One of the workstations at work had suddenly decided to not record any history of new sites visited .. and not to show any traces of old visits. After a bit of searching I found the recipe for How to fix a corrupt localstore which mentions a few of the same symptoms, in particular that the bookmark dialog won’t show up. Stopping Firefox and then renaming localstore.rdf did however not solve anything. Luckily I had remember that somewhere someone mentioned the places.sqlite database as containing information for the location field, so after stopping Firefox again, deleting the places.sqlite file and then restarting Firefox, everything went back to normal. Yet again Firefox knows where it has been!
Category: Firefox
Space, Page Up, Page Down, Home, End Broken for Navigation in Firefox
While I initially thought I had gone crazy or were still dreaming, my fear was true – all my keyboard page navigation had stopped working in Firefox (3.6.3). I tried to move onto to the next by pressing space or page down, my hands trembled as I discovered that neither arrow keys or home / end keys worked. The friendly internet suggested that I should turn Caret Browsing (F7) off (.. so try that if you’re in this situation), but that just told me that I were turning Caret Browsing on (with a proper warning). No luck.
After a bit of tinkering I disabled all my add-ons (previously known as extensions), and voilá, everything worked as it were supposed to! Further problem hunting revealed the culprit: The Del.icio.us Bookmarks Add-on. Curse you, del.icio.us! Disabling the Add-on and re-enabling all the other addons solved the issue, and I’m now happily browsing the internet one page size at the time again.
Showing Source By URL in Firefox
A simple question popped up on IRC today: How to get Firefox to show the source of a webpage given by the URL instead of having to show the page and then selecting "View source". The solution is to use the view-source:-qualifier: view-source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ to see the HTML source for Wikipedia’s front page. The solution was presented over at Stuart Langridge’s blog where he also presents a simple bookmarklet for swapping source view on and off in the current window.