Motho ke motho ka botho

It’s probably good that I’m taking the time to work with Firefox (2, that is) a little more, particularly on an outdated machine. Here are a couple more minor adjustments that I want to keep for future reference.

I’m running without Flash, but every Flash object triggers the annoying drop-down yellow message bar. Turning that off is easy; open about:config, change the plugin.default_plugin_disabled key to “false,” and those should go away.

It’s a little confusing … the default is disabled, or true, which allows the popups, but setting the default to false enables the flag which disables the popup which … … must think about pretty ponies now. …

Clearing the cookies on exit is overridden by the private data settings, which means if you want to keep a cookie — for example, being signed in to WordPress.com when I start Firefox — you have to disable the private data setting that clears cookies on exit. Then you have to tell the site to set a long-term parking cookie (”remember me” on this computer, or whatever), then whitelist it in the cookie exceptions.

Okay, that’s almost as confusing as the Flash popup flag. Let me try it this way. …

1. Set cookies to expire when you close Firefox.
2. In the “Exceptions” dialog, add “wordpress.com” to the list.
3. Under “Private Data,” tick the box marked “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox.”
4. In the “Settings” dialog, untick “Cookies.”
5. Sign in to WordPress.com, and tell it to remember you on this computer.

That should do the trick. With those settings Firefox still blanks the browsing history on exit, but keeps your login to a whitelisted site. Easy, huh?

P.S.: Of course these are all independent of what distro you use, or should be unless your distro presets Firefox differently from Crux.