lucaBiagini.com

I had a strange problem yesterday with firefox on my mac: when I launched the browser, url bar stayed empty. It had no (apparently) (good) reasons act like this, as I didn’t update anything. If I tried to type another url, and then to navigate starting from it, the url didn’t change. Next and previous page buttons wasn’t working either.

A little but annoying problem, so i started googling for a quick solution, but I just didn’t found it, though many other users had experienced my same issue. Some of the few answers I’ve read somewhere suggest to launch Firefox in safe mode. I tried, but the problem was still there. Another common and uneffective (at least, for me) solution is to disable plugins and extensions, one by one, to understand which one is causing the problem.

I post the solution I’ve found, hoping it may help somebody in the future to save some time. Access profile manager (instructions here, btw on mac, open terminal and digit: /Applications/firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager), delete current profile and create a new one (it can be named like the previously deleted one - too lazy to think of something different from “default”).

Now everything is fine again, I’ve reinstalled the previously (and probably unnecessarily) deleted extensions and it’s still ok.

Switched back to MacBook Pro after few unhappy weeks of MacBook Air, I’ve decided to try again Parallels.

Last time I’ve used it, almost 2 years ago, it was a beta and had too many limitations for my needs. Two years later, I must admit that it simply works and suits perfectly my needs, even with “only” 2GB of ram.

I use it with the Windows XP partition generated with Boot Camp and the only problem I had, was with the airport connection. On Windows in Parallels, airport is not recognized as an installed device, so if you want to surf the web from windows with a wifi connection, the only solution is to share the wireless connection between the guest and the host OS.

In most cases, it works automatically, but not in mine. After hours of managing setting trying every combination of shared network, host only network, default adapter and so one, the best results I had gained was the possibility of browsing google.com (it wasn’t cached, it worked!) and few other sites. I could ping correctly everything, but couldn’t open any web page.

Googling and googling, I have found the solution I want to share on this post. I’ve downloaded a small app called Dr. TCP, and in the very last row of the window I have selected “Parallels network adapter” and set MTU to 1400. Now everything works like a charm.

Hope it helps somebody else - I’ve seen many other users looking for help in many forums, with both Windows XP and Windows Vista, and even with Linux. Credit to this velayo’s post on Insanely Mac Forum. I can just add that reboot is probably not needed on newer Windows version.