Re: [tlug] Browser blues

[Josh Glover <tlug@example.com>]

Quoth Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon (Mon 2004-06-07 06:40:07AM +0900):

> First - thank you for the detailed reply and code information.  I've 
> saved the file for future reference.

No problem. Please save also Jim Tittsler's follow-up:

http://www.tlug.jp/ML/0406/msg00042.html

as his way of diddling Firefox's config is *much* safer than mine
(hell, consider yourself lucky that I did not use sed!).

> In the meantime, I've checked the settings under Mozilla (I use both
> Mozilla and Firefox simultaneously...),

As do quite a few of us, I bet. I use both at work because I need to
sometimes login to a web app as an admin user to create an account for
a client, then login as the new account to test it. Without two
browsers, I would have to close out the browser completely and restart
it to "logout" of pages protected by HTTP auth (as of 1.6 (IIRC),
Mozilla has had a tantalising menu option: Tools -> Password Manager
-> Logout, but it does not seem to do anything yet). Obviously, this
sucks no small amount when you typically have five or six browser
windows open, each of them loaded down with five or six tabs! :)

As a fellow Mozilla / Firefox "dual-booter", how did you get around
the fact that running 'mozilla' (/usr/bin/mozilla on my machine)
starts up Firefox (or vice-versa, depending on which you installed
last)? I run /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin, but is there a better way?
Or has SuSE (IIRC, you use SuSE, right?) solved that problem. Gentoo
has a little tool that is supposed to fix it:

: jmglov@example.com; qpkg -I -i mozilla-launcher
net-www/mozilla-launcher-1.7-r1 *
        Script that launches mozilla or firefox [  ]

but it does not seem to work yet, either. :(

> and see that it's now set as follows:
> 
> Compare the page in the cache to the page on the network:
> 
>    Every time I view the page
> x  When the page is out of date
> 
> Now I know how to get around the problem (reload), it's not a big issue 
> for me, but how does the browser determine when something is out of date 
> anyway?  The link I was checking was very definitely out of date, and 
> yet it very persistently keep pulling the old version out of cache.....

See RFC 2616, [1] section 13.2:

"Servers specify explicit expiration times using either the Expires
 header, or the max-age directive of the Cache-Control header."

Section 14.21:

"The format is an absolute date and time as defined by HTTP-date in
 section 3.3.1; it MUST be in RFC 1123 date format:

    Expires = "Expires" ":" HTTP-date

 An example of its use is

    Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT"

> Another question - when running Mozilla and Firefox simultaneously, is 
> there any influence of one on the other, or do they run totally 
> independent of each other?  Under MicroMuck, setting changes in either 
> Netscape or Mozilla directly affected each other....

On a Unix system, they have separate preferences:

: jmglov@example.com; ls -la ~/ |grep 'mozilla\|phoenix'
lrwxrwxrwx    1 jmglov   jmglov         18 Jun  6 20:04 .mozilla -> dotfiles/.mozilla/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 jmglov   jmglov         17 May  8 16:43 .phoenix -> dotfiles/.phoeni

I have tried symlinking bookmarks.html from one to the other, but each
replaces the bloody link with a copy of the file as soon as I make a
change to it (i.e. copy-on-write).

They both use the Gecko rendering engine, and share most of the guts of
the browser component.

-Josh

[1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html

-- 
Josh Glover

Gentoo Developer (http://dev.gentoo.org/~jmglov/)
Tokyo Linux Users Group Listmaster (http://www.tlug.jp/)

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