Surfing in the World Wide Web
We recommend using Mozilla Firefox as browser for surfing the Web. It is available on all our platforms. We follow the ESR releases for the installed versions.
Bookmarks
You can save interesting WWW addresses with the Bookmark function of Firefox. These are saved under Unix in your home directory in the database file ~/.mozilla/firefox/[!ProfileName]/places.sqlite. Firefox also saves other personal settings in the ~/.mozilla/firefox directory.
Configuration
Firefox offers a variety of configuration options. This is very nice, but once you have changed many things so that Firefox stops working properly, it becomes a problem. This is the moment when you should consider 'resetting' your Firefox configuration. Here is how to do it:
- Exit Firefox
Type mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla-old in a terminal
- Start Firefox
Firefox will now get a brand new config file and should resume working properly. Please note, that by this, you will loose all you personal settings. You can always copy files back from the .mozilla-old directory with the command cp.
You can find more information about Firefox configuration files on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data
Enabling Adobe Flash Player in Firefox
![/!\](/static/comp/img/alert.png "/!\"){kind=small}
Adobe has announced the End Of Life of Flash Player on December 31, 2020 (https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html). We therefore do not recommend installing Flash Player any more.
Starting with autumn 2018 and the new Debian Stretch (Debian 9), the flash plugin is no longer a part of the system installation. Users that still need to work with Flash applications must install the Flash plugin themselves in their home. However, always use the builtin HTML5 player as flash replacement, if possible.
Flash installation steps
- The version you need is "Linux 64 Bit (Firefox)" in your desired language.
- From the combobox "Choose version..." select ".tar.gz for Linux"
- Click the "Download now" button.
- Open a terminal (shell)
Unpack the downloaded archive, i.e. enter: tar xvfz flash_player_npapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz libflashplayer.so
Move the extracted file libflashplayer.so to $HOME/.mozilla/plugins, i.e. enter: mv libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins
- Restart your Firefox
Verify if the flash plugin has been loaded. Enter in Firefox the following URL: about:plugins.
- On the page displayed, there should be an entry called "Shockwave Flash". If it is missing, something is not configured correctly.