A few months back, the Insert/Edit link button (on the visual editor page of WordPress) stopped working under Firefox.

I’d just done a whole bunch of site upgrades, so I figured it was just a temporary wordpress bug.

However, several updates later, and it’s still there – and on a couple of different sites, so I thought I’d investigate a bit further.

After much digging around, I figured out what it was.

Adblock Plus blocks the javascript because it creates a popup window called “tinyMCEPopup” – and of course, the anything called “popup” is evil.

To fix this, ensure that Adblock Plus is set to show in the status bar. (Tools | Adblock Plus Preferences – then when the window opens, under Options, check that “show in status bar” is ticked)

Then you’ll get a little red ABP stop sign in your status bar, you can then right click on that, and select “Disable on [yourdomain].com.” When you do that, it’ll go grey, showing that your domain has been whitelisted, & Adblock Plus will stop screwing with it.

Once the ABP icon is grey, you’ll need to refresh the page, but after that, everything will be hunky dory.

I googled the hell out of this but couldn’t find the reason, so I thought I’d put it up here for the world.

There are three possible reasons this happens (“storage quota exceeded” bounces when you don’t appear to have exceeded your quota):

1. You’re forwarding email through/to another Gmail account that has exceeded its quota
2. One of your filters is redirecting your mail through a full Gmail account
3. You’re using Google Apps to manage all email for your domain, and your Google Apps domain email account is full.

Taking these in turn.

Number 1, check in your Gmail account under “Mail settings” | “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” if you have any forwarding going on. If you do (and it’s to another Gmail account), check that account hasn’t used up its quota.

Number 2, check in your Gmail account under “Mail settings” | “Filters” if any of your filters send mail via another Gmail account. If so, check if it’s used up its quota.

Number 3 (this is what happened to my friend), go to Google apps (that link will currently take you mostly there, but if you’re using the free version, click on the “Google apps (Free)” link at the bottom left, under “Solutions”. Alternatively, just google the damn site (ie, Google Google Apps. Yes, this is somewhat ridiculous). Google tends to shuffle things around pretty regularly.

ANYWAY.

• Sign in to Google Apps – remember, this will be your Google Apps login/password, not your Gmail login/password.
• Scroll down to “Email”
• Click on the link underneath the Icon, not the Email icon itself (this goes somewhere else)

This will take you to the inbox for your domain. All email to any accounts on your domain gets copied here (I guess so system administrators can see what everybody’s been up to). What this means is – even if you’re keeping your normal Gmail account nice & low, this domain-wide account will be getting filled up.

THIS is where the “storage quota exceeded” bounce messages are coming from.

Confusingly, there’s nothing in the email headers that will tell you this. You just have to magically know (Thanks Google!) No matter, I’m telling you, so now you know anyway.

From this domain-wide Gmail you can delete all the Spam. Do searches for things like “has:attachment”, then click “select all”, and “select all conversations that match this search”, then click Delete. Or, if you’re feeling wild & crazy, just select everything & delete it. Up to you.

Finally, remember to click on “Bin” (it’s what Trash is called in the Google Apps version of Gmail) and “Delete forever”. This’ll free up all the space, and stop your incoming emails bouncing.

You’re quite safe deleting anything you like from this account. It’s completely separate from your normal Gmail account.

Voila. You’re welcome. Be excellent to each other!

I just had an bug that drove me batty. I was trying to access a webserver on localhost, my laptop. Firefox was redirecting to my production (ie not the laptop) server, but other browsers weren’t. Browsing to ‘localhost’ or 127.0.0.1 worked perfectly, it was just using the laptop name that caused the problem.

Straight away this rules out: the local webserver (eg .htaccess rules), dns or hosts files screw ups. I also switched OFF the local server & same issue occurred.

Of course, it took quite some time to nut my way through the above diagnostics.

Turns out it was the Firefox awesome bar being not so awesome.

Months ago, I’d redirected the laptop name (not ‘localhost’ but the actual name) to the production server via the local hosts file, to assist with a debugging issue. Of course, once I finished debugging I changed the hosts file back again.

I only recently installed a webserver on the laptop, & it seems that when I’d browsed to the laptop sufficient number of times, Firefox obviously juggled its internal preferences & then started using an older, cached version of the name->ip resolution. This added to the confusion, of course. It worked perfectly, then with no relevant changes at all suddenly started redirecting.

The solution? View history, & delete all references to the local server. Voila, incorrect ip resolution gets removed & redirection stops.

Crazy. Hopefully this saves you some time.

I couldn’t use the dashboard under Firefox.

It took a little searching, but I found the issue. Here’s how to solve it:

In your [blog root]/wp-admin/load-script.php file, around line 618, there is a line thus (this is all on one line, it’s just wrapping when displayed here):

echo “<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’” . esc_attr($src) . “‘></script>\n”;

change it to:

echo “<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’” . $src . “‘></script>\n”;

and around line 687 there is a line:

echo “<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’” . esc_attr($href) . “‘ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />\n”;

change it to:

echo “<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’” . $href . “‘ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />\n”;

So what’s going on here?

The lines before those two create urls for loading scripts & stylesheets, respectively.

Those urls are then getting run through esc_attr, which turns characters like & into strings like &amp;

Often this is useful, but not here. What it means is that the html that is getting expressed in the page (you can see this if you pull up the dashboard & do a view source) looks like this:

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&amp;load=jquery,utils,quicktags&amp;ver=b64ae9a301a545332f1fcd4c6c5351b4′></script>

and

<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-styles.php?c=1&amp;dir=ltr&amp;load=dashboard,plugin-install,global,wp-admin &amp;ver=6403d4cb3e6353f406fd43f1b0373ec2′ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />

Which basically meant that the files weren’t getting loaded at all, the dashboard was looking like complete crap, and, well, not working at all.

The slight changes above simply remove that encoding, resulting in the correct urls:

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=jquery,utils,quicktags&ver=b64ae9a301a545332f1fcd4c6c5351b4′></script>

and

<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-styles.php?c=1&dir=ltr&load=dashboard,plugin-install,global,wp-admin &ver=6403d4cb3e6353f406fd43f1b0373ec2′ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />

Instead there would be a mess on the page – lots of square boxes the size of characters with text inside them. Like this or maybe this

Typically this would be some kind of character encoding issue ( the server/browser specifying/requesting UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 etc), or having Auto-Detect universal set off in Firefox – and most sites around the net propose this as a solution (oh, & also recommend partial reinstalls of your O/S).

Uhh, no.

It’s actually a compression issue.

If you’re having this problem, the resolution is this:

Enter into the address bar

about:config

in the Filter textbox below, type

network.http.accept-encoding

You can also just start typing “accept-encoding” until it appears on the screen.

Double click the network.http.accept-encoding entry.

Now, on my browser, it was set to

gzip,deflate;q=0.9,compress;q=0.7

but should have been

gzip,deflate

So, type that into the box & hit OK, then restart your browser (just make sure you close all your windows too)

Voila, you can now surf the web without having to constantly switch back to IE.