Bits by Ben » browser

How to re-enable backspace as back key in Firefox 3.5

Ben — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:59:40 +0000

While Firefox 3.5 has some good improvements, it’s not all good. We geeks are quite disappointed by the decision to disable the backspace key. In previous versions backspace would take you back a page in history. Which is great when you are on the keyboard already — no need to grab the mouse. But in 3.5 this has been disabled.

Fortunately, this is a setting that you can change. Here’s how:

Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar.
In the Filter search field type backspace — this should bring up the browser.backspace_action preference.
Right-click on the value (defaults to 2) and select Modify.
In the pop-up window change the value to 0 (that’s zero) and accept.
Enjoy your backspace key to go back a page in history again.

For more information see the mozillazine knowledge base page on about:config.

Dillo progress

Ben — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:54:00 +0000

For users of older hardware and fans of light-weight systems, Dillo is probably not an unknown name. It’s a very light-weight web browser. That comes with its limitations, of course. It used to have a GTK1 GUI, which no one in his right mind would use anymore today. But last year Dillo 2.0 was released, which was reimplemented using FLTK2. This sports modern features like anti-aliasing (smooth fonts) and unicode

Currently the Dillo developers are working on exciting new features, such as basic CSS and JavaScript support. I figured some people may want to try out this new code, so I added an ebuild for the “live” development version to portage today (or yesterday, depending on your timezone). There is definitely some progress to see, so this little browser may grow in popularity again. And they manage to keep it small. The binary is only 629K on my amd64 system.

Firefox 3’s improved memory usage

Ben — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:34:17 +0000

Pavlov.net has an interesting write-up on Firefox 3’s improved memory usage. Looks like I should start testing that beta!

Qt-WebKit browser

Ben — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:39:15 +0000

Qt 4.4, of which a beta was just released, has the exiting new webkit module (the rendering engine behind Safari, based on KDE’s KHTML). As a demo, one of the developers has made a browser. This could grow into a very interesting project, so I’ll certainly be following it!