Iceweasel 3

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:49:32 +0200
call for help

Trying to get prepared for lenny, the new iceweasel annoys me more and more.

Problem 1: How do I globally set a program to use for mailto: links?
The old solution no longer works, and the only workaround I found is placing a mimeTypes.rdf with the right contents to /etc/iceweasel/profile, but that of course only works for new accounts, not when upgrading accounts...

Problem 2: Is there a way to get the Xprint interface of iceweasel back?
It still suggests xprint, but I see no way to not get those gtk printing dialog boxes. Those of course only show "Print to file" because I am using lprng and someone decides to disable the lpr backend gtk by default. (Those printing backends modules in gtk seem like a nice thing at first, I could easily write one to show the printers in /etc/printcap and have controls for all the options of the printer's PPD file in there, but it only helps to get the dialog better). But the postscript it creates is just broken beyond description. No need to speak about doing color all the time (looks like there is no way to tell cairo to make a surface grayscale), or embedding all the fonts, but it tries to do the distance of characters on its own and miserably fails so. The fonts it embeds also have some strangenesses, or the pswrite method of the new ghostscript has problems, too.
Another problem with the gtk print dialog in iceweasel is in the print setup dialog box. It always defaults to letter, and I found no way to globally change this. Here most likely the fault is somewhere in the glue code, giving that a first glance looks really like someone only knowing letter and executive wrote it...

I'm sure there were others, but those I forget over the more urgent ones...