James'Techblog

As with any new chapter in a revamped piece of software's life, something breaks. Recently, Firefox updated to the latest version 57, which offers users a completely reworked UI, several speed enhancements and overall a more streamlined feel. The program's release was a milestone, not since 1.0 has the program gotten such a facelift with over 6 million lines of code tweaked and changed. Mozilla mentioned removing hundreds of bugs which slowed down the browser in the prior 56  release alone. With the code cleanup, they did a complete redesign of the icon style. Sadly, they also changed the extensions api over from XUL to WEBEX, that means that policeman, and many other content blocking extensions might not work anymore, it also means that flash is slowly becoming deprecated in the browser as well. What's more, Firefox will no longer support classic theme restorer etc. The lead developer of Noscript mentioned on his site https://noscript.net/ that he was hard working on fin...

Having criticized Firefox in the past, I realize how this might sound coming from me. I have recently tested the new Firefox 57. I have to say, I am really digging the sleek, flat look, the dark theme set to compact, the layout of the menu, the customization page now has more items you can throw onto your toolbar. The speed, it's quickly replacing chromium for me. An issue many users might face, it might not be available for you for a few days in linux, depending upon your distribution's package maintainers. I am currently still in Manjaro 17.1pre2 Hakoila. As of yet, the latest package has not dripped down into the repos, so I had to improvise. You can download the tarball at Mozilla, the website recognizes what platform you are using. From there you have to cd into the Downloads folder from your terminal as in: cd ~/Downloads/, once there, you will find the tarball listed by doing a ls. To untar this file, you have to type tar -xvf $filename into the terminal and that should...

Obviously one of the most top rated and the most popular media viewers today, VLC has reached its fame no doubt due to the fact that it supports more formats than any other. VLC is one program with a versatile arrangement of plugins and features. Almost everyone knows about it. In recent months, VLC has been lagging behind in  Manjaro or other Arch-based distributions simply because there was a switch from qt4 to qt5. I wouldn't even bring this up, however, it has affected me as well.  You load Manjaro 17.0.x and for whatever reason, when you go to launch VLC to play say, Knight Rider, VLC crashes almost immediately. I recently updated the bash scripts and solved a whole bunch of bugs that I missed. In one of the efforts to resolve the issues, I added Clementine to the automatically installed list. I added the application simply because it requires qt4 and thus downloads it accordingly. Normally, the system has qt5 and so, it doesn't really look for qt4. Qt4 is a plugin syste...