Brain on Fire Tim McCormack, distilled.

When Firefox updates to a new version, some extensions are disabled. However, you can easily edit the extensions to make Firefox re-enable them -- no particular expertise required.

When I'm making a web page at home on my laptop (a Linux machine), I test it on Firefox and IE 7. (I only test on IE7 now, because it will be distributed to Windows users as a high-priority update.) Unfortunately, IE 7 will not install under Wine, which is annoying because that's how I run Windows programs on my Linux machine. However, there is a way to get the layout engine of IE 7 working under Wine -- and that's all I need.

After upgrading Ubuntu Linux from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, I found that the login screen would malfunction with the message "The greeter application appears to be crashing. Attempting to use a different one." A different login screen would appear (which worked just fine), but it was still irritating.

The Tor packages in the Debian (and Ubuntu) respositories are not up-to-date. This is dangerous, since people do rely on them for strong anonymity, even though the package warns them not to do so (it's still the best out there.) To get the latest stable version, you'll have to add another repository to your sources.list file and set your system to trust it.

For security and ease of troubleshooting, turn off Firefox's automatic keyword search and domain guessing features.