Since the dawn of 64-bit Linux distros, they have included 32-bit versions of browsers such as Firefox, because there aren’t 64-bit versions of plugins such as Java (the 64-bit version doesn’t have a plugin) or Flash.

A couple of days ago, however, I was reading the “what’s new” list for Suse 10.3 Alpha 3, and found this entry:

On x86-64: Firefox is now a 64-bit package and uses nspluginwrapper to handle 32-bit i386 plugins if needed.

Naturally, I had to investigate. I downloaded a 64-bit build of Firefox from Autofox, and nspluginwrapper. With that wrapper, I can use Flash without any problems. (Not Java, though; I think Blackdown offers a 64-bit plugin, but it’s Java 1.4.2 only. But I have found out that I don’t miss Java in the browser at all, for the past few days.)

The browser feels faster. I tend to use bookmark folders to open dozens of bookmarks at the same time on different tabs, which actually makes the browser “hang” for a couple of seconds, and those delays seem shorter now. No, I didn’t do any benchmarks. But the overall experience just “feels” better. It even appears to be more stable, though that may actually come from the fact that I’m using a 2.0.0.4pre build, which is the latest version (2.0.0.3) plus bugfixes… or maybe it’s because this version was built with a non-ancient, and possibly less buggy compiler.

A couple of hours ago, I received an email from a reader of Planet Atheism tell me that it didn’t show up correctly in Safari: fonts were huge.

(Incidentally, PA is a month old today, and, apparently, had that problem since the beginning. Not too many Safari users out there, it seems… or, else, they’re shy! )

Well, I knew it displayed well in Firefox, IE and Opera, so I tried Konqueror, which is supposedly “closer” to Safari (which was originally based on KHTML). No problem there, either.

As I don’t have a Mac, I confirmed with another Mac user (thanks, Ricardo!) that there really was a problem (not that I doubted the guy, but it might be something only on his system), and, so, I started looking. Fire up the W3 CSS validator, and… it complained about this line:

font-size: 62,5%;

The problem, which you may already have spotted, is the comma: it should be a period (or should I say “dot”?) instead. My guess (which was correct) was that Safari was reading that as “625%”. So I changed the comma to a period, and… everything became smaller in Firefox!

Yes, Firefox (and every other browser except Safari, apparently) completely ignored that line because of the comma. Safari, on the other and, interpreted it without the comma.

Highly illogical, if you ask me… if you want to “do your best” to interpret code, the comma should be replaced by a dot, not completely removed. But it’s funny that the other browsers were ignoring that line, as well. I have since commented it out, as I had gotten used to a bigger font on PA.

Incidentally, every single Moonmoon installation probably has this bug. I’ll try to report it to the author.

Firefox 2.0 has been out for a while, and the response to it has been mostly positive.

However, there were a couple of changes to how tabs work, and I, for one, didn’t like them at all. Looking around, I found the solution to one of them, and the other one was pretty easy to figure out.

Here’s the changes, and how to “undo” them:

1- “X” close button on every tab

This one, to me, qualifies for the “What were they thinking?” award. Don’t people know that you can close any tab simply by middle-clicking on it (yes, even on Linux)? Not to mention that the “X” button is both harder to click on than the entire tab, and makes it easy to close tabs by mistake, when you just wanted to select it? In other words, there’s already an easy way, and they add a more difficult way, which, besides, can easy lead to mistakes?

Sigh. Sorry about the rant.

Fix: open about:config, look for browser.tabs.closeButtons, and set it to 2 (no close buttons) or 3 (a single close button on the right of the tabs, like in previous Firefoxes – though, again, middle-click makes it useless).

2- tabs don’t get smaller past a certain point; if you have too many, you need to scroll the tab bar to see them all

Maybe I’m weird, but I have tab folders with 10-15 bookmarks of a particular subject, and I like to open them all, with a single click, daily. In Firefox 1.x, the tabs would get as small as they needed to be, to fit in the window. Now, they don’t get smaller than a certain size, and force the user to scroll.

To me, this is annoying. I haven’t found an option to completely disable this behavior, but I can make it virtually go away by reducing the minimum tab width to a much smaller value.

Fix: open about:config, and change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to a much smaller value, like 1.

(seen on ruimoura.net)

At last! Until recently, the newest version was Flash 7, which is only a couple of years old. But now you can download the Flash 9 beta, which is working perfectly here (SUSE 10.1)!

Now I can enter TotalWar.com again!

EDIT: just switched back to Flash 7. Some pages, such as this one, made the browser hang for several seconds each time I switched to that tab – and that’s in a fast computer. It seems the “beta” label is well deserved.