Living with Firefox

I use Firefox all the time. Both with Windows and Linux but I don’t like the fact that it assumes that you are using Gnome under Linux and doesn’t really play nicely with KDE. Thankfully there are a few things you can do. To get printing to use KPrinter (the default KDE print dialog). Choose the printer called Postscript/default and then change the command that is run to kprinter --stdin. Now, whenever you print to that printer, you will get the KDE standard print dialog where you can choose the printer (most importantly, output to PDF) and change the settings. What is happening is that you are setting a configuration item (see the special Firefox URL about:config) called print.printer_PostScript/default.print_command. If you are happy to always use this setting, you might also like to set print.always_print_silent to true in about:config (add it as a new string entry if it does not exist). Now you wont see the initial print dialog, you will get a progress box and then the KDE print dialog. You might also want to get rid of the nasty looking Gnome open/save dialogs too. That’s easily done, again using about:config. This time set the option ui.allow_platform_file_picker to false. Finally, you may well find that printing from Firefox takes an age. You can fix that by editing /etc/cups/mime.types (as sudo) and commenting out the two lines belonging to the mozilla-ps mime type. I am not sure though whether this has any impact on the quality of the output. And people say that Linux is ready for the desktop? Hmm.