Mozilla

An extension called ".NET Framework Assistant" is installed for Firefox 3.x when you install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. If you comb through some of the .NET 3.5 SP1 release notes, it is very briefly mentioned as adding ClickOnce support into your browser.

On the downside, the .NET 3.5 SP1 installer doesn't really come out and ask for permission to do so, and also seems to gray out the Uninstall button.


It also adds .NET user agent strings to your Firefox user agent string.


You can enable and disable ClickOnce support and how many versions of .NET the browser reports to web servers.


If you want to completely kill the extension, with Firefox closed, delete the folder %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension, and delete the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions\{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}\.

I try to keep my Firefox profile as lean as possible, and I am not aware of many ClickOnce applications on the web yet, so I'm not really missing out on much by removing this for now.

Registry location found from a post here.

Short and sweet:

If you are looking for Greasemonkey functionality in Chrome, check this site out here.
If you are looking for an easy auto-updater for Chromium, check this site out here and check out the release directory here.

If you think your Chrome install updated over the weekend, it most likely did. The original version released was build 1583, and the build out now is 1798.

I'm sure buried in the EULA somewhere is that it can update behind your back without any notification too.

If you want to be riding the bleeding edge, download the newer snapshots from here.

As of a few hours ago, the Chromium build number is up to 0.2.152.0, whereas the current installed version of Chrome on my system seems to be version 0.2.149.29.

Much like the Firefox trunk builds, Chromium installs into a different directory than Chrome, so you can run them side by side if you wish.

I'm all for version checks on websites when they make sense, but typically only when there is a known compatibility issue with a certain version. Blindly denying content to new versions of software doesn't seem like the right thing to do.

Case in point - the Flash videos on CNN's website:

Just a heads up if you are experiencing web browser crashes with Flash 9, along with a bunch of additional features, it seems that they have fixed some of the annoying crashes that would happen from time to time inside Firefox 3 and the Firefox trunk builds.

I tend to run the trunk builds of Firefox and Thunderbird, so these updates are quite handy.

You can download the IE version here and the non-IE (Firefox/etc) here.

As always, before installing these new versions, make sure you uninstall the old versions with this.

If you need to get an insecure extension working in Firefox 3, you can pull up "about:config" and create a new boolean variable named extensions.checkUpdateSecurity set to FALSE. This will allow the extension to run, but disables a good safety feature.

The ideal way to fix this, is to contact the extension author and ask them to place their extension on a secured site.

You can read more about this issue from a post of mine in November, the Mozilla wiki, and the bug entry in BugZilla.

All previous versions were just release candidates, whereas this release is the real deal.
I used the Nightly Tester Tools to override my extension versions so that they will work (somewhat) properly with Firefox 3.0.

Any extension that does not have a secured update location was removed from my laptop, on purpose.
As more people adopt 3.0, I suspect more extension authors will start using secure update locations, because, by default, 3.0 makes it difficult to use non-secure updates.

All in all, this version seems to use much less RAM than FireFox 2.0 with general use.

I would wait for mirrors to get FireFox 3.0 Beta 1, but it does seem to be on the primary host right now.

Big changes have been rolled out for Live Folders. It has a new name, and is now available in the US, UK and India. The team has also launched a blog site. You can revisit recently viewed folders, drag and drop files, and thumbnails are generated for image files.

All in all, a good upgrade. You can't complain about 500MB of online storage either.

Check out what I am talking about here.

My favorite Firefox extension just got a little bit better.
Anti-XSS support, which is very handy when dealing with unknown/potential vulnerabilities.

Read more about it here.

Some people find adding websites to a whitelist a "hassle" but once you have a core list of sites, you typically are very rarely adding any more sites to your list.

Chalk this one up as another thing I'd never expect to see from Microsoft.
A Firefox plug-in for Windows Media Player content can be downloaded from here.

Reminds me of a Monster Magnet song off Powertrip. Very cool "Easter egg" in Google Earth.
Check it out here.

You can view the "Making of.." video on YouTube here.

A good website to find nuggets like this is Google Sightseeing.

A lot of people have commented to me that even though the download links appeared yesterday, that Firefox 2.0 really wasn't officially released yesterday.

Apparently due to all the news sites reporting the availability caused quite a stir overall and I can see both sides of the coin on the argument.

Personally, I think the Mozilla admins should talk to the Redhat admins on how they stage their releases to mirrors.

Typically you know a new Fedora release is coming down the pike when the "real" directory appears but remains unreadable to anonymous users. Once all the files make it to all the mirrors listed (in general), they'll "open up the flood gates" and let people get access to those directories.

I think overall that would have made for a less drama filled release schedule.

If you want more background on it all, check out the posts made here, here and here..

Nightly Test Tools - force older extensions to work with newer ‘untested’ builds with a few mouse clicks

AdBlock Plus - one of the best ad blockers you can embed into Firefox, and it is free

AdBlock Filterset.G Updater – auto updates AdBlock Plus definitions

NoScript – Easily pick and choose websites you want to allow to run JavaScript and/or Flash – might be more hassle than it is worth for most people, but it is a good way of avoiding exploit code on compromised websites.

Tinyurl – take long e-mail-unfriendly web links and change them into the form of something like http://tinyurl.com/blah123

You might have to bump the version number on the Tinyurl plug-in for it to work with 2.0.

My post last night was wrong apparently. IE 7 still beat it out the door but considering how long it took between IE 6 and IE 7, I don't think it is a fair comparison.

Grab if from the source, here.

If you are running Firefox 2.0 RC3, you are most likely already running the final release of Firefox 2.0. If there are showstopper bugs found, they will most likely post an updated version. I've been running the branch builds for a couple months now and overall 2.0 is very solid.