programming Firefox with MozRepl in Windows 7 - firefox

I've only seen examples for it in Linux. Does it work in Windows? Can you give an example?

MozRepl works just fine on Windows.
Since it runs as a Firefox plug-in and interacts with Firefox internals, the examples you've seen for Linux should work the same on the Windows version.
The only difference is that you might have to download a third-party Telnet client. I prefer PuTTy personally. Just make sure you select the Telnet protocol and then specify port 4242 (unless you changed it).
I just gave it a shot and everything was fine. I ran through the Tutorial on the site (the same one they walk through in the demo video) and Firefox on Windows behaved just like Firefox on Linux.

Related

Remote Desktop for Mac - issue with JavaFX app - PDFBOX

I have written a JavaFX app running on Windows 10 machine in the office which has problems showing (painting/rendering) certain embedded controls such as a Pane with PdfBox when I connect to it with Remote Desktop for Mac. It shows only a black screen in the app instead of the pdf document.
When I connect using RDP from my Windows 10 machine at home to my Windows 10 machine at work, the app works just fine (the pdf is shown in the app).
I have the same problems using AnyDesk and Teamviewer.
The app only shows PDFs properly using a connection from Windows 10 to Windows 10 with Microsoft RDP.
It might be a JavaFX issue. Similar issues are described here (although not 100% identical):
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8239589
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8229394
However, since I guess Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac is using the same technology as the Windows Desktop client, I would have expected it to work fine.
I have a Mac Mini M1 running the latest OS (Monterey) at the time of writing this post. I am also using the latest Remote Desktop client for Mac.
This problem is not new and was also present in older releases.
I have tried to play around with screen resolutions, both on Host and Client but nothing good came out of those tests.
Disabled also hardware acceleration in Remote Desktop for Mac preferences but it didn't change anything.
The machine at the office has the following specs (which I cannot change nor update)
Edizione Windows 10 Pro
Versione 20H2
Data installazione: ‎10/‎09/‎2021
Build sistema operativo 19042.1415
Esperienza Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.3920.0
Anyone else who has seen this problem and perhaps resolved it?
Could it be a bug in either PdfBox or Remote Desktop for Mac?
Except for the above issue, the Remote Desktop Client for Mac is working great (not lagging as TeamViewer or AnyDesk) and the user experience is phenomenal.
PS: While this might be considered a programming question (since I wrote the app with JavaFX) but it might be better to post on another forum? If yes, which one? On the other hand, many similar posts (look at the suggested thread on the right) have been upvoted despite not dealing with programming issues.
Thanks.
How do you use PDFBox? I ask because this is not a JavaFX component. If you use a SwingNode for that it might be interesting to try one of my two PDFViewer demos here and see whether the problem persists.
https://github.com/mipastgt/JFXToolsAndDemos#awtimage
The difference is in how I do the rendering and maybe that makes a difference for your use-case too. But of course this is just a wild guess and I can't promise anything.

All the websites detect wrong OS and browser version of my computer. Why?

I am using Windows 10 (insider build) and Firefox 58.0.2. But all the browser detection sites like www.whatismybrowser.com and similar says that I am using Firefox 52 on Windows 7. Detection scripts also return wrong screen resolution.
Can anyone say why is that? Maybe some firefox plugin - but I am not using any that would do that, that I know of. Maybe uBlock Origin?
If you have the setting privacy.resistFingerprinting turned on in about:config, Firefox will pretend to be the most recent ESR version (in this case 52) on the most common OS (Windows 7).
This is to make your browser's user agent string the same as a lot of other people's, so it's harder for sites to use it to identify you.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418672

Apple and Internet Explorer

Someone smart who I know just mentioned that the idea of downloading Internet Explorer onto a Mac seems counterintuitive, even though it might make sense to do since Safari seems to have problems on a certain site for a project we're working on. I'm just wondering why this is and would greatly appreciate any clarification. In summary:
Why does it not make sense to download Internet Explorer onto a Mac?
Much thanks in advance!
If you're looking for a serious answer:
The best way to test something with IE7 for Windows is to use IE7 for Windows. Just because you have a Mac doesn't mean you can't do that. You can run Windows through BootCamp. Or buy a used $99 Windows box and borrow the Mac's keyboard/mouse/etc. Of course it's much more convenient, and almost certainly good enough, to run Windows in a VM under OS X via Parallels, VMware, etc. Wine will mostly work, but it can be fiddly to configure, and may crash and/or have visual glitches that don't happen with real Windows; if you really want to get serious about that you may want to look at Crossover.
But the next best way to test IE7 for Windows is actually Opera. Of course in the case of bugs and quirks that are still present in later versions of IE, they'll do a perfect job of emulating IE7, but for bugs that were fixed, that's not a particularly important focus. Opera, on the other hand, works hard to be able to emulate the quirks of all of the important browsers. Make sure to enable IE quirks mode, and set the user agent to pretend to be IE7 for Windows, and you should be golden.
But for the question you actually asked, there is no blanket answer to this that could possibly be correct. There are many reasons it may not make sense to download Internet Explorer onto a Mac, and also many reasons why it might.
You can't run IE for Mac on any modern Mac.
If you have an ancient Mac, and it's running 10.2 or 10.3 rather than 10.4, it already has IE (and if you want to reinstall it, it's part of the OS X install), so there's no reason to download IE.
You also can't legally download IE for Mac from anywhere anymore (except as part of old versions of OS X).
And IE for Mac is actually far less like IE7 for Windows than any modern browser is.
You can't run IE for Windows (or Pocket IE for Windows Mobile) on Mac OS X.
But you can run it under wine.
And you can run it in a virtual machine running Windows.
Except that Windows comes with Internet Explorer, so there's no reason to download it.
Unless your Windows comes with an older version and you want to update it.
And a Mac can run Windows instead of OS X if you want (e.g., via BootCamp).
Same caveats as with a VM.
And there may be other reasons to download it other than running it.
If your Mac has access to a fast internet connection and your Windows box doesn't, you might want to download the installer on the Mac to copy it locally to Windows.
Sometimes you just want to use up internet bandwidth.
Maybe you're testing your download speeds.
Maybe you're about to dump your boyfriend, and first you want to run him $300 over his monthly bandwidth limits.
Someone at Microsoft might find it entertaining when they notice in the logs that you've downloaded IE on a Mac, and it's always nice to bring a smile to a stranger's face.
The last version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh was 5.2, out in 2003. It wouldn't even run on a modern machine. The build is just not compatible.
If you want to try a different browser, both Chrome and Firefox run on OSX.
To run internet explorer on the Mac, you'd need to use some sort virtualization, running Windows either through Boot Camp or Parallels.
I had to do it because I'm developing software and the client wants to have it styled for IE 7 (the version they have on all their machines).
If I had my druthers, I'd run it under virtualization (e.g., VMWare), but I've misplaced my old XP CDs, so I settled for Wine (which works 'okay', but crashes from time-to-time).
I suggest using VirtualBox which would enable you to run MSIE on your Mac directly:
https://www.virtualbox.org/
...and here are the VMs for MSIE 6, 7, 8 and 9:
https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
Good luck!
It's definitely not a good idea to install Internet Explorer for Mac. It simply doesn't work properly as it was discontinued by Microsoft in 2005. However, if you have to use it to view certain websites that will only work in IE, this is the easiest way to download and install it for Mac: http://machow2.com/download-internet-explorer-for-mac/

Is there any browser that looks remotely similar between Ubuntu and Windows

I want to implement websites using a computer that is running only Ubuntu.
This is not feasible because Ubuntu FireFox displays completely different from Windows FireFox.
This means that I can do things like JS & PHP on Ubuntu, but have to switch to my Windows Computer to (edit and) view HTML & CSS as they appear for most users.
This makes file management too complicated. I have two of everything. And...I don't want to install a server on my Windows machine.
Is there any browser that looks remotely similar between Ubuntu and Windows? I want to stay on Ubuntu as much as possible.
Following the advice from Greg, why don't you install wine and run Internet Explorer from that?
use Wine to run a windows based browser to work with: http://www.winehq.org/
If its layouts and stuff you're worried about have a look at http://browsershots.org/ it allows you to see what a website looks like on many revisions of many browsers on BSD, Linux, Windows and Mac
I have to say you are working on the total wrong idea.
I can easily switch between 20 different themes. I'm currently using either an old Win2000 theme or the olive WinXP theme.
The only way for a non Desktop GUI app is to make your website look good on any computer.
Use CSS to style the input elements. Or better - make the GUI simple enough that the look of the common GUI form controls do not matter.
Everything else should work exactly the same anyway cause the layout engines for Firefox Linux and Firefox Windows are the same.
Google Chrome took special care to look the same on all platforms for font-rendering, etc. But I haven't noticed anything problematic on firefox, either. Have you installed msttcorefonts on ubuntu? That should help.
I agree with Greg. The simplest problem from one OS to another is fonts. While you can installed Microsoft licenced fonts in linux out of the box this isn't the default eg. Arial.
Even then just look at Safari for windows verusus Safari for Mac. Apple has their own implementation of the licenced MS fonts, as such the same font (eg arial) on Windows is not the same as on Mac. This can also be the case on linux if a slightly different implementation of the font is installed.
That aside, all the chrome ( toolbars, buttons, titlebar etc ) are different from one OS to another, so if you're a good developer and try really hard to word your content and fit your layout so that most people don't have to scroll just for two or three lines, then without actually viewing the page in the target OS you're really just doing half the job.
If you can get your head around it, try something like virtualbox and have a set of virtual machines, which you can run one at a time and test fully how each browser will work with your pages. A few things to note: as much as we ALL hate IE6, if your sites are going to be viewed by a company / organisation, chances are they'll still be on IE6, even worse is that there are TWO versions on IE6 which do operate slightly differently, notiable IE6 from XP ( no service packs installed ) and IE6 from XP SP2. Then you've got the default install that is Vista with IE7 ( which can look different and operate differently to IE7 on XP), and the default install in Win7 which is IE8. REALLY importantly is that it is known that some CSS on IE8 in XP is different to IE8 on Vista or Win7.
We (unfortunately) have as part of our testing 7 Win vm's to test just IE, then two for Firefox on windows ( FF 3.0 and 3.x - the latest ) plus two vms for Chrome and two vms for Safari on windows. Admittedly we promise our sites will work on all these browsers in our projects if the client chooses to at an additional cost.
Good luck
Fonts and platform form controls are likely reasons that you're going to see things differ between Linux and Windows. But they can also cause differences between different Windows users or different Linux users, so testing on a single Windows machine isn't necessarily sufficient either. If you're seeing drastic differences between Linux and Windows, it might be a sign that there are things in your design that are unnecessarily dependent on particular text widths or form control sizes.

how to launch x programs running in mac ox from cygwin running on windows-

running cygwin on windows I can connect and execute X applications with no further problems
just accessing the remote linux box as ssh -Y -l user machine.
If I do the same against a mac box and try to open ie. firefox as: open -a firefox
returns the following:
LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed for the application /Applications/Firefox.app with error -10810.
Any hints?
I've alternatively used a vnc server in the mac computer, but it's extremely slow.
Thanks,
/Applications/Firefox.app is not an X app it uses Apple's own GUI routines to write to the screen.
To work via cygwin you would need to compile up an X11 version of Firefox - one easy way is look at macports for X11 applications.
However I suspect you want to use Apple applications - all those in /Applications and then VNC is about the only way,
I agree with Mark.
The only other solution that might work is using AppleScript to script the target applications. As far as I know, it doesn't require a GUI session. I know I've used it over SSH before, but I can't remember if I've been logged in or not. Worst case scenario, you just log in via VNC and then close your VNC client.
What are you trying to run? Hopefully not just Firefox -- it'd be much easier to just use it on Linux than try to use it over VNC to a Mac. Either can be frustratingly slow over a distance, in my experience, however.

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