Tweaks and Settings for Mozilla / Firefox / Thunderbird

Disable Direct HTTP auth confirmation dialog

If you include a username and password in an URL (http://joe:secret@foo.com) Mozilla wants a confirmation that you really want to access the website. This can be very annoying. Radoslaw Maruszewski told me the solution:

1. Type about:config in the text control where you enter URLs
2. Click right mouse button, from the popup menu select "New->Integer"
3. Enter "network.http.phishy-userpass-length"
4. Modify value of this variable and change it to 255

List of installed Plugins

Ever since the Mozilla browsers supported plugins you could see the list of currently installed and active plugins via about:plugins.

openurl helper program

openurl is a shell script which will open URLs and files correctly in your running browser. If you are annoyed by programs calling mozilla (or firebird or whatever) for you to open a ressource and then mozilla complains it is already running you need this script. Install it to someplace and then set your BROWSER environment variable to this script.

If you want to use the openurl wrapper from Thunderbird you'll have to include these lines in your (Thunderbird) user.js preferences file.

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/openurl");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/local/bin/openurl");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/usr/local/bin/openurl");

audiowrapper helper program

If you use mozplugger to handle various multi media formats you'll run into the problem that mozilla hands over a filename from it's own cache to mozplugger which hands it to the external helper application. As the cache names don't contain the filename extension many helpers refuse to accept/play this file. The script audiowrapperplugin tries to autodetect the filetype and call the correct program. It even comes handy as a general audio file multiplexer which gets called by other programs.

The program has the additional feature that you can reconfigure the player it uses by calling it with audiowrapper -s <appname> to restore it's default player use the -d option. Have a look at the first two lines to define your default player and a tmp directory the program can use to set some links.

fix mailto: links

If you are using Firefox and would like it to handle mailto: links by opening a new Thunderbird email you can use my thunderbird wrapper script. Install this to /usr/local/bin and add the following lines to your (Firefox) user.js preferences.

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "/usr/local/bin/thunderbird");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", "true");