konq, redux

[waider]

What's bothering me right now, since I just ran up Konq after Mozilla fell over on doonesbury.com (it's the flash, you see):

• fonts: I've set it to Sans 12, which seems reasonable but turns out to be a lot bigger than I expect. Setting it to Sans 10 makes no visible difference, which is WRONG.
• the nav bar: I run mozilla with bookmarks open in the left-hand sidebar. The best I can manage in Konq is to have the nav bar open; it's got a bunch of icons that I can place on the left or right of the nav bar, but can't hide; and it doesn't remember the state of the bookmarks, i.e. if I expand a bookmark folder, then quit konq and restart, that folder is closed.
• page nav menu bar: it doesn't have one. turns out i actually use this a fair amount, and only miss it when it's gone
• Ctrl-T starts a terminal instead of opening a new tab.

Mostly I've beaten it into the shape I want, and it does a lot of things right, such as automatically running flash player under arts to avoid the very thing that I think is at the root of the mozilla hang. (pointers to fixing the above gripes - not explanations as to why they're the right thing, pointers to fixes - appreciated)

Comments

[odaiwai.livejournal.com]

when Mozilla hangs like that for me, I have to restart X to get any control back. Which usually means that I have to power up another box, ssh in and killall X.

Any idea how to avoid it? The Firefox plugin which disables flash sounds like it would be good, if it would run on mozilla.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's pretty harsh. I suspect a poor interaction with your sound daemon; mozilla will try and start up esd if it thinks it can get away with it, which can cause all manner of stupidity as various things fight over access to /dev/dsp, ad one of those fighting things may well be your window manager trying to make some noise. I've found chmod -x /usr/bin/esd to help with this, since artsd is my preferred sound daemon and is a lot more well-behaved that esd which is basically some sort of horrid joke thrust upon us by the GNOME people. In summary, here's what I run:

• in my window manager startup, artsd -a toss -S 4096 -F 20;
• for mozilla: artsdsp --mmap mozilla;
• for xmms: the arts_output plugin, abused (as is xmms) to play nice with KDE 3.2;
• mplayer, bless it. automatically detects artsd;
• for the stand-alone flash player: artsdsp gflashplayer foo.swf;
. This seems to cover pretty much everything for me. My window manager does not at any point attempt to make any helpful sounds, so I don't have any issues there.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Possibly more useful advice: switch off XInput Methods for mozilla (run it as "XMODIFIERS= mozilla", yes there is a space in there) which, well, you get to not use XInput in moz, but maybe flash won't crash. Just found this hint in the Release Notes for 1.7b and it seems to be working so far.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Ok, this is horrid, but it appears to be working for me: allowing esd to run. inside artsdsp. which means that flash is talking to an emulated /dev/dsp, which is talking to another emulated /dev/dsp, before any actual sound data gets to the sound device. Ow my head. Oh well, if it stops the hanging...

[odaiwai.livejournal.com]

Well, whatever it was, getting ALSA sorted and upgrading to Fedora Core 1 seemed to sort it out.

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

I keep reading people cursing Mozilla. I would curse mozilla also, if I still used it.

But I moved to Firefox and haven't turned back. That's on both windows and linux, thanks to the "user agent switcher" that lets me masquerade as necessary. It runs flash, it loads real, it handles java/jscript...is this not happening for other people?

FWIW, I'm running xfce, not gnome or kde. The lack of bloat in the WM might be giving the browser more memory/room/horsepower to recover from glitches.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I gave it a spin last week and encountered the same problem. It seems some part of mozilla absolutely positively wants to talk to esd. Which as hinted above is a very appropriately named piece of software.

FWIW myself, I'm running fvwm2. I really dislike bloaty desktops.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I consider fvwm2 bloaty but i've learned to live with it. I haven't run into this problem, though. I'm running Linux Firefox + Linux FlashPlayer on FreeBSD.

[candice.livejournal.com]

I never found it bloaty from a memory/resources standpoint, but cannot stand the usability of it.

(this coming from a twm person who has momentary flights into wmx.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I was an fvwm user who kept running into a bizarre focus bug and actually put in the effort to migrate to fvwm2 AND cut out all the moronic usability fat. I wish i had that sort of effort these days.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Well, I run fvwm2, the button bar, and the pager, all with configurations that have changed little since 1994.

Waider (localhost.localdomain) $ > ps -auxwc | grep -i fvwm
waider    3737  0.0  0.3  5376  876 ?        S    10:30   0:00 fvwm2
waider    3739  0.0  0.0  2520  112 ?        S    10:30   0:00 FvwmEvent
waider    3740  0.0  0.1  2924  280 ?        S    10:30   0:00 FvwmButtons
waider    3757  0.0  0.1  2804  336 ?        S    10:30   0:00 FvwmPager

And just for amusing comparison:

Waider (localhost.localdomain) $ > ps -auxwc | grep moz
waider    3755  0.8 17.6 182012 44996 ?      S    10:30   0:31 mozilla-bin

So in relative terms, I think I cannot in any sense call fvwm2 "bloaty".