bobpeers -> blog

I’ve recently had a problem when using EPIServer with either Firefox or Google Chrome. We’re using version 5 and the HTML editor used, HTMLarea, does not support either browser.

I should also mention that the HTML editor is pretty terrible especially when compared to CKEEditor, for example.

As an example, if I write some style rule like this using the source code:

style="border:0"

then after saving the editor manages to mangle to HTML so it looks like this:

style="BORDER-TOP:0;BORDER-BOTTOM:0;BORDER-LEFT:0;BORDER-RIGHT:0

It manages to expand a simple rule plus add ALL CAPS into the mix (which will not validate as valid XHTML by the way).

But to get back to the point, since the editor is not supported I end up with a very small textarea in Firefox that’s hard to use.

To try and solve the problem I tried the Firefox addon called Resizeable Textarea but this doesn’t work in Firefox 3.6 plus it requires manual resizing every time.

The solution that worked for me is the Stylish addon that allows me to override the CSS rules for any site. I simply made a new rule to resize the textarea looking like this.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://intranet/login") {
textarea.epitextareaeditor  {height:20em !important}
.episize500 {width:800px !important}
}

A similar extension, called Chrome Stylist, is available for Google Chrome that works almost identically.

After I wrote previously about toggling the proxy setting in Internet Explorer I looked for a similar function for Firefox.

There’s quite a few proxy extensions available, but if you just want to toggle the proxy on and off quickly I recommend QuickProxy.

I’ve noticed that I’m getting a strange problem with text boxes and textareas in Firefox. For some reason they are greyed out and exhibit a bad tearing issue when pages first load, when another window is dragged over them or they are scrolled in and out of the visible screen.

It didn’t look like this using the same version of Firefox on Fedora 9 so I’m wondering what has changed. I even downloaded the version from Mozilla but it looks exactly the same.

On a brighter note this is the first time I’ve been able to log into my webbank (that requires Java) without installing Sun Java. In the past the open Java that shipped with Fedora didn’t support secure sites but OpenJDK worked out of the box. Having said that it did crash Firefox 4 times in a row yesterday so maybe I’ll still be using Sun Java.

Mozillia released Firefox 3 beta 5 a few days ago so I upgraded from the beta 4 release. Unfortunately the Adblock Plus addon has not been updated yet.

I’ve been using this addon for so long and have it installed whenever I install Firefox on a computer that I’ve completely forgotten just how many annoying adverts there are on many web sites I visit. On top of that they slow down my browsing while I wait for some massive Flash movie to load or some other useless ad.

It’s so bad that I’ve actually gone back to using Firefox 2.0.0.13 that I also have installed, just to avoid the ads. Of course now I have the problem that I’ve got so used to Firefox 3 betas that going back to Firefox 2 is also pretty hard…

If you want to use Firefox to access a corporate intranet then you will need to enable Windows Authentication. Simply enter about:config in the location bar and locate the following key:

network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

Enter the domains you wish to access separated by commas. For example, if your intranet was located at http://intranet/ then you would just enter the value ‘intranet’ (without quotes).