With new version of Spellbound installed you should see red underlined for misspelled words.
 

Since
I am running as LUA, like a good little boy, I flipped on over to a Windows account with administrative rights, made sure that no versions of
Firefox are running, and then launched the installation kit.  The
install did it’s stuff, offered me the usual dialogs to install
via standard or custom method, and then completed.  All is good I thought….

So, there I am double clicking the new Firefox icon on my desktop, awaiting the launch of the new version of my favorite browser, and I’m waiting, and waiting, and nothing….. After peaking a look at the Windows Task Manager I notice that firefox.exe is not listed, hmmm.  I know, let’s run Firefox in safe mode – nothing.  Perhaps a reboot is in order – shitty, but this is Windows after all – pause for a quick commercial break…. we’re back, and… yup Firefox is still not working.  Even the event log is telling me nothing (thanks Mozilla)

It is at this point that I am browsing the Mozilla support site, with IE of course, looking for answers as to why Firefox will not load.  Fortunately I found this standard diagnostic page on the knowledge base, which suggested a list of steps to bring my apparently dead browser to life.

By following the instructions, I finally got Firefox to load by blowing away my profile in %APPDATA%Mozilla (both the Administrative account profile and the LUA profile).  What followed was another hour of my time reloading the themes and extensions that had vaporized during the profile cleansing – tsk.  Most of the extensions I use are pretty straight forward (Bug-me-not, IEView, Forecastfox etc) and reinstalling them was no effort.  However, installing Spellbound was a real pain.

Spellbound is a free spell check application, which spell checks text contained in text boxes on the open page in Firefox (via a right mouse click). Each time I upgrade Firefox, this extension is guaranteed to break, and this time was no exception.  I would use another spell check extension, except there are no other better alternatives.  I managed to reinstall the broken Spellbound extension and supporting library extensions, but the dictionaries just would not install.  After some more digging on the web I found out that I had to grant my current LUA account write access to the main Firefox installation folder – urgh.  Installing under the administrator account would not work in this case because Firefox extensions are associated with the Windows user profile, so I had to grant write access to LUA, install the dictionaries, and then revoke the write access permission. Not ideal, but at least it was temporary.

After some considerable effort I managed to get Firefox 1.5 working with all my favorite extensions, curiously, the rich text box (FreeTextBox) on my blog admin page seems to have disabled all of the formatting buttons. I’m not sure if this is a Firefox 1.5 problem or something else unrelated – time for some more experimentation.

One good thing that has come about as part of the upgrade is the installation of a tab preview extension, which displays a miniature display of the web page in the tab as I hover the mouse over.

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time.
When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really
speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it
“nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is
the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it
receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

I never thought I’d see the day in which I said “I’m switching from Internet Explorer”, but today it happened.

My friend Anton showed me the delights of FireFox, and after dealing with a recent attack of malware and spyware, downloaded through IE, I decided to give it a shot.

The
first thing that is great about FireFox is the use of tabbed browsing.
Yes, there are plug-ins available for IE but it’s nice to use a browser
that has them built in. I was next shown the extensive list of
extension plug-ins available for the Gecko based browser and was rather
impressed with how many useful downloads on the list I’d want.

Performance
appears to be much better in FireFox than IE. My blogs website loads
much quicker, almost instantaneously, compared to a 2 second pause in
IE.

Google searching is built in, no need for addition of G’s toolbar or Tweak UI.

Above
all, the biggest reason for my switch to FireFox is because of malware
and spyware. Each site I’ve visited on the subject has suggested to not
use IE, or to run a collection of registry hacks that lock it down. The
security options alone in IE are vastly complicated, and there are so
many of them that it’s hard to keep track of which settings should be
applied for optimum protection. FF’s settings are simple and effective.

I’m not done playing just yet, but for now I’m happy with what I’ve seen.

Secunia has reported a Windows Injection Venerability, which allows insecure web sites to hijack other secure web sites by exploiting named pop-up windows. This venerability affects most browsers, including Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Netscape. Secunia’s web site has details on how to check if your browser is affected. So far the only solution available is to not browse insecure sites whilst a secure site is in session.