We use Fedora in my Linux classes at school, so I was equally pissed off of when I found out that the stock firefox installation doesn’t support ssl…in other words you can’t get to secure pages. Since the entire schooli ntranet is on a secure connection it pretty much sucks when you can’t access your email and assignments. I was the only person in the class who was able to fix this and be able to finish my shit during class instead of doing it for homework.

The error you get when accessing secure pages in Firefox on Fedora is:

Unexpected response from server
Firefox doesn’t know how to communicate with the server.

You can fix this in three commands:

yum update nss (or yum install nss, if it’s not installed)
yum remove firefox
yum install firefox

I still haven’t upgraded my PC to Ubuntu 8, so I was really depressed to find out that Ubuntu 7.10 stopped at Firefox 2 and wasn’t going to be offering version 3.  I’m the laziest person on the face of the earth so I wasn’t looking forward to doing this manually, but here’s how I installed Firefox 3:

Download the Linux tarball from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

sudo tar -C /opt -jxvf firefox-3.0.1.tar.bz2

sudo cp -R ~/.mozilla ~/.mozillabackup

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

cd /opt/firefox/plugins/

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/* .

sudo dpkg-divert –divert /usr/bin/firefox.ubuntu –rename /usr/bin/firefox

sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

sudo dpkg-divert –divert /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox.ubuntu –rename /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox

sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox

XP and Vista users, you might want to hold off on the new Firefox 2.0.0.3 update until it gets neutered. Yes, Firefox violated my CPU today. No, not once, but 12 times. Yes, 12 times in the last half hour. Talk about stamina. My poor AMD now has performance anxiety and refuses to play my illegal mp3s, movies, and porn bible movies.

For those of you who have had issues with Firefox being a CPU nazi in the past, you might want to check out Justin’s article on optimizing Firefox.