Troubleshooting Firefox Gets Easier With New ‘About:Support’ Page
Mozilla has added a feature to the coming Firefox 3.6 that will make it a bit easier to figure our why your friend’s web browser isn’t working. A new –about:support — configuration page in Firefox 3.6 is designed to make debugging and solving Firefox problems a little bit easier.
Firefox 3.6 (code named Namoroka) is still currently an alpha release and not stable enough to recommend for everyday use, but the Mozilla roadmap calls for the final version to arrive some time in November. When it does, the new about:support windows will make it dead simple to look up all the pertinent information about the current Firefox installation, including a list off all installed extensions, any user-modified preference setting, links to installed plugins and other configuration details.
The best part for those of us charged with trouble-shooting PCs for friends and family is that all the information inside the new about:support window can be copied by pressing a single (large) button. Your beleaguered, less-than-PC-savvy friends can paste the results in a chat window or e-mail and send you a wealth of information without you needing to spend hours explaining what extensions are and where to find them.
The new about:support window will be a boon to those trying to manage Firefox — and we don’t just mean you helping grandma when you’re home for Thanksgiving.
If you’ve ever wondered why much of the corporate IT world has stuck with IE 6, the answer is that IE 6, for all its other faults is much easier to manage when it comes to installing and updating thousands of workstations. There are some open source tools designed to help IT pros deploy and manage Firefox (notably Firefox ADM), but Mozilla has never shown much interest in making Firefox more enterprise-friendly.
While the new about:support window is a far cry from everything IT managers would from Firefox, it is a welcome (if tiny) step in the right direction.
Eventually, Mozilla would like to add self-diagnostic and repair tools to the about:support page, but such tools won’t arrive until after Firefox 3.6.
Firefox 3.6 is still an alpha release, so some aspects of the about:support window are still up in the air — particularly whether or not the profile folder location should be revealed. The Firefox profile folder is obscure and randomly named precisely to make it hard to find. Doing so prevents attackers from easily accessing it. Exposing that information in about:support could possibly make Firefox more vulnerable to attack, thus Mozilla does not seem to have made a final decision about including it.
Mozilla is hoping to get Firefox 3.6 out a bit more quickly than its last release, Firefox 3.5, which was delayed several times before it finally arrived in June 2009. Look for Firefox 3.6 beta 1 to arrive any day and, if all goes well, the final release should be here by the end of 2009.
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