Section: Firefox
December 07, 2008 by
Jason
For Firefox users, Windows Update usually becomes the only time we are forced to run Internet Explorer. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Since Windows Update requires an ActiveX control in order to run, it’s impossible to exclude Internet Explorer completely, so you will need to install IETab first, the magical Firefox extension that lets you open a web page with Internet Explorer within Firefox in a couple of clicks.
Once it is installed, you will need to replace the Windows Update shortcut in the All Programs menu. To do this:
- Press Start. Select All Programs.
- Right-click on Windows Update menu item and select Properties.
- In the properties window, enter “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” http://update.microsoft.com in the Target field. Make sure you enter the correct path for your Firefox install and if the path contains any blank space, enclose the path in double quotes. Read More»
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December 04, 2008 by
Jason While Firefox 3’s location bar is perhaps my personal favorite new feature and the one I missed the most when I have to use Firefox 2 for some testing, there are a lot of people who find it weird, obtrusive and don’t like it including bookmarks and history among its results.
An option to restore its old behavior was available for a few weeks during Firefox 3 development but it was pulled basically because it would need a lot of testing and it was thought it was not worth it. The option may come back for Firefox 3.1.
In the meantime, for those who prefer the old way and those who want even more power, here are 9 easy tweaks you can try.
1. Make the autocomplete menu show only typed addresses and not visited or bookmarked
- Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences. Accept the “This may void your warranty message”.
- Look for browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped and double click it to set it to TRUE.
Read More»
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November 26, 2008 by
Jason Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.
But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Enable pipelining
Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems. Read More»
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November 12, 2008 by
Jason The upcoming stage in the development of the next iteration of Firefox is blocked by a consistent volume of bugs, Mozilla revealed. No less than 17 blockers are stopping Firefox 3.1 from moving onward to Beta 2. On November 10, the conclusion was that the Firefox 3.1, codename Shiretoko, Beta 2 was not ready for build because of the large number of issues affecting the development milestone of the open source browser.
“Despite a lot of hard work, we’re still a little bit away from being ready to hand the code for Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 over to the build team at this time. As of this writing, there are 17 bugs (marked blocking with the appropriate TM) that need to be resolved before we can ship,” revealed Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s User Experience lead.
Beltzner indicated that no less than ten bugs impact Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, while another seven affect the underlying Gecko 1.9.1 Beta 2 rendering engine. The release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 continues to be planned for mid-November 2008; however, considering the number of blockers still unresolved, availability might slip toward the end of the month. Read More»
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November 08, 2008 by
Jason
For most users, Firefox doesn’t use an abnormally large amount of memory. For others, however, Firefox’s memory consumption is a major problem. Typical Firefox memory usage reported by Windows is around 50-100 MB, with virtual memory usage at 100-150 MB. These numbers will vary because Firefox is configured by default to use more memory on systems that have more memory available and less on systems with less.
1. System Extensions
WindowBlinds can dramatically increase memory use. To continue using WindowBlinds and Firefox without memory issues, add Firefox to WindowBlind’s exclusion list.
2. Download History
Firefox can slow down or hang if the download history is allowed to accumulate. Clear the download history (you may need to exit Firefox and delete the file “downloads.rdf” from the profile folder in some cases) and change this setting to solve the problem: Read More»
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October 22, 2008 by
Jason A new, or rather a newly revised threat may be coming to a browser near you. It’s called Clickjacking and it can affect all browsers. It first appeared a few years ago but little was heard of it after the first warnings. It looks like it might be back though the threat level is still quite low at the moment but these things can quickly spiral out of control. Here’s how it works. If a hacker can get access to a website they can fiddle with buttons and graphics so that if you click on what appears to be a legitimate link what actually happens is you are directed to a phoney or fake site where you unwittingly enter personal details, or in a worse case scenario, clicking the link downloads malicious software onto your PC. Of course the same kind of thing can be found on less reputable websites.
Microsoft and Mozilla have released fixes in the past but there is a way to stop clickjacking in its tracks, on Firefox at least, and that’s to install an add-on called No-Script. This creates a white list of trusted sites by blocking any attempt to run an unapproved or suspicious script within a web page. Read More»
Posted in Firefox, Software | 1 Comment »
October 20, 2008 by
Jason Normally, Mozilla Firefox operates from your hard drive, but it’s possible to run it completely in your system’s memory (RAM). It speeds up your browsing because computers can read and write from RAM much faster than it can read and write from the hard drive. The following instructions will walk your through a configuration with Windows.
Steps
1. Download and save Portable Firefox onto your Desktop (see Things You’ll Need below). Double-click on the ZIP file and extract the contents of the archive to the folder “C:\PortableFirefox”. You can use a different directory, but you will have to adapt the rest of this article to that directory.
2. Download RAMDisk and save it to the same location as the ZIP file (see Things You’ll Need below). Double-click RAMDisk.exe. This is a self-extracting archive. When asked where to save the extracted files, save them on your Desktop. This creates a directory called RAMDisk. Read More»
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The Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) made available a Firefox extension developed at their School of Computer Science and College of Engineering that improves security in Firefox by protecting against man-in-the-middle attacks. The extension, named Perspectives, is available only for Firefox 3 and works on Windows, Linux (32-bit) and OS X (Intel), with support for Linux (64-bit) and Open Solaris being in the experimental stage of development.
A man-in-the-middle attack is performed by intercepting the traffic between a user and a resource that he is trying to access. This can be achieved by exploiting several vulnerabilities, like the latest DNS cache poisoning or GMail accounts hacking incidents show.
When accessing a server resource using secure protocols like SSL or SSH, a correct identification of the server is required. This is achieved through digitally signed certificates. Due to the fact that certificates issued by trusted authorities like VeriSign are expensive, it became common practice for small businesses and websites to use self-signed certificates. Read More»
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After days of tweaking my new Firefox 3.0, I found out that one so-called top new features of Firefox is not so pleasing Smart Location Bar or the Awesome Bar.
The Smart Location Bar is just too “smart” to an extent that it saves my viewed browsing history without my knowledge! The auto complete feature is fine with me but I would still prefer the old Firefox 2.0 way in handling my addresses. I tried to disable this “smart” option via the Option menu but there is no direct way to do it. So, I have to do it the indirect way via about:config or with a help of an extension.
OK, here is how:
Remove only bookmarks results from the list
To to this, you can just use Hide Unvisited extension to get the job done. What Hide Unvisited does is hide bookmarks that you haven’t visited from showing in the Awesome Bar. Read More»
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Mahesh was worried because after upgrading to Firefox 3, he didn’t see his bookmarks and hence asked me if there is any way to get them back.
The answer is yes. You can definitely get back your bookmarks because Firefox has a backup of bookmarks through which you can restore them
So here are the steps to restore lost bookmarks in Firefox 3 (only for Windows, sorry Mac guys )
For Windows XP
1. Click on Start- > Run
2. Type – > C:\Documents and Settings\YourWindowsUserName
3. Display the Hidden folders by clicking on Tools at the top the Folder Options-> View -> Show Hidden Files
4. Now you should see a folder named Application data. Double click on it and then go to Mozilla-> Firefox -> Profiles Read More»
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