretty as time goes on.

Hopefully someone will figure this out and get their USEFUL response and solution ranked highly enough in Google’s new Instant Search functionality for me to be able to find it.

Rant over.

Carry on.

Update: The problem with logging into Google website has something to do with the LastPass password management tool. After setting all google.com to NEVER for autofill or autologin, the issue went away. Now, if I get time, I can look into WHY that creates a problem with logging into Google websites.

Google Webmaster Tool Error Spreading is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Has anyone ever tried to count how many users run Firefox with the NoScript add-on?

How many users have JavaScript disabled in Google Chrome?

Do a lot of IE users have JavaScript turned off or restricted somehow?

Most importantly, if you added up all of the users with JavaScript unsupported or JavaScript disabled in their web browser, how big of a user group would they be as a percentage of all web users? Would that number be larger than the number of people still using IE 6? If so, wouldn’t it be prudent for website owners and webmasters to ensure that their websites function correctly without JavaScript, especially when so many of the elements using JavaScript are superficial like animated menus?

I for one test every WordPress theme or website template in Firefox with NoScript running to see what it looks like when it “breaks” because JavaScript is not enabled in a browser. If it still doesn’t render and function at a basic level, then I won’t use it.

Does anyone else do something similar?

Can the noscript tag be used effectively enough to compensate for non-JavaScript enabled browsers?

Support for NoScript JavaScript Disabled Browsers is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

The basic speed dial window all browsers have.

I usually don’t like to post stubs or preliminary articles like this, but I went all reviewer on Mozilla.org this morning and, of course, ended up writing a review of my favorite Firefox add-on of all time, Speed Dial. As that review got longer I felt myself wanting to show people how to really maximize productivity with this Firefox plug-in by configuring Speed Dial the way I have ended up tweaking it and setting it up. Don’t get me wrong, my why isn’t the only way, but when you see the power and customization of the Firefox Speed Dial plug-in in use in my setup, you can see why I think that Speed Dial is the most important Firefox add-on anyone can have. In fact, it’s the one real drawback to Google Chrome for me right now.

There is a Speed Dial extension for Google Chrome on the Google extensions website, but it is a pale imitation of this powerful Firefox add-on. It doesn’t have dial groups which is the main powerful feature of the Speed Dial plugin.

Anyway, it would be irresponsible of me to get into posting my Speed Dial Firefox extension review right now when I have deadlines barreling down on my like runaway trucks with no brakes on the side of a steep mountain. However, I don’t want anyone following the link I threw onto my review at mozilla.org to arrive and wonder where in the heck the review I promised is. Therefore, I’m going to post a couple of screen shots that I think will help any user with even a little bit of power browsing experience to understand the kind of productivity gains that are possible with this plugin.

If that is you, either install the plugin and start messing around with it. Just got to Tools -> Add-ons -> Options and start customizing away. (I recommend setting up either a Speed Dial icon on your toolbars, or doing like I did and setting the right click on a page to include the context menu option to Add to Speed Dial. You can make that work by right-clicking on the tab if you prefer, but I’m used to right-clicking on the page itself when I want to do something. One of the best things about this add-on is how much it can be customized to work exactly the way you need it to in order to help out with your own time management by making browsing faster and easier.)

The quick, quick, version of how to use Speed Dial to speed up your Internet browsing and boost your online power goes like this:

1. Use Dial Groups – Every web browser offers some sort of dial based start up screen. Opera was first, but Google Chrome has one now too. IE has a similar concept although it is done via text links instead of actual configurable dials. What makes Speed Dial great is the ability to have MORE THAN ONE page of dials.
2. Set Speed Dial to show up in new tabs instead of waiting to click something. Every time you press CTL-T you’ll get a list of your speed dials to use. Just make your current homepage the first dial on the first dial group to keep instant access to it.
3. Customize the dial group tabs – You can change the colors to make tabs easier to find. Just don’t go crazy or you’ll hate it.
4. Customize the dial groups – Need more than 9 websites for one dial group? No problem. One of the configurations is how many sites to show on a speed dial group. You can change both the default, and even better change on a per group basis. You can have 12 dials under Work and 6 dials under Facebook Games or vice versa, depending on your lifestyle – If you have a widescreen monitor take advantage of that width by setting your default dial group configuration to 3 rows and 4 columns.

Lastly, if you are a power user looking for maximum time savings, you’ll end up with a lot of dials that link to a lot of webpages. By default, the speed dial thumbnails refresh frequently which means you could end up with a slow running Firefox when running Speed Dial and switching through several dials because thumbnails are being generated for each site no matter how fast you click. (See the link for details.)

There is lots more power. Read the docs or poke around the settings to see what else you can do to improve online productivity with Speed Dial. Or, come back here in the next day or two when I get time to go on full tilt. Even easier, grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed to make sure you get the updated Firefox plugin reviews as soon as they come online.

Then you can check out my post about Firefox personas if you need to read more about the Mozilla web browser.

Best Firefox Addon For More Productivity is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

When you spend a lot of time in the world of technology it is easy to get jaded. New features that are promoted (self-promoted, and then echoed by lazy writers) are almost never as useful as they are supposed to be, and half the time, they are not even new. I almost ruined my eyes looking at computer monitors full of accolades for Microsoft Internet Explorer 7′s “new” tabbed browsing feature, especially since I had been a power-user of tabs in web browsing since they came out in Firefox years before.

When new features are both truly useful and actually new, like the Ribbon Interface in Office 2010 (updated from a partial integration in Microsoft Office 2007), they are often met with initial resistance.

As a freelance technology writer I not only spend a lot of time in the tech world, I am actually forced to look at and use new software features regardless of how useful I could possibly find them because a client needs a review of new software utilities or a customized newsletter could benefit from a comparison of program features.

Check out a review of Citibank Thank You network rewards program.

The other thing that happens to us technology types is that we stop reading about what a program does. We most certainly do not watch videos that show us how to use new features. (How many seconds of your life does it waste to watch someone show you how to click File then New on a training video?) Fortunately, most of the time it works out just fine because when you are used to how software works, you know where to look for functions you need. However, from time to time, I miss out on a cool new feature or a great new function that would increase my productivity.

Firefox 3.6 Coolest New Feature

When it comes to software development, there are two kinds of functionality. One type of functionality affects the usefulness of the product. These functions make the software, better, faster, easier to use, and so on. The other type of functionality makes the computer software more fun to use, or just makes it look nicer. These days, it seems like there is a lot of action in the latter category.

Most of the “improvements” in the user interface design realm are actually just ways to make a software product look nicer, or most commonly, to make it so that you can superficially customize the application. Think of it as the equivalent of being able to add bumper stickers to your software.

For the most part, I don’t have much use for these beautification features. A computer is, what a computer is, and while using my own wallpaper is fun, it doesn’t really matter what the wallpaper is when I’m switching between eight full-screen windows in a desperate race to beat an important deadline.

As you can imagine, I haven’t played around much with Firefox’s personas feature.

This morning, however, I was bored (actually, I was procrastinating and rendering my ADD planner worthless) and I ended up on the Firefox Personas page after re-installing the Firefox NoScript Plugin.

While I don’t have much need for a new persona for my web browser, I was clicking around to see what was on the Mozilla website when I noticed something happen to my default Firefox browser.

When you hover over the sample picture graphic of a Firefox persona, it previews what that persona would look like if you installed it on your Firefox 3.6 installation. Tons of applications do previews like this, but the fun part is that Firefox previews the persona on your real installation. That is, the browser you are currently using to browse the available personas actually changes when you hover your mouse over the preview.

Now this is fun.

Normally, would have to download and install the browser extension or browser skin in order to “play around” with what it would look like. Then, when I am finished wasting time, I would switch back, and if I remembered, uninstall all the different personas I downloaded to check out. Hopefully they all uninstalled cleanly and there were no residual effects, although that is never a guarantee.

But, with the Firefox persona preview functionality I can see what my browser would look like with a hundred different personas, all without downloading or installing anything. So, I can see what my Firefox would look like if I installed the Kelly Brook persona (First, calculate the odds of the wife using my computer and Firefox…). Or, for a more whimsical (and socially acceptable at a client site) persona I can check out the Snoopy persona.

Here is my usual Firefox (the default) persona:

Here is the Kelly Brook persona:

In the end, personas are a play thing, like putting up a Go Buffs sign on my home office wall, but sometimes, playing is good. After all, all work and no play make Jack go crazy and try to chop up his family at the Overlook Hotel.

Firefox Personas Preview Feature is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Update: And we’re back again

It looks like the issue is caused by having an unsaved “custom theme.” Don’t think you made a custom theme? Think again.

Any change to the “personalize” settings like background image (desktop image), colors, font-size, etc… results in a custom theme being generated with those changes. In other words, if your desktop background is not a stock photo that came with Windows 7, you have made a custom theme. So, that picture of your kids, or dog, or cats, or whatever, is a customization, and it has not been saved with the rest of your personal choices as a theme yet.
Click save and give it any name you like. My Logitiech mouse buttons started working again in Firefox right after I did that.

Update 02/13/2010: It appears that my cruise up and cruise down buttons are once again broken inside of Firefox. Still working on it…again…

Not long ago, I complained bitterly about how disabling transparency in Windows 7 caused cruise up and cruise down to stop working in Firefox. My wireless mouse, part of a wireless keyboard / mouse combo from Logitech, had until recently been cruising (scrolling fast) up and down within Firefox with no trouble. Then, shortly after the latest Firefox update (I didn’t notice right away, so I can’t say for sure) these mouse buttons stopped working.

As it turns out Logitech’s keyboard and mouse mapping software, called SetPoint, has numerous well documented errors and glitches inside of it. For Logitech, it seems to be a low priority since the mass market user it targets doesn’t generally make use of all the advanced features modern mouse and keyboards have. It is misleading to advertise that their product does something that actually doesn’t work, but that is another matter.

Windows 7 Update Fixes Keyboard Function Keys or Shortcuts

The January 26, 2010 Windows Update pushed out by Microsoft includes “stability and reliability” updates including on that targets “Keyboard function keys or keyboard shortcuts…that may not work correctly.”

This is interesting because the Cruise Control feature on my Logitech mouse is not the default setting for those buttons. Rather, it is a function assigned to those buttons manually through UberOptions which is the software that Logitech should be releasing instead of the choke-ware it puts out.

This mouse button assignment works very similarly to programming a keyboard function key or shortcut. One goes into the UberOptions interface and the selects which mouse button to program and then what functionality to assign to that button.

I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but it would be interesting if this Microsoft fix corrected the mouse button error in Firefox that I was getting.

Have a nice day.

(Needed to add that last part to avoid the Google no man’s land of sub-300 word pages of content.

Did Windows Update Fix Logitech Mouse Cruise Control Issue In Firefox is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Sometimes I just can’t help but wonder what is it that makes computers so difficult?

Today, I noticed that my Cruise Down and Cruise Up buttons on my Logitech mouse stopped working in Firefox. The odd thing is that they continued to work fine in Chrome, IE, Word, and so on. But, for whatever reason, my Logitech Cruise Mouse buttons broke in Firefox.

Since there was recently an upgrade to Firefox, I figured there was some sort of glitch. My first guess was that someone’s accessibility settings or compatibility settings were messed up. Accessibility settings allow people with disabilities or impairments to tweak how a program behaves. For example, you can’t really expect someone with one arm to hold the shift key while clicking the mouse button. I’ve never really understood why this comes pre-installed on Windows and so many other systems when the percentage of users that need that functionality has to be pretty small. I’m guessing it is political.

So, I checked through all the Windows 7 Accessibility Settings, which have been nicely renamed to Ease of Use Settings. I wonder how many people see that heading and thing, "Gee, I’d like for my computer to be easier to use. I’ll go ahead and turn on the easier mode."

Anyway, it seems that none of those settings were on. Just to be sure I checked and unchecked all the boxes to get everything manually reset. Still, my cruise control scroll buttons wouldn’t work in Firefox.

Next up, an Internet search reveals that several Logitech products suffer from horrible glitches in their software implementations. Unfortunately, the cruise up and cruise down features are one of these trouble areas. However, none of the specific models mentioned matched up with my Logitech Wireless 3200 Laser Keyboard Mouse combo. Nonetheless, I read through several of the threads to find nothing that worked.

I had forgotten just how bad Logitech’s SetPoint software was, because I have been using UberObtions on my computer for a while now, and it actually does what SetPoint should do! Unfortunately, it turns out that while UberOptions fixes SetPoint glitches and allows any key to be mapped to any function setting, it doesn’t really do anything other than expose all the hidden options in the Logitech software. In other words, if it’s broke at the Logitech level, it’s broke in UberOptions too.

What kept bugging me was that the Cruise Control mouse buttons worked fine in all the other software. So, I dug into the about:config settings in Firefox. It seemed the cause of Firefox problem with cruise up and cruise down features would be in the settings related to mousewheel. Another troubleshooting article suggested using the mousewheel about:config settings to fix some other mouse button problems in Firefox. However, that didn’t work either.

Although I like Google Chrome, I’m not ready to give up my array of Firefox plugins that make it do exactly what I need it to do. My NoScript Whitelist alone would take forever to reconfigure on Chrome.

About the time I was ready to give up, I was 5 or 6 pages deep in the search results on Google for my tenth try at crafting a search that would return useful results instead of gamers that have trouble with WoW and Logitech mouse reviews, I stumbled upon a programmer forum where a user asked a question about a glitch in Firefox when something called wmode was set to transparent.

Sometime in the past few days, I had changed the wallpaper on my Windows 7 PC and used the Personalize feature to tweak some colors as well. I also turned off the transparency of the title bar, because it reminds me of a shower door, not a cool user interface design.

It was a long shot, but I was tired, and getting ready to just flat out give up fixing Cruise Control in Firefox on my Logitech wireless mouse. So, I right clicked the desktop, chose personalize, window color, and rechecked the box that says Enable Transparency. And, you can about guess what happened based on the first line of this post.

Yes, folks, Disabling Transparency breaks Cruise Control Mouse Buttons in Firefox if you are using a Logitech Wireless Mouse and the SetPoint software. Can you freaking believe it?

Cruise Control Buttons Stop Working in Firefox is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC