Change Firefox tab width

One neat little feature in Chrome is the automatic shrinking of tabs when you open more and more tabs. But Firefox lacks this feature. What it does is create a scrollable tab strip after a certain number of tabs are open, which makes some tabs to go off the screen. This could get really annoying when you have a lot of tabs open. You will have to wait a long time to scroll back and forth through the tab list and sometimes it's annoying not being able to see all the open tabs within the screen.

Tab shrinking in Chrome 

In Firefox, by changing the minimum and maximum tab width you can customize it to behave the way you want. Prior to Firefox 4 this could be easily achieved by changing a couple of parameters in the about:config page. You can change the following two parameters to have any value you like. By setting the minimum value to 0, the tabs can be set to keep on shrinking while more and more tabs are opened.

Adding Custom Commands to the Equinox OSGi Console

Equinox is a very popular, widely used implementation of the OSGi framework. The command line console of Equinox can be accessed by running with the "-console" option.
You can run the equinox jar file with the console enabled as follows.

java -jar org.eclipse.osgi_3.6.2.R36x_v20110210.jar -console

Or you can also access the OSGi console of your Eclipse installation. Go to the folder where Eclipse is installed and run the following command.

./eclipse -console

if you type "help" command in the prompt you get, you will see a list of available commands and what they do. I am going to show you how to add your own command  to the console.

Install Firefox 4 final version in Ubuntu

The final version of Firefox 4 was released on March 22nd. Windows users can download an installer directly from Firefox homepage and just run the installer. But for Ubuntu users it's not that simple. The best thing for them is using the package manager.

Most of the instructions for installation of Firefox 4 in Ubuntu point you to the Mozilla - Ubuntu daily build repository, which actually installs Minefield. Minefield is the unstable nightly build of Firefox. Of course those of us who are ardent Firefox fans have been using Minefield to get the latest betas and RCs and to feel the awe of Firefox 4. But now that the final version is out you can get rid of Minefield and upgrade the default Firefox installation in Ubuntu to version 4.