Everyday Nerd » Firefox

Firefox 4 for Android

Nerd — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:33:59 +0000

Firefox has always been a favorite of mine, and well, so is Android. Firefox for Android came out of beta, and can now be installed on you android device. With it, you get Firefox Sync, add-ons tabbed browsing, and much more!

[ Firefox 4 – Android Market ]

Firefox 4 is HERE!

Nerd — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:13:52 +0000

So I’m a huge fan of Firefox (although recently been using Chrome almost all the time) but now that Firefox 4 is out of Beta, there’s a good chance I’ll be switching back to Firefox!

Download it here from a random mirror: Windows /Mac OS X / Linux.

The official launch is 3/22/2011.

Change Firefox address search engine provider

Nerd — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:54:56 +0000

Somehow… my default search engine in Firefox defaulted to Bing, and I wanted to change it back to Google, so I figured I’d show ya’ll how to do it too!

In Firefox, type in about:config in the address bar, click “I’ll be careful, I promise”.
Filter the results by typing in keyword.URL
Modify the entry, with your preference:

Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=
Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?FORM=IEFM1&q=
Google: http://www.google.com/search?&q=
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=

Close the About:config page, and you can now search from the address bar, using the search engine you set!

Firefox 3.5 out now!

Nerd — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Faster, and better than ever, the world’s best browser has been released – version 3.5. Here’s the official video from Firefox:

Go get Firefox 3.5 here:

Firefox Plug-in: Search Options

Nerd — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:09:24 +0000

I’m a HUGE Firefox fan for many reason, one of which is the extensions that make browsing with Firefox easy, and fun. I ran across a great extension today, called Search Options.

Basically, it lets you customize your search box, such as returning the search engine back to your preferred one, and clearing your search results after so many seconds. Both of which I like!

If customizing Firefox is your thing, you will probably like this extension. Go here it here:

→ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3544

WiseStamp: HTML Signatures for Webmail

Nerd — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:00:47 +0000

One major hang up I’ve had with most webmail providers is the lack of HTML signatures. I’m a sucker for a good nice looking signature! The webmail provider I use doesn’t support HTML signatures, so I was stuck with a boring plain text signature…

WiseStamp is a Firefox Extension that enables HTML signatures in Yahoo!, MSN (Live/Hotmail), GMail (Including Google Apps for your Domain), and AOL mail, although, with a right click, you can insert your signature into any text field. WiseStamp supports two signatures, personal and business.

A live sample:

EverydayNerd
http://everydaynerd.com

Neat huh? OK, so not everyone is going to get excited about this, but it’s nice to have if you use web based email as your primary email client.

Download WiseStamp

Download Firefox 3 Today!

Nerd — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:27:59 +0000

Firefox 3 has been released! With great performance and security enhancements, it is hands down, the best browser you can use!

Today, Tuesday June 17th, Mozilla is trying to break a world record, of the number of downloads in a 24 hour period. Go here to download and get counted in the millions already grabbing the best browser on the net!

Link: Download

Firefox 3 Beta 1 Released

Nerd — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:39:00 +0000

"Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers."

More Security

One click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed.

Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. You can test it here (note: our blacklist of malware sites is not yet activated).

New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. You can test it here.

New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.

Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.

Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.

Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.

Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Easier to Use

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.

Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.

New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files.

Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.

Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.

Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.

Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.

Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.

Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.

Text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph.

Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.

Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.

Integration with Vista: Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.

Integration with the Mac: Firefox now uses the OS X spellchecker and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.

More Personal

Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.

Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.

Location bar & auto-complete: type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history; favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where results are coming from.

Smart Places Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as you more frequently visited pages with the new smart places folder on your bookmark toolbar.

Bookmarks and History Organizer: advanced search of your history and bookmarks with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.

Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).

Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.

Native Web page forms: HTML forms on Web pages now have a native look and feel on Mac OS X and Linux (Gnome) desktops.

Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.

Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).

A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

Reliability: A user’s bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 1, and will show further gains in future Beta releases.

Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

Source: [The Road to Know Where]

Firefox: Google Reader Extension

Nerd — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:20:00 +0000

This extension will checks your Google Reader for unread feeds and if you have, the plugin will display them on your browser’s statusbar.

Works with:

Firefox: 1.5 – 2.0.0.*

Google Reader statusbar icon with tooltip

Google Reader Watcher statusbar icon

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4808

Software: Sysinternals Suite

Nerd — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:35:00 +0000

I cannot tell you how many times the software from Sysinternals has come in soooo handy!

I literally use at least one tool of this every day at work. Download it, unzip, and go through each one – very powerful, very handy. Some are command line only, but others, like Process Explorer, Autologon tool and RootkitRevealer (the very one that discovered Sony’s rootkit last year) have a GUI.

Mark Russinovich from Sysinternals created all these tools some years ago, and recently was aquired by Microsoft for his great work!

Once you get familiar with the tools, you may want to copy them to your system32 folder, so you can run them from a command prompt without having to change directories to the actual location of the tools.

Have fun with them!