Firefox Widgets

From ArchWiki

Jump to: navigation, search


Contents

Introduction

If you compare Firefox to Internet Explorer, for all its myriad faults, IE does look prettier for some of the rendering. This explains how to improve the look of the widgets in Mozilla Firefox 2 - things like buttons, text boxes, combo boxes and radio buttons. It is completely reversible.

Also note that this will become largely obsolete with Firefox 3 (from Beta 3) as this uses native widgets.

AUR

An AUR package exists. It will detect common firefox and/or swiftfox installation paths, and install the widgets. Simply download the PKGBUILD here, then run makepkg. Or, if you have yaourt:

# yaourt -S firefox-beautifier

Note that you will have to run

# /usr/share/firefox-beautifier/install

each time you update your firefox. To uninstall, use yaourt again to remove it.

Manual install

Prerequisites

First of all, log in as the super user (enter the password when prompted)

su

Now you need to install sudo. sudo allows user programs to run as root. This is required because the installer is designed for Ubuntu, which doesn't allow you to switch to superuser (easily).

pacman -S sudo

Security

sudo can be a slight security risk. However the default installation of sudo allows no-one to sudo except root ...... who doesn't need it. This package is required purely for the install or the uninstall. You can uninstall it when you've finished if you like. IMO though, the security risk is minimal.

Downloading and Unpacking

You will need to visit the Ubuntu Forums to download the installer. Visit this thread. (you will need to register to download the code)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=369596

You will see, a picture showing Firefox before and after (shown as "old" and "new"). If you don't like it, don't go any further.

Towards the bottom you will see a list of versions to download. Download the most recent one to a convenient directory. The version I am using here (which works as of this date) is firefox_widgets_2.7.tar.bz2

Now, go to the /tmp directory and unpack the newly downloaded file. You should still be in super-user mode.

cd /tmp
tar xjvf firefox_widgets_2.7.tar.bz2

and go into that directory

cd firefox_widgets_2.7

These commands will change slightly if the version number changes.

Installation

To install, run the CLI installer.

./install

Select option 3, and enter the directory as

/usr/lib/firefox

This is required as the Firefox installation is different in Ubuntu.

Now, to set the 'new widgets', simply select option 1. It should generate messages - hopefully no errors - the first two errors are not in fact "real" errors but caused by the check for previous installations - starting like this is a-ok.

Installing widgets to /usr/lib/firefox
Removing any previous installations of the widgets.
/usr/lib/firefox/res/form-widgets not found.  No action taken.
The CSS does not appear to be installed.

Or you can do all of this with one command

./install -p=/usr/lib/firefox -i

To see it in action, you have to close all currently open firefox windows.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling is exactly the same as installing, except use option 2.

Personal tools