Mozilla

Mozilla Hangs, Freezes, Crashes or Otherwise Misbehaves. What Should I Do?

The first thing to do when mozilla does anything unexpected such as crashing, freezing up, or otherwise acting strangely is the following:

1. Quit and restart the browser.

If it still acts strangely, try the following:

On UNIX systems:

1. Quit (or kill) mozilla.
2. Run mozilla -cleanup which will remove the mozilla fast load file cache, mail summary files and other files that will be rebuilt at startup. These files can become corrupted and cause mozilla to misbehave.
3. Start mozilla and try again. If it still does not work then you should start over with fresh Mozilla preferences. How Do I Start With Fresh Mozilla Preferences?

On Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 systems:

1. Quit (or kill) mozilla.
2. Delete the file U:\.mozilla.w2k\User\puegzo40.slt\XUL.mfl
3. Start mozilla and try again. If it still does not work then you should start over with fresh Mozilla preferences. How Do I Start With Fresh Mozilla Preferences?

How Do I Start With Fresh Mozilla Preferences?

In case you need to start over with your Mozilla preferences, here's how to do it.

On UNIX systems:

1. Quit mozilla
2. mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.old
3. mv ~/.mozilla.w2k ~/mozilla.w2k.old
4. Restart mozilla

On Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 systems:

1. Quit mozilla
2. Rename U:\.mozilla to U:\.mozilla.old
3. Rename U:\.mozilla.w2k to U:\.mozilla.w2k.old
4. Restart mozilla

Note: This will not remove mail or bookmarks files if you are using the default department Mozilla setup.

You'll need to redo any changes you made to your preferences and reinstall any plug-ins you installed locally. Your email will default to imap so if you receive mail on your local workstation, then you'll need to Edit your email preferences. When you are sure everything works and you have your bookmarks, etc. You can remove your .mozilla.old and .mozilla.w2k.old directories to reduce your quota usage (rm -r ~/.mozilla.old ~/.mozilla.w2k.old on unix platforms)

How Do I Change Printer Options In Mozilla?

On UNIX systems:

Go to File⇒Print and press the Properties button. There is an entry box that should say something like lpr or lpr -Plaser or something similar. To change your printer, add or change the -P option to the desired printer, i.e., -Plaser-duplex, and hit OK. You can also specify other options, such as number of copies. For more info, see the man page for lpr.

Note:Mozilla will default to the printer you have set in your $PRINTER environment variable. Otherwise, it will default to the laser queue on computer science computers or prb248 on statistics computers.

On Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 systems:

Much the same as above. Go to File⇒Print. You can choose which printer you'd like to print to from the drop menu, if you have access to multiple printers. To choose whether or not to print double-sided, press the Properties button, and go to the Layout tab. There is a box on this tab in which you can choose duplex printing options.

Mozilla Starts Up A Profile Manager When I Try To Start Mozilla. Why Is It Doing This?

Mozilla has a concept of profiles built into it, meaning you can start it with multiple "personalities", each customized a little differently. On UNIX, you can always start up Mozilla with the Profile Manager as follows:

mozilla -ProfileManager

If you started mozilla with no arguments and you got the profile manager, you probably have a mozilla process running somewhere, or mozilla may have crashed and left a lock file. At this point, you have three options:

1. Exit or kill the other mozilla processes
2. Remove the lock file (if mozilla crashed). See The Profile Manager Tells Me My Profile Is Already In Use But I Know It Isn't. What Should I Do? .
3. Start mozilla with a new/different profile

How Do I Import My Old Bookmarks Into Mozilla?

Mozilla should be able to import your old netscape bookmarks automatically on both UNIX and Windows systems.

If it doesn't, or if you want to import new bookmarks from other files, then select Bookmarks⇒Manage Bookmarks⇒Tools⇒Import. Find the bookmark file you wish to import (your old netscape bookmark file should be in your .netscape directory). If you are using a UNIX system, you may have to check the 'show hidden' box to be able to see your .netscape directory, or just enter the directory name into the file name field to go to that directory. After selecting the file, click the Open button, and it should import any bookmarks from that file that weren't already in your active bookmark list.

This will only work on html format bookmark files.

The Profile Manager Tells Me My Profile Is Already In Use But I Know It Isn't. What Should I Do?

If mozilla tells you your profile is already in use but you know it isn't, it's probably because Mozilla crashed and did not remove it's lock file. You'll need to remove the lock file by hand.

For the Microsoft Windows version of Mozilla, the lock file is U:\.mozilla.w2k\User\puegzo40.slt\lock

The location of the lock file is slightly different for each user under UNIX. It is located at

~/.mozilla/login/XXXXXXXX.slt/lock

where login must be substituted with your login name and XXXXXXXX.slt is some random directory name that you will need to determine (by looking in ~/.mozilla/login).

Remove this lock file and you should be good to go.

Here's an example for a user named "joeuser":

cd ~/.mozilla/joeuser
ls

mzti5x2o.slt

cd mzti5x2o.slt
rm lock

Can I Configure Helper Applications For Mozilla To Open Certain Types Of Files (for Instance, PDF Files)?

Maybe. Mozilla's browser plugins override any helper applications you configure, so if there is a plugin associated with that file type, it will open the file in the browser window. There is a pdf plugin, for instance, so pdf files will be opened in the browser window. However, if there is no plugin, you can configure helper applications under Edit⇒Preferences⇒Navigator⇒Helper Applications.

You can also just save the file and open it with the appropriate application.

How Do I Import My Old Netscape Communicator Address Book Into Mozilla?

Strangely enough, Mozilla does not seem to be able to import a Netscape Communicator address book directly, however you can accomplish this task with the following instructions

1. QUIT mozilla.
2. Start Netscape Communicator 4.x
3. Click on Communicator ⇒ Address Book
4. In the Address Book, select File -> Export
5. Browse to a good location to save the file (remember where you saved it and what you named it!)
   On Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 systems:
   Leave the default "Save as type:" which should say something like LDIF (*.ldif)
6. Quit Netscape Communicator.
7. Start mozilla.
8. Click on Windows ⇒ Address Book.
9. In the Address Book window, select Tools ⇒ Import
10. In the Import dialog box make sure "Address Books" is selected. Click Next.
11. Select Text File (LDIF, .tab, csv, .txt) and click Next.
12. Browse to the location where you exported your Netscape Communicator address file and open it.
13. That's it. Your old Netscape Communicator 4.x address book entries should now be imported into Mozilla.

How Do I Use The Junk Email Features Of Mozilla?

Starting with version 1.3, Mozilla has built-in junk email filtering capabilities. However, it does not filter anything "out of the box". Instead, you need to train Mozilla to recognize spam. It may take a week or two of training Mozilla before it can reliably recognize spam but it works pretty well once you've trained it. You also need to tell it when it marks something as spam that is not spam.

By default, the junk mail controls should be enabled for your Mozilla e-mail, but Mozilla will not do anything until you start training it. To teach Mozilla that an email message is spam you can:

• Tools⇒Mark Selected Messages as Junk
• Click on the Junk toolbar icon that looks like a recycle bin to toggle the junk state to on.
• Click the dot under the junk icon in the thread window to toggle it's state to on.

Typically, you'll also want to hit the Delete button after marking each junk message to get rid of it, since marking messages as junk simply trains mozilla to recognize messages similar to these as junk in the future but does nothing else with them.

Similar methods can be used to tell Mozilla a message is NOT junk if mozilla (or you) accidently marked it as junk email:

• Tools⇒Mark Selected Messages as Not Junk
• Click on the Junk toolbar icon that looks like a recycle bin to toggle the junk state to off.
• Toggle the junk icon in the thread window to toggle it's state to off.

Note that the first two methods in the lists above can be applied to multiple email messages at once if more than one message is highlighted.

After some training, Mozilla will start to automatically toggle on the junk email icon in the thread panel for email that it believes is junk. To make this feature more useful, you can do one of the following:

• Click the Junk email icon in the header for the thread panel (or goto View⇒Sort by⇒Junk Status) to sort by junk status. This way you can easily group junk email and scan for false positives (unmarking them as junk) and then delete the remaining junk email.
• Move junk messages automatically to a different folder. Goto Tools⇒Junk Mail Controls... and check the box that says Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail to: and then select a folder to place the junk email. Note: we do NOT recommend checking the Automatically delete messages marked as junk mail after X days since there is the very real possibility of false positives and you don't want to miss important email. Rather, we recommend that you occasionally scan the subject lines and senders of your junk email and then delete it.

How Do I Get Math Symbols To Show Up On Web Pages?

In order to view a web page with math symbols correctly on a UNIX-based system (these pages should display just fine under Windows NT), you need to tell the X windows system where to find the symbol fonts. Here's how:

• In netscape, goto Edit⇒Preferences⇒Appearance⇒Fonts At the bottom right, under the box labeled "Sometimes a document will provide its own fonts." select the last option "Use document-specified fonts, including Dynamic Fonts"
• Now quit netscape.
• edit ~/.Xdefaults and add the following line to the bottom of the file:
  Netscape*documentFonts.charset*adobe-fontspecific: iso-8859-1
• run the following at the UNIX prompt:
  xrdb ~/.Xdefaults
• Now start up netscape and visit a URL with math symbols. It should look right. The downside is that other pages are probably going to look ugly (the default fonts are much nicer than the ones containing the symbol fonts.) So, you might want to change your preferences back to the top option "Use my default fonts, overriding document-specified fonts" when you are not viewing web pages containing math symbols.