My website, blog and portfolio…

So unlike previous versions of firefox its impossible to clear all the history. How The fuck do I remove browser history, cookies and everything else from firefox!?

Here’s a post with the same question on this issue straight from mozillas website..

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=ro&forumId=1&comments_parentId=399203

For those who are interested, I finally managed to clear the shit. I removed firefox, ran cclean and reinstalled firefox. Something is wrong with firefox.  Also I switched it so firefox is always in secure browsing mode. For those who are paranoid like me, just leave the stupid thing in secure browsing mode.

This is a multi-part article, see part 2

Per suggestion of a co-worker I thought I’d pitch in a little with the Mozilla Development team with Firefox. A little C++ will help me brush up my development skills as well as learning how to use the newest Microsoft development tools.

Mozilla’s website is very extensive and a bit daunting and setting up a working development environment is a bit difficult. So I decided to document a bit about how I got my development environment working on my Windows XP SP3 system.

The wiki suggests that Windows XP developers need to install Visual Studio. I had visual studio 6 somewhere, but as I read more of the wiki I found out that the Express version of visual c++ 9 (2008) would be easier to get a development environment setup on. Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express can be downloaded at Microsoft’s Express Edition website.

The installer for the Express edition of Visual C++ is only a client for downloading the full application. It only took me about 10 or 15 minutes to download the installation. The installation consists of approximately 100MB of installation media. The installation prompted to install an Express edition of the Microsoft SQL Server, the Mozilla wiki said that this installation is not necessary, so I didn’t bother to waste time downloading it.

Once Visual Studio was installed and working the next step was to install the Windows VISTA SDK. Don’t ask me why my Microsoft Windows XP SP2 installation needs an installation of the VISTA SDK to do development on Firefox,. Or even how it’s possible that my OS didn’t complain that I was installing a development SDK for an OS that is not installed, for that matter.

I browsed to the Vista SDK website and had to validate my computer with some strange application plugin. This installation is just another one of those downloaders that Microsoft seems to have an abundance of. So upon starting this installation I was prompted as to what should be installed. I selected everything, by default it left off some of the x64 bit stuff. Even though I have a 32bit processor I figured that I might want to do some cross platform compilations.

This installation is rather large and has over 1.5gb of files to download. As I selected the options for installation it calculated to installation time and size, it said it would take 5 weeks to download the installation. But once the download actually started the status bar shot to the 100% mark and stayed there. So far an hour has gone by and it’s still downloading with 0% left to go.

After the download and installation of the VISTA SDK, next I installed the Mozilla Build 1.3 package. The Mozilla Build package contains a shell, CVS and other necessary free or open source development tools required to build a successful Mozilla browser on Windows. Consider it an all in one development add-on to Visual Studio to get a working Mozilla development environment.

I downloaded the Mozilla Build package and started the installation. The Mozilla Wiki suggested that I leave the installation location and settings default so I did the usual next, next, next… finish. By default everything gets put into the directory “C:\mozilla-build”.

The wiki had me run the exe “C:\mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat” for visual studio 2009 express edition.This executes a MINGW32 shell for developing Mozilla packages. With this running the only thing left to do is get the Mozilla Firefox source from CVS and try to build it. I’ll leave that for the next article.

This is a multi-part article, see part 2