I wanted to practice my Javascript and I liked the idea of Ubiquity, so I decided to write some search commands for it. Ubiquity already has a utility function to create them, makeSearchCommand, but it’s too limiting. For example, if I do not provide a search query argument, it still takes me to the results page, when in fact it should take me to the home page of the site I’m searching, like Open Search Plugins do. A kind person in #ubiquity in the Mozilla IRC servers filed a ticket saying that makeSearchCommand should allow this behavior. In the mean time, I created some utility functions which would make it simple to create a search command that would do this, but for this I had to use CmdUtils.CreateCommand. But since I wanted to create many of these search commands, I came up with a way to make the creation of these commands a simple function call. Continue reading ‘Ubiquity Search Script’
Tag Archive for 'Firefox'
I’m not a big fan of most networks’ streaming players. Usually they make you download random extensions/plugins and make you jump through hoops just to get the stuff streaming. I’m looking forward to the day when most shows are available on Hulu or YouTube. Anyways, recently I felt like starting to watch Lost and so the first thing I did was check if I could stream them online. To my dismay they were not available on Hulu but ABC did have their own streamer at the ABC Go site. I quickly loaded it up on my MacBook and it right away asked me to install a ‘plugin’ (Not an extension). I did this and without having to restart Firefox I was able to start watching Lost. I chose Standard Definition because I wanted to be sure not to run into any hiccups while streaming. The player shows 30 second commercials every once in a while (Not too many to become annoying) and I could live with that, no big deal for me. Anyways, after a few minutes I decide to hit the full screen button, bracing myself for the amounts of pixelation that would make the show unwatchable. Right after hitting the full screen button, however, it immediately seemed to switch to HD quality with no interruption at all, not one bit of lag. The HD quality was surprisingly nice, I’m not HD virtuoso but I’d say it had to be at least 480p, but on my 1280×800 MacBook screen it looked like 720p. So anyways, yeah, lately I’ve been watching Lost on my MacBook at a very nice quality with no lag whatsoever, I’m really surprised and glad.
Right now I am on my computer with Windows 7 RC 64-bit installed running Firefox 3 beta 4. I decided I should watch some Lost for a bit and I was shocked to realize that they had some sort of OS detection script running. I got a message saying something along the lines of “Only Windows XP/Vista and Mac are supported”. Right away I figured that this should be fixable with a quick User Agent String ‘hack’. After all, most programs run fine on Windows 7, even if they are aimed at Vista they run perfectly fun on Windows 7.
Edit: David, from the comments, posted that you can easily avoid having to do this by simply installing the plugin by going to the plugin’s home page. ABC seems to do a check to make sure that the OS is ‘correct’ before allowing you to install the plugin, but once you have the plugin installed (Either by installing it directly or fooling ABC into thinking you have the ‘correct OS’), it won’t care what platform you are on. Thanks David, for the URL!
Alright I’ll shut up with the commentary now and get right down to it. You will need to get the User Agent Switcher extension. Next you will have to find a User Agent String that is closest to your setup and has Vista as the Operating System. You can look at this list if you really want to spend some time and find one that suits you, or you could trust me and use the one I found; keep in mind that this one has the browser set as Firefox 3.5 beta 4, though that shouldn’t really matter as long as you’re running at least 3.0. Next what you will want to do is copy the actual User Agent String into your clipboard, it’s the text in the textbox at the top:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090423 Firefox/3.5b4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Now you should go to Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options… On the left sidebar click on User Agents and then click on Add… In the little dialog window that comes up, type in a description into the description box, something like “Firefox Vista”. Next, paste the User Agent String into the User Agent box, then click OK. Now close the options window and go back to Tools > User Agent Switcher and choose Firefox Vista, or whatever you put as the description for the User Agent. Now Refresh the ABC Go player page (I recommend CTRL+F5 to clear the cache for that page, though I doubt it’s necessary). Now click on the big button to open up the player (Which will appear in a pop-up window, so if you don’t see it it’s cause it’s being blocked) and it should no longer whine about using an advanced Operating System. It will ask you to install an extension (Unfortunately, but it’s not a big deal in my opinion) and then restart once it’s installed. Once restarted, your User Agent should automatically be switched back to the default, and you no longer need to go and switch it each time you want to load the player (At least from what I’ve noticed), it seems like it just does the check if you do not have the extension installed yet.
Anyways, there you have it. You should now be able to stream ABC shows on Windows 7 in Firefox. The reason you cannot use the pre-defined Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista) that comes with the User Agent Switcher extension is because the requirements for IE7 and Firefox are different. In Firefox, you install an extension, in IE7, you bash your head into the wall for running IE (No really, I guess you would download a setup file and install it directly to your system or some ugly stuff like that). Hope that helps, and by the way, this type of ‘fix’/'hack’ usually works with all other similar problems where the site detects that you are not running on an operating system or browser that they want (Though when it’s just the browser then it usually doesn’t work).
So as you probably already know, I recently got a MacBook. I have loved OS X so far, I think it’s a really fast and elegant OS (As a friend likes to call it, “Sexy Unix”). There’s only a few things that I have been taking a bit of time getting used to, but very few. The only thing so far that had been really annoying me though, was that in the OS X version of Firefox, you can’t really tab through checkboxes. So if you’re in a form for example, I’m used to not ever using the mouse (In my case, the touchpad), just the keyboard, navigating with TAB and the space bar. Well this isn’t possible in OS X out of the box, forcing me to move my cursor and manually click on a checkbox each time after filling in some information (Even something as simple as logging into a site became annoying, despite Sxipper).
Well after some searching I learned that this is actually possible with a little tweaking. Go to about:config (Type it into the address bar and press enter), right click anywhere on the bottom and click New > Integer. In the first box that comes up, type accessibility.tabfocus and in the next box type the number 7 . I’m not sure, but I believe a restart of Firefox is required (I did anyways to be sure), and once you’re back up you should be able to tab through checkboxes and a few other things like drop down lists. Makes life a whole lot easier :)