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PrefBar FAQ

If you have a question, check here before sending me an email; chances are your question has already been asked and is included below.

General

What is the Preferenes Toolbar?

Installation

Help! I installed the PrefBar2 over the PrefBar1 and now I can't get popups to work.
How do I uninstall the Preferences Toolbar

Use

How do I reset the buttons on the toolbar?
Why doesn't the images pref work correctly?
What happened to the old onLoadPopups pref?

Feature Requests

Can you add a checkbox to disable flash?
Can you make the PrefBar buttons appear on the Personal Toolbar?
Why can't I have more than six options on a menulist?
I want to add a button to do such and such. Do you know what the onclick value is?
I added a button to do such and such; Do you want the values I used?

Other

Why do I see such and such a bug with Netscape 7.x?
I discovered a bug! What should I do?
My question isn't listed here. Now what?


What is the Preferenes Toolbar?

The Preferences Toolbar is a XUL overlay designed to make your web browsing experience more enjoyable and annoyance free by allowing you to quickly toggle certain navigator preferences and perform certain utility functions.

For example, if you happen to find yourself visiting a site who's author thinks that red text on a yellow background constitutes an attractive color scheme, The Preferences Toolbar allows you to quickly turn off the "Custom Colors" pref, and browse that site in browser's default colors (usually white on black).

Web developers will also enjoy being able to clear their browser cache with a single click, and just about everyone could use a quick user agent spoof now and then.

How do I uninstall the Preferences Toolbar?

There are different ways for uninstalling in Mozilla Seamonkey (Suite) and Mozilla Firefox:

Firefox
- Open the "Tools" menu and click "Extensions". Now you get a list with all installed extensions
- Select the list item for "PrefBar"
- Click the button "Uninstall"

Seamonkey
- Hold the shift-key and right click on the PrefBar to get the context-menu
- Click the "Uninstall" item in the context menu

How do I reset the buttons on the toolbar?

To reset all the buttons on your toolbar to the factory default, use the "Reset"-Button in the configuration dialog. This might be useful if you have deleted something and want it back, or have edited one of the default buttons and want it restored to its original state. (Note that doing this will destroy any changes you have made to the toolbar. New buttons you have created aren't touched!)

Can you add a checkbox to disable flash?

Although disabling flash turned out to be difficult, this feature was requested so often that I started promising people that I would get something in by 2.2. What I finally came up with is the "Kill Flash" button that will remove any flash embeds from the current page. Not quite as useful as being able to turn flash off completely, but it should be nice nonetheless.

Why doesn't the images pref work correctly?

The images preference does work, it just had one weird quirk: it requires you to restart the page in order to see the effect. If you don't restart the page you will get some strange behavior where the state of the images is exactly opposite that of the preference. I have no idea why this happens, but I am almost certain it is a bug in mozilla, not in my prefbar code.

A few people have suggested that I have the page automatically reload when you click that pref, but I think that could have some pretty bad unwanted side effects. Plus I think users are perfectly capable of reloading the page themselves if they want to see the current page without images immediately, but most of the time I think people set that pref because they want the next page they plan to view to be loaded without images, so I'm not going to the prefbar do any automatic reloading.

What happened to the old onLoadPopups pref?

The old onLoadPopups pref is still there, it is just called popups now. It was actually the old popups pref that got removed, since it was pretty much made obsolete by the new popups pref. (The new popups pref is the one that has a UI in the prefs dialog. The old popups pref was a hack using capibility.policy.) You should be able to get all of your popup blocking need with popups check currently included in the prefbar. However, if you really want the old popups pref back, you can make a new one by using:

prefstring: capability.policy.default.Window.open
topref: value ? 'allAccess' : 'noAccess'
frompref: Boolean(value == 'allAccess')

Help! I installed the PrefBar2 over the PrefBar1 and now I can't get popups to work.

If you had the old popups pref turned off, and then installed the PrefBar2, you won't be able to turn it back on again because that pref is no longer on the prefbar. To reenable popups, either remake the old popups pref according to the instructions in the previous question, or open your prefs.js file (without mozilla running) and remove the line for "capability.policy.default.Window.open".

Can you make the PrefBar buttons appear on the Personal Toolbar?

Yes and no. I could have done that. I was even planning on having that feature when I started writing the code for 2.0. However, when I wrote the toolbar customization system I had to change the way prefbar button information is stored, and that made it much more difficult to have them on different toolbars than it would have been before. I still could have done that, but I decided that with the PrefBar show/hide command being hooked up to the F8 key, the main reason to put the buttons on other toolbars (vertical screen space) was on longer an issue. If you value your screen space I'd recomend leaving the PrefBar hidden until you need it, and then press F8 to show it, and F8 again to hide the toolbar after you are finished with it.

Because of what is either a design flaw in the XUL template syntax or my own stupidity, I was unable to figure out a way to write the toolbar code in such a way as to allow an arbitrary number of items in a menulist. I therefore hard coded the templates for menulits with two through six items. (This should probably be enough for most people, but if you think you know a way in which I could allow for that, let me know.)

I want to add a button to do such and such. Do you know what the onclick value is?

No. If I did, I likely would have included that button with the default installation. Although I can go look up the values for this stuff, doing so is partly why it took me four months to get a phoenix compatible version of the toolbar released. In the future, I probably will not have time to answer these sorts of questions anymore.

I added a button to do such and such; Do you want the values I used?

Yes, definitely. A good number of the new buttons in each new version come by way of users who send in the values for them. If someone just sends in an idea for a new button, it can take me an hour or more to go hunt down the values for it and get into the toolbar; when someone sends me those values, I can usually get it finished in less than ten minutes.

Why do I see such and such a bug with Netscape 7.x?

Well, the thing is, maintaining the prefbar takes a lot of work. The people who write the XUL stuff in mozilla have a way of changing things (and breaking everybody's extensions) every few releases. Keeping the prefbar working in two different browsers is a sizeable task, and doing it in three would be near impossible (at least for one person who can only work on this in his increasingly less frequent free time). I have therefore chosen to support the two most popular of browsers that prefbar users use, meaning Phoenix/Firebird and Mozilla Seamonkey. Consequently, I do not officially support any Netscape releases. Any Netscape compatibility that does exist is purely coincidental. There are usually bugs when using the prefbar with Netscape, and I usually don't have time to fix them, because I'm too busy making sure that the prefbar still works with mozilla.

I discovered a bug! What should I do?

First check this FAQ and the known bugs section of the User's Guide to make sure I don't already know about the issue. If you don't see anything related to your bug, send me an email about it and I'll see what I can do. Be sure to include the exact version of the PrefBar you are using, as well as what operating system and mozilla build you see it with.

My question isn't listed here. Now what?

If you've checked here and don't see your question, go ahead and send me an email about it. I'll try my best to get back to you as soon as possible, although it might take a while depending on how many other emails I get that day.