DISCOVERY Re: Why is Firefox such a beast??

[Beartooth]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:03:44 +0000, I Beartooth wrote:

> I'm running Firefox under F8 and F9 on five different machines, and it's
> a pain on every one of them, albeit in slightly different ways; but the
> differences differ, too.
> 
> 	The first thing they have in common is that it takes forever to
> launch -- when it does launch. The second is that it mostly doesn't. It
> will try, and the little blue dots will circle for a while, and the
> window list on the panel will show a mark for it -- for a while.
> Sometimes one or another window will flash up and disappear, usually too
> fast even to identify.
	[...]

	Until such time as I gird up my electronic loins for another 
lunge at the Cox Method, I've been cutting back and back -- and mostly 
having to launch Firefox from the CLI. After a while, I started removing 
whatever extension it seemed from the messages on the terminal to have 
been trying to deal with before any failure. 

	Then a couple times I went from machine to machine, trying to 
remove such an extension from all four -- and absolutely could not get it 
to launch on one. So I went looking, with nautilus, through my .mozilla 
folder. I didn't find any method to do the job I wanted to that way, but 
I did stumble on something else, which looked relevant and seems to've 
helped.

	There are two things I've long made a practice of moving from 
machine to machine, either with scp or by sneakermail, whichever seemed 
easier at the time : FEBE, and my collection of desktop background 
pictures (aka wallpaper, I believe).

	I had noticed a new problem with the pix, but hadn't thought to 
check for it with FEBE : a lot of files a/o folders would show up in 
nautilus with a padlock emblem. Lo and behold, the extension folders, and 
some others, were littered all over with those blasted padlocks.

	I had also discovered that I could clear away the padlocks by 
right-clicking a parent folder, choosing Properties, going to the 
Permissions tab, and making changes. 

	(Why should there *be* permissions trouble with a file or folder, 
belonging to user btth on one machine, burned to CD by that user, 
inserted into another machine, then dragged and dropped by the same user 
into some folder belonging to that user?? Is this yet another betise of 
SELinux?? It didn't use to happen.)

	Anyway, I applied the same method to the padlock-littered firefox 
folders in my user's .mozilla -- several times, from the firefox folder 
itself on down -- and the various installs of firefox on F8 and F9 did at 
least start launching better than before.

	Question, while I'm at it : is there any simple way for us 
subtechnoids, who can't read code, to find out which extensions overlap? 
And how to decide, of a given pair with an overlap, which to keep?

	Fwiw, I'm down to 25 or 26 extensions under F9 and 28 under F8 -- 
almost exactly the same 25 or 26, I believe -- still not counting ones 
grayed out, usually because they're Ffx3 only or Ffx2 only. Six or seven 
of those are defenses, and may be readily eliminable if/when I once gain 
competence with the Cox Method at http://www.melvilletheatre.com/articles/
squid-privoxy/index.html

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Fedora 8 & 9; Alpine 2.00, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.6;
Dillo 0.8.6, Galeon 2, Epiphany 2, Opera 9, Firefox 2 & 3
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.