Hi James -- and thank you very much for the
reply.
Sometimes I am deeply troubled about how come that good things don't
manage to get the critical "take off" speed... Mozile is one of them:
there's little reference to it, no alternative to it, and tremendous
potential for it. Anyways...
I describe m procedure in some detail for the benefit of other
potentially interested users.
What I did, was to "prepare" a special installation of Firefox 2, such
as I could continue using Mozile. My Firefox was already hacked, in the
sense that it is completely independent from the OS (XP). It lauches
via a .bat file, and the profile and the app folders are on locations
chosen by me on a separate drive. I modified the batch file such as I
could use a second process in an independent way. Therefore, now,
Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 can run at the same time, without interfering
with one another, using different profiles/settings. I even changed the
icon of Firefox2-Mozile app, such as I can tell the windows apart.
The two Firefoxes use separate Scrapbook settings, sharing only one
folder in common. I usually run Firefox 3: when I discover a page of
interest, something which I want to read and annotate offline, I
capture the page with Scrapbook in the common folder, I switch to
Firefox2-Mozilezied, edit the page, save it, and then I can move the
edited file in its desired location in the main Scrapbook folder tree
visible from Firefox 3 (Firefox2 needs to be restarted, though, for
Scrapbook to show the addition).
If one really want to maximize the results, one could portabilize the
Firefox2 installation, adding plugins which otherwise one may want to
keep away from polluting the system folders (I recall the good old days
of Netscape for Mac -- a plugin was just as the name says, and as
should be, staying in the plugin folder; today, a so-called plugin -
Acrobat, QuickTime among the most noxious, just don't work if they
don't install their mother applications, which one may one to keep out
of one's machine; but the same is, regretably, true for VLC or
OpenOffice so-called "plugins").
I tried the 0.8dev version of Mozile. Perhaps for some minimal
operations (cut-paste) could be useful. Unfortunately, the enhanced
features are the important ones for purposes like mine. The
installation acts weirdly: the caret does not show, and the extended
toolbar appears and disappears without me being able to detect a
pattern. Upon trying the "font color" feature, nothing happened in the
text, but the color changed in the menu (I tried red, and the letters I
typed replaced the label for "red" in the drop-down menu and were
colored red!).
Nevertheless, I am happy to know that you are still interested in
working on Mozile. So far, the solution described above should satisfy
any seriously interested user. I for one will be happy to wait for as
long as it takes for a FF 3 compatible version, and am grateful for
your effort.
Sincerely,
Mircea
James A. Overton wrote:
Hi
Mircea,
(This is a duplicate of the message I sent to the Mozile list.)
Sorry for the long delay replying to your email.
There's good news and bad news...
The bad news is that the problem with the Mozile 0.6 extension in FF3
looks like a serious one. Mozile 0.6 loads files into the target page
from "chrome" URLs (the browser's own special files) and FF 1 & 2
allowed this. However FF3 does not allow linking to chrome URLs anymore
-- which is probably a good security decision. In short: Mozile 0.6
just won't work in FF3.
The good news is that Mozile 0.8 is smarter about these security
issues. I've done some quick hacks to get the (incomplete) Mozile 0.8
extension to work in FF3. You can try installing it from the link
below:
http://overton.ca/james/mozile/mozile-0.8.0dev.xpi
Once it's installed, customize the toolbar and add the Mozile button to
it. You'll be able to edit arbitrary web pages as before. (The
"enhanced editing" features aren't complete.)
If this works for you then I can try to find a little time for bug
fixes in the coming weeks. If it isn't going to be a good replacement
for your old workflow with Mozile 0.6 and FF2, then I'm afraid there
isn't too much more I can do.
Best regards,
James
On 2008-07-28, at 1:46 PM, contulmmiv wrote:
Hello
James/Max et al. --
I have been using with great success Mozile in conjunction with
Scrapbook for online research/annotation of selected web content.
Everything worked fine with Firefox 2.
I recently upgraded to Firefox 3 and Mozile seems to not work.
I tried both Mozile 0.6.3.1 and Mozile 0.7.6. The symptoms are
identical:
* by means of the Mr tech Local Install extension, I override the
version limitations, and Mozile installs fine
* what happens, is that upon attempting to edit any web page, even
though Mozile produces the message "content now editable", nothing can
be typed. The toolbar, also, doesn't show up
* however, when using the "test boxes" provided here
http://mozile.mozdev.org/ and here
chrome://mozile/content/demo/basic/mozileTest1.html, the toolbar shows
up, albeit in different positions: in the first case, it is located in
the upper part of the web page itself, scrolling together with the
scrolling of the page. In the second case, it shows up in the normal
position, that is, in the "Mozile Toolbar" itself. Typing and editing
within the box is possible, but not outside the box. As soon as one
clicks outside of the test box, the toolbar disappears again, and
typing has no effect.
These symptoms seem to indicate that there is no fundamental
incompatibility at stake. I wonder if one of the default settings in
Firefox 3 may be responsible, preventing the normal operation of
Mozile?
I very much hope that this is the case, or something very simple,
because Mozile has proved to be irreplaceable for the purposes stated
above. I know of no other tool which can do the same...
Looking forward to hearing, hopefully, good news.
Sincerely,
Mircea
_______________________________________________
Mozile mailing list
Mozile-hfdxhZW8pNUdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org
https://www.mozdev.org/mailman/listinfo/mozile