Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by MEM-TEK on June 9, 2012 · permalink

Anybody having usage issues with Browser Backgrounds needs to make sure that the Firefox home page is set to the following:

chrome://browserbackgrounds/content/bb.html

Accomplish the above under Tools >> Options >> General tab and then paste the above into the box for Home Page and then hit the Enter button.

Bam. Doing the above will get Browser Backgrounds working correctly.

If you want to disable randomization of your backgrounds, this is easily accomplished by going to the Firefox Add-ons Manager, or Tools >> Add-ons, then click on Extensions (which should already be the current section that is being displayed in the Add-ons Manager), and then clicking on the Options button for Browser Backgrounds. You will see that the only available option for Browser Backgrounds is whether or not to disable background randomization.

And now, what FF release 13 breaks in terms of using Browser Backgrounds in conjunction with another very handy extension called "Last tab close button". This latter extension is splendid by itself, and it is particularly useful in conjunction with Browser Backgrounds, since the purpose of Last Tab Close Button is to tell Firefox what to do when you close the one and only tab displayed in Firefox. Normally you can't close this tab if it is the only tab since Firefox does not display an X on this single tab so that you can close it. But this is the purpose of the Last Tab extension -- to both display the X for the single displayed tab, and to give you options for what to do when you close this single and only tab displayed in Firefox.

Prior to FF release 13 and when using the Last Tab extension in conjunction with Browser Backgrounds, you could repeatedly close the last tab (the one and only tab displayed in Firefox), and then Last Tab would close the tab and then create another tab which displays your home page. And of course your home page was configured to merely display another background due to your home page being set to:

chrome://browserbackgrounds/content/bb.html

But FF release 13 breaks your home page setting for any add-on which can close the last tab by calling omni.ja which is compressed jar file. This compressed jar file features copyrighted Mozilla code which is set to display a 3 x 3 tile of, well, whatever you have been browsing. We need to change the default option for browser.newtab.url in Firefox's config file from "about:newtab" (which calls the omni.ja file) to "about:blank" in order to make the first displayed tab display the setting for your default home page, or "chrome://browserbackgrounds/content/bb.html" which is what we want for Browser Backgrounds to work correctly. Thus...

Paste "about:config" into the URL bar, accept the warning message, search for "browser.newtab.url" and then change the value for "browser.newtab.url" from "about:newtab" to "about:blank". Don't past the quotes surrounding anything in this paragraph.

That is it. Browser Backgrounds will once again behave correctly, and the Last Tab or similar extensions should once again behave correctly as well.