Mozilla

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.

It looks like it just missed getting into the 1.8.1 codebase, and is slated for 2.0.0.1, according to the notes as of today.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336469

Brief description:

Windows Vista provides new APIs that allow applications to register file and protocol types more easily, and with new capabilities that allow the application to describe itself so that the file association UIs can provide meaningful information to the user. We should be using these new APIs as soon as possible when we detect that the target system is Windows Vista. I'll attach a whitepaper and reference URLs shortly.



[Screen shot reduced in size so tables wouldn't break]

One of the best CSS/Website "mangler" extensions out there, with a website dedicated to collecting the best "code" to import. The best way I've heard it described is that it does to CSS what Greasemonkey does to Javascript.

http://www.userstyles.org

It is technically a Flash technology, not necessarily a YouTube technology, but that is currently the most popular site using the video format.

Website that converts FLV movies to AVI / MOV / MP4 formats online

Also handy for Firefox users is the VideoDownloader extension:
VideoDownloader for Firefox

That extension also works with about 60 other video sites - great for ripping the videos so you can store them on your hard drive. I used to browse the raw HTML of YouTube to figure out the direct link to the FLV files - not anymore!

The variable, which is not there by default in most setups, is:
Browser.cache.memory.capacity

This is normally set dynamically but if you are tracking down a leak in an extension or Firefox, setting this manually can aid in the process.

If you want a peek inside the current contents of the memory cache, just punch in:
about:cache?device=memory

You can also do the same for the disk cache subsystem with 'about:cache?device=disk'

Note that this isn't necessarily Firefox specific - it is something exposed/contained within the Mozilla core functions.

For more information about this entry, check out:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity

I always find it interesting what people are using for e-mail clients. Sometimes I've noticed someone was using an older (exploitable) version of Outlook Express due to this setting and sent them a note that they should upgrade their software, as a safety precaution.

Anyway, if you set 'mailnews.headers.showUserAgent' to 'True' in the configuration editor, you will see the X-User-Agent: line displayed with each message you receive. You can sometimes filter mail based on this with known forged User-Agent strings, but most spam programs these days either don't set the user agent string or fudge them.