I use firefox as my browser on Ubuntu Karmic Alpha x (can’t remember which one). During one update, my firefox web development toolbar disappeared. There was nothing there aside from the blank grey bar.

How do you fix this?

To fix this, I did the following steps:

1. Right click on the blank toolbar – this will bring up the toolbar selection context menu.
2. Click on “Customize” – this will load the toolbar “Customize Toolbar” screen.
3. Click on the “Restore Defaults” button located on the bottom of the “Customize Toolbar” screen.

By now you should have your Web Development toolbar icons appear where they should be (on the Web Development toolbar!)

“FAIL! That didn’t work!”

Failing the above, you could try the following:

1. Load up the “Customize Toolbar” screen by following steps 1 and 2 above.
2. Using your scrollbar, locate a few of the Web Development toolbar Elements and drag it to the blank Web Development toolbar.
3. Click on the button called “Restore Defaults” on the bottom of the “Customize Toolbar” screen – this should restore your web development icons.

“FAIL AGAIN!! That _STILL_ did not work!”

Failing the two methods above, you should look to see if you have the popular tab enhancement add-on called tab mix plus. If you have this installed, you will not be able to see the icons for Web Developer when you open the “Customize Toolbar” screen. With me not wanting to spend more time on delving into why TMP gets in the way of the Web Developer tool bar, I decided to disable the Tab Mix Plus add-on in favour of my toolbar.

So if the two suggested fixes don’t work, try the following:

1. Load up the Add-ons menu and disable TMP
2. Right click on the blank toolbar and click on “Customize”.
3. You should now again be able to see your Web Developer Toolbar icons.
4. Locate a few of the Web Development Toolbar Elements by using your scroll bar then drag a web developer toolbar icon to the empty toolbar.
5. Click on the Restore Defaults button.

One of the above mentioned workarounds should work, but if your firefox Web Developer toolbar doesn’t work on Ubunutu, or any Linux distro, leave a comment. We’ll figure it out together.

Coming from Windows a few months ago, one of the things I took for granted was the backspace key being a shortcut key for the back button on my web browser – Firefox.

Once I shifted over to Ubuntu, this shortcut was missing from a default installation. If you want to replicate how the Firefox web browser on Windows has mapped the backspace key to go back a page on linux based systems, do the following:

• Open up firefox
• In the address bar, type about:config *this should give you a payload of preferences going down the page*
• Once this happens, enter the word “backspace” in the filter field, this should narrow your entry to one that says browser.backspace_action.
• Double click on the entry and change the value to 0 instead of 1.

The change should be immediate, so if you now press the [Backspace] key, it functions as a back button. I must have done this a several times when I was installing and reinstalling distributions as I messed around with my installations, but kept forgetting how to do it.

So this is more a quick note than any ground breaking hack.