vimperator – Neal's Computing Notes

This afternoon I was finding my computer really bogged down. I was averaging 1.5 loads or so. After a bit of poking, I found the culprit (again), xulrunner. Killed it, was thinking Firefox was junk. Tried out midori and epiphany, they’re nice, but I can’t survive without vimperator anymore. Sad but true.

Then I realized that it’s probably less Firefox and more flash. Uninstalled flash and installed mozilla-plugin-gnash on Debian testing. Youtube was dead. Though I don’t like to admit it, this is a big problem. Did some more poking, found some “greasemonkey” scripts that are supposed to fix the problem etc, installed that, no dice. Then I went on a chat room and someone pointed me to

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#gnash-youtube-broken

Basically says to kill all your cookies and block www.youtube.com from putting in cookies since there’s some kind of bug with that. Then I turned off greasemonkey by clicking on the icon, and the video was playing but no sound! So I finally uninstalled the greasemonkey scripts and greasemonkey itself, restarted, and voila!

So now when the fix the bug, then presumably it will get all screwed up again.

I’ve been having fun with vimperator, but then my firefox on one of my (Debian) laptops became unstable. I’d rightclick on a field, and it would crash. I ran it from the commandline to see if there’s any error messages, it would just say Segmentation fault. I didn’t have time to get a tracer and see where it’s crashing, and I did need to to work again quickly. I tried aptitude reinstall firefox, but that doesn’t seem to do anything useful, since it reinstalls the same binary and it was still crashing; the problem wasn’t in the binary or system-wide configuration (which I didn’t touch). Then I had some intelligent instincts; I already guessed that the problem wasn’t there, and so it had to be in my add-ons, like vimperator. But I didn’t know which one. I’ve always tried to keep the number of addons that I use down; and the answer was simply


 rm -rf ~/.mozilla

which blows all that add-on and everything else away. I keep my bookmarks on delicious, so that doesn’t matter, and all my other addons are non-critical, so this didn’t cost me anything except downloading some of them again if I felt like it. And it solved my problem.