I wrote about the installation process for Firefox 3.5 in this post. In that post, I covered the removal of Firefox 3.0.11, noting that the package sun-java6-plugin would also be removed and that I would look into it later.

Well, it’s later. If you’re using icedtea or openjdk java exclusively in your system, the there’s no need to read further. However, if you are using Sun Java as your primary Java system, as I do for Moneydance, then the loss of sun-java6-plugin leaves a capability hole in Firefox 3.5. It turned out that some sites, like the National Weather Service radar loops, didn’t work after the sequence in my previous post.

I believe that we lose the Sun Java plugin when removing Firefox 3.0.11 is because the  sun-java6-plugin package doesn’t yet recognize the firefox-3.5 package as a supported browser requiring its services. So, it thinks that the java plugin is no longer required if no other supported package is present on the system. To get it back, I decided to reinstall sun-java6-plugin, which will also install Firefox 3.0.11. I chose to work from the terminal, because it provides more flexibility. That turned out to be a wise decision. First type:

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin

That will also install the packages firefox, firefox-3.0, and firefox-3.0-branding, first asking permission:

Next we need to uninstall firefox-3.0 but somehow leave the java plugin. In the terminal, aptitude provides alternative courses of action when conflicts arise from your requests. Here’s a screenshot of the first step:

aptitude offers the default position that Synaptic would in the GUI. The difference is that we can reject alternatives in aptitude. In the screenshot above, we don’t want to lose the sun-java6-plugin, so we’ll reject this offer from aptitude and ask for another choice by typing ‘n’:

This time, aptitude offers to install a small browser that it supports as an alternative to firefox-3.0. While I don’t need midbrowser in general, it doesn’t take up much room and will preserve sun-java6-plugin, which you’ll now notice is not on the removal list. Cool. In a previous run I looked at many alternative approaches, but this proved the most palatable. So when asked to accept this solution, I simply hit Enter to accept the default. aptitude then summarizes the step that it will execute and confirms that’s what I want. Again I hit Enter to say yes and it executes.

Lastly, you want to ensure that the plugin will be incorporated into overall Java system. To do so, tell Linux that you want Sun Java the primary Java support by typing:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

That’s it. Now everything works as expected.

In retrospect, I could have gone through the alternative selection process on the initial installation of sun-java6-plugin. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

If you’ve been using or testing the OpenGEU implementation of the Enlightenment window manager (like I have), here’s some important news. The old greenie repositories crashed. The new OpenGEU repositories are located at Linux Freedom. You can change your repositories manually, or use the custom package downloadable from the linked announcement page.

According to a number of web  postings, the speedy Tracemonkey Javascript engine in Firefox 3.5 is not implemented in the 64-bit version. That would be bad, because the added speed of Tracemonkey put Firefox 3.5 on par with Google’s Chrome browser and its speedy V8 Javascript engine. Since I only believe 1/2 of what I see and nothing that I hear, I decided to check this out. In the process, I compared Firefox 3.5 (32- and 64-bit), Chrome 2.0, and Internet Explorer 8.

For this comparison, I used the x86_64 build of Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and a standard 32-bit WinXP SP2 setup, the latter in a virtual machine. I don’t have a 32-bit Linux install available in a virtual machine at the moment, otherwise I would have used it as well.

UPDATED 7.12.09 to include actual 64-bit Firefox 3.0.11 comparison.

There’s a great post called what does tracemonkey feel like? by Mozilla’s Director of Evangelism. In his post, he points to an online mini-benchmark with which one can make comparisons between browser Javascript engines. The site worked well in Firefox 3.5 in both Linux and WinXP, but interestingly would not work in either Chrome 1.x or IE8 under WinXP. I didn’t pursue the issue to find out why. It would run under the latest Chrome beta 2.0.172.33.

Upon initial loading in Firefox 3.5 under WinXP, the page produces this result:

The draw time is pretty impressive at 126 ms. Moving the sliders around, I saw numbers in the range of roughly 110 ms to 135 ms or so very consistently. According to Chris Blizzard, Firefox 3.0.11 comes in at about 800 ms, so FF 3.5 rates as considerably faster. This is all with the 32-bit version.

On initial page load in x86_64 Ubuntu, the results aren’t quite as impressive:

Here you can see that the draw time hits around 300 ms. Moving the slider sees considerable variation, from about 295 ms to about 412 ms or so. That’s about but 2 – 4 x slower than 32-bit FF 3.5 on WinXP. Indeed, it looks like full Tracemonkey functionality is lacking in 64-bit Firefox. Ouch.

It could be worse. 64-bit Firefox 3.0.11 on Linux:

The initial loading takes 424 ms. Moving the sliders around produces draw times between 396 and 493. So, 64-bit FF 3.5 provides some improvement over 3.0 in Linux. There’s some comfort there, but not much.

Here’s the same test in the latest Chrome beta, 2.0.172.33:

Draw time for the initial page loading jumps to 341 ms, but then things get weird. When first dragging the sliders around, I got draw times up to 430 ms at first. Then after a few seconds of dragging the slider around, the draw times drop to the 82 – 130 ms range. That’s the same range as 32-bit FF 3.5. After restarting the system and Chrome, the numbers jumped back up to 340 – 500 ms draw times. Clicking the Animate button resulted in a rating of 436 ms. But this time after several minutes of playing around, the draw times again dropped to 82 – 140 ms. I have no explanation for the wide variation in test times for Chrome.

Then again, it could be a lot worse. As expected, Internet Explorer 8 won’t even load the test page properly – even in compatibility view. As with all the browsers in this test, I updated IE 8 to the latest version before running this comparison. Although Firefox and Chrome didn’t require a system reboot during their updates, IE 8 required two reboots! Given its gaping security holes and poor performance, I can’t imagine why anyone would use IE at all.

Bottom line: 64-bit Linux users have been relegated to 3rd class open source citizens after decades of Linux user support and evangelism for Mozilla. That only puts Mozilla about 10 years behind the predominant hardware. Thanks, Mozilla.

Loyalty cuts both ways. So, when does Chrome become available for Linux?

After you install the current Firefox 3.5 from the repositories and then uninstall Firefox 3.0.x, clicking on hyperlinks in your emails will probably no longer open the browser. That’s because the Firefox 3.0.x uninstall removes the ‘/usr/bin/firefox’ symlink. That’s easily fixed.

The Quick Fix

Simply type (or paste):

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/firefox.sh /usr/bin/firefox

in a terminal window. That creates the symlink “firefox”, to which Thunderbird’s settings file points with a default installation. The symlink, in turn, points to the script that starts Firefox 3.5. If this doesn’t work, just read the background below to find out the symlink file name needed.

Background

Thunderbird’s user settings are stored in ‘/home/[username]/.mozilla-thunderbird/[profilename].default/prefs.js’ where you fill in your local names in the square brackets. The lines that execute hyperlinks are:

user_pref(”network.protocol-handler.app.http”, “/usr/bin/firefox”);
user_pref(”network.protocol-handler.app.https”, “/usr/bin/firefox”);

As you can see, when the symlink /usr/bin/firefox is deleted during the firefox-3.0 removal, Thunderbird has no means to execute hyperlinks. We could just change the target in this setup file, but I think that its better to avoid making version-dependent changes in application setups.

Creating the symlink restores the status quo without changing individual application setups. I’m betting that future Firefox installations will eventually overwrite the symlink to point to themselves. If not, the link can be modified to point to the next version. Simple, elegant solution.

Note that your Thunderbird installation may vary slightly in the setup file contents, but the general principle will apply. For example, your network.protocol-handler may be a different symlink file name. Just make the symlink that name and you’re covered. It’s possible that the Firefox 3.5 installation and Firefox 3.0.x removal sequence won’t affect your Thunderbird at all. If it does, though, know you can easily fix it. And you won’t have to call and pay the Geek Squad, either.

As I said in this post, Firefox 3.5 went stupid on my search engines when I installed it. I had about 10 on the list under Firefox 3.0. The worst part was that Google and Yahoo!, my two primaries, were gone. Hmmm. Google was supposed to be the default. The only two search engines left were two that I installed from 3rd party sites.

Even more curious, Firefox 3.5 would do Google searches from the address bar. When I checked about:config (type about:config in the Firefox address bar), it still showed Google and Yahoo! as my #1 and #2 search engines, and keyword.URL was correct for Google. Yet, they didn’t appear on the search bar. Double hmmm. This made no sense.

I searched the Internet and Mozillazine, but didn’t find any help. Others had the same problem, but no one provided an effective answer. Going to Mozilla’s Search Engine add-ons didn’t turn up either unadulterated Google or Yahoo! engines on the site. I wasted a lot of time looking, though.

After poking around the Net for a while, I found the Mycroft Project Search Engine Plugins page. Bingo! I installed both basic Google and Yahoo! engines in seconds. They also have a ton of other engines, including country/language specific ones – everything that you need to bring Firefox 3.5 back up to scratch. Outstanding resource!

Problem solved. I’m now fully functional in 64-bit Firefox 3.5 on 64-bit Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04. Happy camper!

I found Firefox 3.5 Shiretoko today in the Ubuntu repositories. You can either choose the files in your package manager (Synaptic in Ubuntu) or install from the terminal. To use your package manager, be sure to refresh the package list before proceeding. The required files for the Gnome desktop are:

firefox-3.5
firefox-3.5-branding
firefox-3.5-gnome-support
xulrunner-1.9.1
xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome-support

For Kubuntu, just leave off the two gnome support files. If you select firefox-3.5, it will account for its own dependencies, but you should make sure that the list above is complete for the installation. You can also do this quickly with terminal commands:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-branding firefox-3.5-gnome-support xulrunner-1.9.1 xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome-support

Firefox 3.5 will install along side version 3.0.11, so I recommend installing 3.5 first, get it up and running, then uninstall 3.0.11 once you’re happy.

When you first run Firefox 3.5, it pick up your existing profile and will check all your extensions. All my major ones like Adblock Plus, NoScript, Popup Blocker, Perspectives, MR Tech Toolkit, etc., made it, but some others did not. TabMix Plus required downloading the latest build. I was able to find replacements for most of the few lost extensions. More on that later.

That’s all there is. Firefox 3.5 fired up with only one serious problem – all my search engines were gone! That’s fixable, but I will put the answer in the next post so folks can find it quickly.

When you’re confident in Firefox 3.5, you can uninstall 3.0.11 by either selecting it for removal in your package manager or from the terminal. The packages to uninstall are:

firefox
firefox-3.0
firefox-3.0-branding
firefox-3.0-gnome-support
ubufox

That’s all you can uninstall. If you try to uninstall xulrunner-1.9, it will try to uninstall a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to lose. This can be done quickly from the terminal:

sudo aptitude remove firefox firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-branding firefox-3.0-gnome-support ubufox

The last two aren’t loaded in Kubuntu. Synaptic also uninstalled sun-java6-plugin in the process. When I tried to reinstall sun-java6-plugin, Synaptic wanted to install Firefox 3.0 again. Hmmm. No big deal, because I also have icedtea java’s plugin installed. I’ll have to look into the sun java issue later.

UPDATE: Later came in this post.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with Firefox 3.5 yet, but it’s easy to tell that it loads much faster than 3.0. Can’t really tell if it loads pages or javascript any faster yet. Overall, very cool so far.

Dr. Scott Clark posted a link to the United Reformed Churches in North America final report on Federal Vision. I also linked it on my sidebar here. As you can discern from the title, the URCNA study committee concentrated on the issues surrounding justification. As with every orthodox Reformed denomination, the UCRNA rejected Federal Vision as a serious theological error in the church. Dr. Clark posted an excellent summary. I highly recommend it.

Happy Independence Day to all in the U.S.A. who work for a living and produce wealth! The vision of 1776 seems like a long-past dream these days, along with the values that made this country great. We once appreciated that sacrifice, hard work, and diligence brought prosperity. Now, we see on the one hand that scam artists robbing people of their life savings through bogus investments, and on the other hand the government is robbing our future with trillion dollar per year deficit spending and confiscatory taxes.

For anyone paying attention, we’re seeing the effective use of Alinsy’s Rules for Radicals by Obamessiah’s lap dogs. Che Obama’s character assassins are masters of the politics of personal destruction. The issues are irrelevant, only personal attacks count. Against the myth of Global Warming? Against abortion? Want to keep your civil rights under the 2nd Amendment? Serve honorably in the military? Then you’re a potential enemy of the state. Reminds me of George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.“

Few seem to remember that governments don’t create wealth, they can only take it away and destroy it. Socialism has failed miserably every time it has been tried. The Germans are implementing tax cuts to rebuild their economy while we’re taxing and spending like there’s no tomorrow. Even the Russians are laughing at our rapid decline into socialism. Yet, the Democrats seem incapable of learning from history.

Who is John Galt?

The economy’s decline continues to accelerate, not for want of trillion dollar stimuluses, but because of them. The decline of housing values is starting to starve the plethora of entitlement programs. Unemployment has risen past Obamessiah’s promised 8% maximum to 9.5% and continues to increase. And still, Obama’s minions push a bankrupting destruction of our health care system, a system which is the envy of the world even with its imperfections.

Politics trumps science. Congress seems poised to pass the largest energy tax in history based on the myth of global warming. The EPA has even suppressed opposing opinions within its ranks. You can download the banned Carlin/Davidson report here. The effects of the proposed legislation, already passed in the House, will devastate this country’s economy.

So, on this 233rd anniversary of our independence, we need to relearn the lessons for which our predecessors shed their blood. Our freedom wasn’t secured by exercising our free speech, although that contributed. It was our guns, guts, and faith in God which won our freedom, freed others around the world, and fueled our prosperity for two centuries. The worthlessness of naivete and empty words is coming home to roost with the despotic regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. Rather than the “big stick” that Teddy Roosevelt recommended, Obama’s impotent foreign policy carries a limp nerf bat.

May God have mercy on us and restore our sanity and our greatness.

Firefox 3.5 released on June 30, but that release hasn’t made its way into the official Ubuntu repositories yet. I’m not in a huge hurry, but I did upgrade to the new version in a 64-bit Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 virtual machine. It turned out to be pretty easy.

First, you need to add Fabian Tassin’s repository (HT: Talking in Circles):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

to your software sources. Open System -> Administration -> Software Sources, then click on the Third-party Software Tab:

Click on Add and type in or paste the repository address…

Then click on Add Source, Close, Close. You don’t have to update the package list at this point because we haven’t added the authentication for our new repository yet. The authentication could have been done in Software Sources as well, but I find it easier to use the terminal. Open a terminal and type (or cut and paste):

sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0C713DA6

sudo aptitude update

That will update the file list with the added repository data. Since the terminal is open, we can install Firefox 3.5 here:

sudo aptitude install firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-gnome-support firefox-3.5-branding xulrunner-1.9.1

Aptitude will add any  files needed to satisfy dependencies.

Note that your previous version of Firefox will remain on the disk. Firefox 3.5 will import all your existing settings, extensions, etc., and notify you of extensions that aren’t compatible with the new version. After you’re comfortable with the new version, you can uninstall Firefox 3.0.11 at the terminal by typing:

sudo aptitude remove firefox-3.0 ubufox firefox-3.0-gnome-support firefox-3.0-branding

One funky but trivial thing. In the Ubuntu menus and on the Firefox title bar, this build appears as “Shiretoko” rather than “Firefox”. Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine so far and most of the major extensions have already been updated for it. But, I’ll wait for the official version and optimizations in the formal Ubuntu release for my production system.

Adobe released an alpha version of its Flash plugin for Linux back in February (last update as of this post was Feb 24, 2009). Normally, an alpha version would best be avoided by ordinary users because “alpha” designates a very early build that probably isn’t stable. However, in this case, a  huge number of users have tried it for months and have very few issues with this build. I was seeing occasional crashes due to the 32-bit Flash plugin under the excellent nspluginwrapper, so I decided to give Adobe’s 64-bit alpha a try.

Important safety tip: All vestiges of Flash Player must be removed from your system before installing this update. This can be a pain, but thankfully Romeo Adrian Cioaba actually wrote a script to automate the deleting of the old Flash and installation of the new. He published the script contents in the form of instructions on his site as well. If you don’t use nspluginwrapper for anything else, simply download and run Romeo’s script.

However, I also use Adobe Reader 9.1 for Linux through the Medibuntu Repository. Reader 9.1 isn’t available in 64-bit yet, so it must use nspluginwrapper to work in 64-bit Firefox. Consequently, I modified Romeo’s script slightly by removing all references to nspluginwrapper. I made the modified script available here.

So, the easy way to get 64-bit Flash support in Ubuntu is to download either Romeo’s original script or my modification to a temporary directory on your hard drive. Your directory name will vary, so I’ll assume that it is located in the /home directory. Then, close out Firefox. Next, make the script executable. From a terminal, type:

chmod +x ~/native-64bit-flash-installer.sh

or for the modified script:

chmod +x ~/native-64bit-flash-installer-nsmod.sh

Now simply run the script as root from your home directory:

cd ~
sudo ./native-64bit-flash-installer.sh

or

sudo ./native-64bit-flash-installer-nsmod.sh

That’s all there is to it! Restart Firefox and you should be running 64-bit Flash support. Works like a charm here. If it didn’t, I couldn’t have typed this post into WordPress.

Now we can lobby for 64-bit Adobe Reader support…