macdiggs.com

I live in Japan, but I really love to have my (Google) search results to be in English. However, every other program out there thinks it knows what I need better than me. 

That exactly the case with Firefox 3 on Mac. It annoyed the hell out of me to get my location detected every single time I do search and search Japanese segment of the web for my English-worded queries. Making changes to my preferred search language in my Google accounts yielded ZERO results. 

But before you go insane, there's an easy solution!

1. Open file: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml in your favorite text editor

2. add <Param name="hl" value="en"/> to the parameters section (if you want english as default language) as well as replace {moz:locale} entries to the required language setting.

See the screenshot.

3. Restart Firefox and enjoy!

Good news from del.icio.us :) They have finally updated their Firefox browser plugin so it doesn't conflict with Google's browser sync plugin.

Really good news because I really love del.icio.us, but I definitely love my Google browser sync plugin several magnitudes more. Before, del.icio.us was just refusing to work after detecting Google's plugin, but no more! I now have them both installed on my Firefox and am a really happy camper :)

del.icio.us bookmarks plugin

google's browser sync plugin

good things come in.. couples? :)

Even since betas of Firefox 2, I had constant unexpected freezes of the browser, at least once on 1-2 hours of normal use (usually the uptime was not longer than 10-15 minutes during heavy lifting).

That, considering excellent stability of Firefox 1.5, was very very annoying. I thought may be it release candidates or the release version itself will fix the problem, but RCs came and gone, and even the release version of the browser was as freeze-prone as early betas.

I tried to delete user profiles and create new ones, delete preferences - without any results. Then I have started to turn off extensions (I had lots of them), leaving only the ones I can't live without, and which I thought I can trust 100%. These extensions happen to be: WebDeveloper, FireBug, Google Toolbar for Firefox and Google Browser sync. But no matter what, even with this limited extensions set, freezes continues at their usual annoying level.

…until one day when I was desperately searching for a solution to the problem again, and found a post in which the poster suggested removing Google Toolbar for Firefox extension in order to get rid of crashes. "Huh? Google's toolbar?", - I though. "Isn't Google's software pretty good and polished to be a source of such a horrible problem?". But I eventually gave it a try. I removed Google Toolbar for Firefox extension from both computers I use (Intel-based iMacs, one at home and one at work) - and I could barely believe my eyes - the freezes just stopped. I'm living my 3rd day without ANY freezes at all!

Now.. I'm not sure if Google Toolbar causes these problems on any machines it is installed on, or is this problem only Mac-version specific, or may be I live right in the middle of some anomaly which causes Google Toolbar to behave in such a way, but all I can say is that :

removing Google Toolbar extension resolved Firefox 2 freezes for me

so you might also give this solution a try if you have similar problems with Firefox 2 constantly freezing on you.