Cruise Control Buttons Stop Working in Firefox
What in the name of all that is holy is going on here?!?
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?
MediaFire Takedown Notice Threatens Mozilla Over SkipScreen
I’ve been thinking about writing up a review for Firefox plug-in SkipScreen for a while now. SkipScreen has quickly become an important time saver with file sharing sites getting more and more belligerent about making even one time users wait excessive amounts of time and jump through more and more hoops.
What is truly ironic is that 99% of Mediafire’s business is hosting copyright violating files which it takes down one at a time in an effort to “steal” the value of the copyrighted files. Then, it has the nerve to demand that an organization take down a file that does not violate any copyright laws.
You can read the MediaFire Takedown Notice Response here.
It seems as though the EFF lawyer may have missed the most important thing. Even if SkipScreen did do something illegal (which it does not), the same legal precedent that says you can’t sue an ISP for providing the connection that allows a user to do something illegal (like downloading copyrighted files from MediaFire) would apply to this situation.
Mozilla cannot be held liable for UNAFFILIATED USERS violating the terms of service of a website by using UNAFFILIATED SOFTWARE. If Mediafire has a legitimate complaint, it must pursue it against SkipScreen and its users directly. Of course, it isn’t doing that because it has no legitimate legal claim and would quickly lose any such action. Instead it is trying to scare Mozilla with the threat of having to pay legal expenses in hopes that they will cave in before Mediafire has to actually prove anything or cite a relevant violation of law.
It’s the oldest trick in the book, legal extortion. Make it so expensive for the party that is in the right to fend off the party that is wrong, that the good guys decide it isn’t worth fighting.
Shame on Mediafire for its outrageous hypocrisy and its shameful attempt at legal intimidation.
Firefox Beats Chrome But…
Recently, I wrote about why Firefox is better than Chrome in a head-to-head browser comparison between Firefox 3.5 vs. Google Chrome 2. In the end, it basically came down to certain specific features that I just cannot live without because I use them on a daily basis to increase my productivity.
However, I do switch back and forth between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox a lot. In doing so, I have developed a list of things that I wish Firefox did that Chrome already does. For the most part, these are little things that make surfing the web faster or easier, rather than make or break requirements. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t really like to see these Google Chrome features show up in the next version of Firefox.
Chrome Better Than Firefox Features
The biggest one here has to be speed. You have to give it to Google and their open-source browser project Chromium. What they have put together is hands down the fastest web browser. Each browser developer out there from Microsoft, to Opera, to Apple’s Safari, all have specific tests that they construct to showcase their browser’s speed. But, when it comes to real-world browsing speed, Chrome is undeniably the fastest.
Where Internet browsing surfing speed really counts is in a user’s ability to get to the Internet and then do what they need to do without having to wait for the browser program to load or refresh, or whatever. Start the timer when you click to run the program and stop the timer when your favorite website or homepage has finished loading and nothing comes close to Chrome’s speed regardless of which carefully chosen website the developer wants to use.
The reason is that Google’s Chrome browser has the fastest start-up speed. True, it cheats a little bit by displaying the interface and giving control to the user before it is actually ready to do anything productive (it keeps loading in the background), but even if you account for that extra boot up time, Chrome is still the fastest to start.
Firefox, on the other hand, is a NIGHTMARE to start-up, especially if you purposely left a bunch of tabs open to automatically reload the next time you started Firefox. Here is the rest of the list. (I do know that some of these things can be done by plug-ins or add-ons for Firefox, and that is one of the great things about Firefox, but, frankly, I already have a TON of plug-ins loaded. I’d like to start cutting down on the number of Firefox add-ons I have, not increase them.)
Things I Wish Firefox Did More Like Chrome
- Load Faster
- Search from the Address Bar – It’s awesome, but it doesn’t do this.
- Paste and Go in the Address Bar – Nothing has saved me more keystrokes.
- Incognito style privacy – I get why Firefox does privacy mode the way it does, but I really like being able to have a private session going concurrently with a normal browsing session. Getting to choose between the two types would be ideal.
- One Tab = One Process – For research purposes, sometimes I right-click a dozen or more search results before I go look at what opened up in those tabs. Sometimes one of those websites is junk and ends up hanging the whole smash. In Chrome, I open the task manager find the garbage site and shut it down without even looking at in. In Firefox I have to wait until I get back control and then hunt down the offending site myself.
How about you? What features from Chrome would you like to see in Firefox?
Bizarre Internet Explorer 8 Favorites Quirk
How weird is this?
I’m using Internet Explorer 8 today; not by choice, but because some Microsoft websites whine about you using other browsers and I was doing research for a Microsoft related article. I have a favorite of the page I want to open. (The proper term is bookmark, but Microsoft insists on pretending that they invent everything, including all the stuff they steal from other software, so they didn’t use the term bookmark, like everyone else.) So, I press CNTRL+B.
Now, Control + B is actually the keyboard shortcut for another browser (Firefox). As proof that Microsoft knows full well what the real terminology for a saved Internet location in a browser should be, CTL+B opens the "Organize Favorites" window in Internet Explorer. This is a nice touch of Microsoft user interface usability from the boys in Redmond to understand that those of who don’t just use the software that came preinstalled on our computers are very likely to be used to the keyboard shortcuts of other browsers.
Still, it’s a little bit unexpected, because I’m expecting the sidebar or toolbar, or whatever that opens when you click on the little gold start to show up, but the Favorites window is fine, too. What is very weird, however, is trying to open a bookmark from this window.
Technically, the Organize Favorites window is not where you are supposed to be browsing and opening your favorites from. Nonetheless, following the standard Windows user interface paradigm, right-clicking on a bookmark brings up a context window which includes the option to Open the IE favorite that was clicked on.
At this point, I’m a little bit bummed, because what I really want to do is open the bookmark in a new tab, but it is still better than nothing, so I choose Open from the pop-up menu and…nothing.
I choose Open again. Again, nothing happens. After a few tries, I roll my eyes, give up, close the Organize Favorites window, click on the gold star, and open the bookmark from the sidebar. A few minutes later I switch over to Firefox for something else, and notice that there are 4 tabs open. Those four tabs are the ones that opened when I chose open.
Seriously?
Just to prove it to myself I tried it again, and sure enough, choosing Open from the context menu in Organize Favorites in IE 8 opens the bookmark in Firefox.
It is undoubtedly because Firefox is set as my default browser, but I still assumed that choosing Open in a IE favorites window would open the favorite in Internet Explorer.
I wonder if this behavior is intentional, or if in all of their testing, no one ever noticed this behavior. It is likely a felony at Microsoft HQ to have another browser installed as your default browser, so maybe it just never came up. Either way, Microsoft amused me today.
