Firefox Widgets
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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.