Archive for firefox tag
Firefox for power users, part 2
Here are a few more useful bits and pieces to improve you browsing experience if you’re a Firefox user.
GreaseMonkey
This great extension provides a framework that allows scripts to run against web pages from your own machine. The upshot of this is…
- Linkify turns anything that isn’t a hyper link but looks like it should be into one
- Butler removes advertisements from Google while providing second opinion search links to other engines
- Gmail: Smart-Delete button adds a useful missing button to the Gmail interface
- Google Maps: Mouse wheel zooming does what it says on the tin
- Google Suggest adds the still-in-beta search prompting feature to the main Google interface
There are many many more at GreaseMonkeyUserScripts.
CuteMenus
Put icons next to some menu items to bring the UI a bit more in line with Microsoft’s tools.
FlashGot
Download multiple files, images etc. from a single click.
Other browsers
Mac users may want to check out Camino which uses the Gecko rendering engine inside a native Cocoa application. It’s pretty fast and cool although it can’t use any of the Firefox plug-ins. Another alternative browser is OmniWeb which uses the Safari rendering engine but provides many more useful commands, options and facilities than Safari itself.
Microsoft fans will have to wait a little longer until the public Internet Explorer 7 betas turn up. We’ve been promised fixed PNG transparencies and improved CSS handling. In related news Bill Gates has been trying Firefox…
Postfix
Just a quck note to praise the free Windows blogging application Zoundry that allows WYSIWYG style editing. I’ve managed to use it to clean up some of the previous postings too. Now if only it had a spell checker and auto-pasted in the clipboard URL when you create a hyper link…
My Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 DVD’s arrived Saturday free of charge courtesy of Microsoft. I’ve just installed them alongside SQL Developer 2005 and will hopefully be posting some titbits soon. One heads up is to install IIS before VS2005. The VS2005 installer won’t warn you or error however the SQL 2005 installer will tell you it’s a prerequisite if you want Reporting Services. If you install IIS after VS2005 and before SQL 2005 you’ll receive an unidentified error for the Reporting Services installation.
[)amien
Firefox for power users
If you’ve been using Firefox for a while you might like to look at some of these tips and tricks to get more from your web browser. If you’re not using Firefox to find out what all the hoopla is about.
Get newer, optimised builds
Firefox, like most applications, is compiled without optimisations for specific processors. Some third parties such as Moox make processor-specific optimised builds available for download.
As well as the Firefox 1.0 release you can also download a trunk build. These are built directly against the source tree the developers use and can sometimes be rather unstable although the 20050206 one I’m using has been pretty good except for a view source bug. Make a backup of your %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox directory first and unpack the trunk version somewhere new to give it a whirl.
If you don’t understand those just instructions you might want to wait for the any-day-now Firefox 1.0.1 release although it contains only essential bug-fixes.
Watch activity
We all know sometimes pages take a few seconds to load and knowing how many files to load and the current transfer rate is something geeks love to know. Firefox’s extensions architecture allows third-parties to add such functionality, so grab Extended Statusbar.
Optimise performance
The network settings in Firefox are a little on the conservative side for broadband users. As with Internet Explorer tweaking you can allow more simultaneous connections (it’s the HTTP connection and pipelining section although the other tuning tips are certainly worth considering).
Once done, visiting a page will start loading all images used on a page together rather than just two at a time. It will also mean you can download more than two files simultaneously from the same web site.
Block advertisements
Advertisements have gone too far, they’re now incredible obtrusive, annoying and can often cause pages to load slowly. Get rid of them with the AdBlock extension.
Learn short cuts
Switching from the keyboard to the mouse to perform a single operation is incredibly slow. Get used to the following short cut keys (Ctrl on Windows, Command on Apple)
- F, Find text in the page (IE too)
- N, New window (IE too)
- L, Position to the address bar (F4 in IE)
- K, Position to the search bar
- B, Open bookmarks sidebar
- H, Open history sidebar
Tabbed-window specific short cuts:
- T, Open a new tab
- W, Close current tab
- 1 to 0, Jump to specific tab
- Tab, Cycle between tabs
Web development
If you develop web sites for a living then the Web Developer extension is essential. Features include:
- Editing and identifying cascading style sheets (CSS) on the fly
- Disabling forms, images, JavaScript, CSS
- Validating page and CSS structure
- Examining HTTP response headers
- Modifying cookies
- Highlighting page structure and layout
Windows corporate use
Check out the Microsoft installer (MSI) package and Group Policy integration project.
[)amien
Phishing with IDN’s
Currently “hot news” is the fact that Firefox, Mozilla and Safari browsers have been demonstrated as susceptible to a new form of phishing attack.
Basically all these browsers support International Domain Names (IDN) that let you use the full Unicode set of foreign characters and symbols, and some of these foreign characters while technically different from the Latin ones look identical. In the case demonstrated they have used the Arabic a to replace a Latin a in “Paypal” to get another site. This isn’t really anything new, even the original RFC commented on how this would be a problem and the IETF issued guidelines that would have limited their scope if only Verisign actually implemented them. (Specifically the guideline for preventing mixing of languages within a domain name would reduce the scope for attack considerably).
One thing that is amusing is the Internet Explorer fan boy reaction that their browser isn’t susceptible. This is true but only because Microsoft hasn’t added IDN support to IE, instead recommending you install a third-party plug-in to do it.
Head over to Verisign, install the plug-in, and you too can have exactly the same “exploit”.
Some 12 hours later it appears the rest of the world twigs and Secunia issues this advisory.
[)amien