Riddle me this, OSX Firefox Users

development (This post is more than 2 years old.)

As the manager of ColdFusionBloggers.org, I view a heck of a lot of RSS feeds. I've noticed that the description field is always (nearly) impossible to read:

Yet with Firefox under Windows, the same feed's description field is much more easy to read:

I don't really read RSS feeds with Firefox, I just view them in order to get information for adding feeds to my aggregator, but I've wondered if anyone else has ever noticed this?

p.s. Maybe I should just shut up and be happy that Firefox 3 isn't slow as molasses like Firefox 2 was under OSX!

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Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Jules Gravinese posted on 3/4/2009 at 4:25 AM

I'll bite. It's the default style for feeds.

chrome://browser/skin/feeds/subscribe.css (line 85)
h2 {
color:#C0C0C0;
font-size:110%;
font-weight:normal;
margin:0 0 0.6em;
}

Comment 2 by Raymond Camden posted on 3/4/2009 at 4:26 AM

Where is that?

Comment 3 by Jules Gravinese posted on 3/4/2009 at 7:36 AM

Well, I'm not exactly sure Ray. But the firefox interface is sorta like a webpage itself. You can customize a lot of it like you would a web page.
If you explore the Package Contents and your Profile folder, you'll see lots of JS and CSS files.

Comment 4 by Tom Chiverton posted on 3/4/2009 at 5:15 PM

@Jules: The system is called XUL and there are a fair few projects built on top of the same 'xulrunner' framework.
It's a cross-platform application framework, a bit like how Flex is.

Comment 5 by Jules Gravinese posted on 3/4/2009 at 6:22 PM

@Tom
Oh, ok. Thanks for the info! Any idea where the chrome files are for Firefox? I know I did this once before but a long time ago. I just can't seem to figure it out right now.

Comment 6 by trent posted on 3/4/2009 at 6:37 PM

Check in your home folder ->Applications Support -> Firefox -> Profiles ->asdfzxc.default -> Chrome

Comment 7 by Jules Gravinese posted on 3/4/2009 at 6:58 PM

I have. There are two examples in there. Renaming the examples makes them active. But neither of these are the subcribe css. And I did make a file of the proper name with custom rss, restarted firefox, but it did nothing.

Comment 8 by Lola LB posted on 3/4/2009 at 7:53 PM

FF3 may not be slow as molasses, but it has some weird rendering issues. There's a bulletinboard using phpBB that I visit. Everytime I click on a link there, or submit a new topic or reply to a message, the entire page loads like this: Browser window loading plain text view. Flicker, then reloading, reading in the .css file to deliver the skinned look. It got so irritating that I've reverted back to viewing this site in Safari, despite the System 10.5.6 Update Cookie bug issue which forces me to log back in at random intervals.

Hopefully FF4 will have resolved rendering issues.

Comment 9 by Bob posted on 3/4/2009 at 9:54 PM

You can browse the XUL directly... check out this address in firefox:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

There is also a Ghostbusters reference on mozilla:

http://www.mozilla.org/keym...

Comment 10 by Lars posted on 3/4/2009 at 11:27 PM

In FF3 on Mac, browsing to chrome://browser/skin/feeds/ shows a directory-like listing that includes subscribe.css and is (on my system) titled:

Index of jar:file:///Applications/Firefox3/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/...

Same URL on my Windows PC has this title:

Index of jar:file:///C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/chrome/classic.jar!/skin/classic/browser/feeds/

So there are your paths to the CSS file. On Mac you'll need to "Show Package Contents" of the .app, and look inside the .jar on either platform.

hth,
Lars