Results tagged “firefox” from Just Another Stupid Blog

Firefox 3 is being released today. I’ve been using the pre-release versions for a little while now and it is certainly the greatest web browser ever. Probably the best new feature is the smarter location bar, usually referred to as the AwesomeBar. It is not quite as life changing as tabs, but it’s close. Actually it is more like the built-in search box except instead of searching all of the internet, it searches just the pages you have bookmarked or recently visited.

A lot of these new features are thanks to the hard work that has been going on behind the scenes like integrating SQLite (AwesomeBar and Places) and Cairo (full page zoom). It is nice to see all of that paying off (not that I had anything to do with it).

So, go download it today, or read about more of the enhancements.

A few years ago, I had an idea for a website, I think it was going to be called “Are They Evil?”. Users would vote and comment on a company’s Social Responsibility - do they test on animals, use sweat-shops, etc.

There is a new website with a similar idea called Knowmore.org. The content is somewhat limited so far and it is wiki-based, which might be a problem for controversial topics, but I hope they are successful with the idea. They also want to create a browser extension that would warn you when you visit the website of a company that Knowmore considers bad. Kind of like the warnings you get when you visit a phishing site.

Someone on our QA team likes to post screenshots into our Bugzilla as MSWord docs. I find it rather obnoxious to have to open a new application just to view an image when the browser could easily handle a jpeg or png itself. Sure, it is convenient to Print-Screen-Paste into Word when you have no other option but it seems like if you are doing QA and taking screenshots on a regular basis, you’d save yourself some time in the long run to go ahead and install a decent screen capture utility.

Anyway, I did a little searching to see if I could find a way to extract the images from the doc file and view that in the browser. I found a suggestion on how to convert the file into a viewable format using wvWare and then open that in Firefox, on Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I’m kinda stuck on Windows at work so I’ve had to adapt the process. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.

First, you need to download and install wvWare for Windows.

Then you create a batch file similar to this:

echo off
set tmp="C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp"
set dir="c:\program files\gnuwin32" %dir%\bin\wvWare -x %dir%\share\wv\wvHtml.xml %1 -d %tmp% > %1%.html
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" %1%.html

Make sure you adjust the second line to match the user name on your system. I set this up for Firefox but I imagine you could adjust it for other browsers as well.

Now, when Firefox attempts to open a Word doc, tell it to open it with your batch file instead of Word.