Could Iceweasel be the source of my X woes in Debian Lenny? (Answer: no)

Like most of you, I use Web browsers a lot. A whole lot. And my problems with screen refresh seem most acute when using the Iceweasel/Firefox browser.

I thought the problem with “ghosting” images on the screen only occurred in GNOME, but now I’ve seen problems in Xfce, too.

To test my theory, I started using Epiphany, the GNOME Web browser based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine.

So far things are looking pretty good. I’ll have to do this for a few more days before I determine whether or not Iceweasel hates my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I’ll leave the jury out on this for the moment and render a verdict in a day or so.

10 minutes later: Nope, it’s not Iceweasel. I’m seeing funky stuff in Epiphany, too. And running xrefresh doesn’t clear it up, nor does dragging the window off the screen and back again.

Fat lady sings, and Opera is officially my new favorite browser (this week anyway)

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple’s Safari, there’s plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don’t know about you, but I’m in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla’s Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that’s modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I’m probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I’d never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been “forced” to use Internet Explorer — also closed source (hey, it’s Microsoft — what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple’s OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most “advanced” operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I’ve downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com — and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won’t open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better — and always much, much faster.

That’s the best thing about the Opera Web browser — it’s very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can … do your thing.

The company that makes Opera — called Opera Software — provides versions for many platforms. It’s a pity you can’t get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I’ll still use Firefox — probably a lot — since it’s the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there’s no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I’ve seen lately.

Slightly broken Iceweasel 3.0 comes into Debian Lenny

I’d read the teeth-gnashing about Iceweasel/Firefox 3.0 among developers at Planet Debian, and while I wasn’t eagerly awaiting the move from 2.x to 3.0 for Iceweasel — Debian’s copyright-free version of Firefox — I didn’t expect the thing to move from Sid to Testing with huge bugs.

First of all, and I don’t call this a bug so much as a total oddity. Instead of using the standard Iceweasel file as the home page, it now defaults to Mozilla’s “Gran Paradiso” page. I’ve seen other names for Firefox (besides Iceweasel, there’s Bon Echo), but this one I can’t figure out.

And like Epiphany did a while back (and which I since fixed), now Iceweasel defaults to “working offline” mode, even though I’m definitely online.

When Epiphany “broke” in this same way, I began using Iceweasel more and more just to see how long it would take Debian to fix the problem. When I saw they weren’t going to do that (since the bug report included ways users could hack it back to health), I did the fix myself in gconf and moved on.

But having this problem in Iceweasel is bigger, since presumably more people use it than Epiphany.

Again, these problems just don’t present themselves in Ubuntu. … and I had smooth sailing with Iceweasel 3.0 in Sidux this morning, so Lenny is definitely hurting.

Update: I found possibly relevant bug reports from Debian and Mozilla. It appears that the problem is due to Network Manager.

What isn’t clear is whether or not the fix is forthcoming. Firefox 3 is working just fine in Ubuntu 8.04, so perhaps when a more mature Iceweasel works its way into Debian Lenny, my problem will be solved. I hope.