firefox

Access Firefox Bookmarks Easily via Bookmark Keywords

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If you have been using Mozilla Firefox for sometime, you will definitely love the was how Firefox makes it easier to add and manage all of your bookmarks.You can always access your bookmarks easily from the bookmarks menu present in the Firefox.If you need to open a particular webpage from your bookmarks quite often, you may wish you have a better way to open it more quicker.Well, you can do this via a a feature “Bookmark Keywords” available in Firefox.You just need to assign some short keywords, typing which in the address bar immediately gets resolved to your original webpage URL that is stored under your bookmarks.Follow these steps to know how to assign bookmark keywords in Firefox.

1. Open the particular bookmark for which you want to add keyword from the Bookmarks menu.Right click on the “Properties” tab.

firefox bookmarks properties

2. In the properties window, add the keyword through which you want to access this bookmark in the filed “Keyword” and click save.

Add Bookmark keywords in Forefox

3. Once you have saved this, you can access this particular webpage by just typing the keyword (“tdn” in my case) in the address bar.

Add Bookmark keywords in Forefox

That’s it, access your favorite bookmarks more quickly using this.This is actually not a new feature in Firefox, it has been there for a while in Firefox but for some reasons this is still not very much used to that extent by the users.

Firefox 3.6.4 Beta Released

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Firefox surprised every one last week by announcing launching out-of-process feature for plugins (via Firefox 3.6 Lorentz) that let the users to run the plugins in a separate process rather than in native browser process.What it means is that if a plugin crashes, it will not affect the rest of the browser as you can fix it either by reloading the page that restarts the plugin process.

And now Mozilla team has a taken a step further to add this feature in their latest release Firefox 3.6.4 Beta.Apart from this main feature, Firefox 3.6.4 also addresses other security issues.

firefox 364 beta download

Firefox 3.6.4 provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.

Download Firefox 3.6.4 Beta

Direct download link (Windows – 8.2 MB – via Mozilla FTP) Update: Link expired.

P.S: Firefox 3.6.4 version is coming on May 4, 2010.Untill then, grab this beta version.

Firefox Lorentz: Google Chrome Like Plugin Crash Handling

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Firefox has yesterday released a new beta of Firefox 3.6.3 (a test build) which will be called as Firefox Lorentz, intended to minimize the entire browser crashing due to crashing of a single or multiple plugins.Normally what happens in Firefox browser is that when a single plugins crashes for some reasons, the entire browser goes down in effect which now will no longer be the case.

Google Chrome has implemented similar feature way back in 2008 by isolating the pluigns process from normal browser’s process.So with such out-of-process plugins, only the errant plugin’s process gets damaged keeping the rest of the browser intact.

Download the Firefox Lorentz from the direct download link given below:

Lorentz crash report send

Direct Download Link:

Firefox 3.6.3 Plugin 1 Lorentz [link expired]

How To Deal With “Firefox is already running..” Error ?

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You might have observed this error message many times while trying to open Firefox too soon after it was closed or may be due to closing Firefox abnormally (without deleting the lock file) or not shutting down the Firefox properly or when your Mozilla can’t find profile folder in the expected location

“Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.”

Firefox not responding

An article in Firefox Knowledge Base explains why this error occurs:

This error can occur in Firefox 3 because of a delayed shutdown, if you try to reopen it too soon after it was last closed

Solution 1 : End processes

The one popular and easiest solution to this is to kill the process in the Windows task manager.To do this right click on your Windows taskbar and choose “Start Task manager”.

start task manager

Locate the process called “firefox.exe” (each instance of Firefox when running multiple pages) in under the processes tab:

processes in Task manager

Right click on the process and choose “End Process” or simply use “delete” from your keyboard.

End a process in Task manager

And now re open Firefox browser and it’ll also recover tabs from your last session that you have just ended abruptly by stopping the firefox.exe process.

Solution 2: Remove the profile lock file

This requires finding the location of the Firefox profile in your computer and deleting the lock  files under your profile.

Step 1 :

Press Windows+R button to open run command prompt, type “appdata” and click ok

appdata run command


Step 2:

Now a windows explorer window will open up then navigate to the following folder by the give paths:

C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming folder  — Windows 7 and Windows Vista

C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data folder – Windows XP and Win 2000

Navigate to Mozilla >Firefox >Profiles from there

Step 3:

Delete the file “parent.lock” from your profile folder.

parent lock firefox profiles

via [Matt Cutts]

Note:

The methods given here are exclusively for Windows based systems.

Note that this will only solve the current issue with Firefox, however we can’t guarantee that Firefox will not behave like this in future.

Google Chrome Gains Market Share To Stand @ #3

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According to the published by web metrics company NetApplications.com, Google Chrome managed to gain market share both from Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The superfast browser from Google has a market share of 5.20% as of January, 2010 overtaking Safari (4.51%) and Opera(2.38%).Remember Chrome has a share of just 1.62% in March 2009.

The following table shows the comparison of market shares of different browsers as of March 2009 and January 2010.

Month IE Firefox Chrome Safari Opera Opera Mini Others
March 2009 68.46% 23.30% 1.62% 3.63% 2.12% 0.23% 0.65%
January 2010 62.18% 24.41% 5.20% 4.51% 2.38% 0.59% 0.72%

image

The worst affected being the IE, which lost almost 6% of market share since March 2009 to 62.18% in January 2010, whereas Firefox ended up at 24.41% even though Firefox lost its share slightly by 0.2% as compared to 24.61% in December 2009.

Full data:Link

No Component Directory Based Third Party Add-Ons in Firefox 3.6

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Component Directory Lockdown in Firefox 3.6:

Firefox until now has been allowing third party contributions to be added to the application’s components/ directory.However starting with Firefox 3.6 (Download), they have decided to change this.The reason? To minimize the Firefox crashes.

Usually components that are being added by these third party contributors in this way would be invisible to users and cannot be updated nor can they be managed through Firefox add-on manager.Even worse is that they can’t specify the version of Firefox with which they are compatible, thus creating problems and compatibility issues when you upgrade your Firefox.

The above reasons are good enough for the Mozilla team to think about closing the door for third party softwares access to component directory.

In Firefox 3.6 (including upcoming beta refreshes), we’re closing the door. Third party applications can still extend Firefox via add-ons and plugins the way they always could, but the components directory will be for Firefox only.

Q. This is fine, but what are the other alternatives for me to install these third-party sofwares in my Firefox?

Ans: Firefox from now on allows third party softwares in Firefox only as add-ons (as XPI additions).So these developers just need to change their packaging of their software to XPI- based approach.Nothing needs to be done on the Firefox users part though.There is a migration document available for the developers for more directions on the changes they need to make.

Firefox 5th Anniversary @ #CODEFAIL Party Bangkok Thailand

[This special cake in the above pic was designed for 5th anniversary of Firefox part @ Bangkok]

Firefox 3.6 Beta Revision 4 Version Available For Download

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Okay, if you are still using Firefox Beta 3 version, just check it out guys, Firefox has released beta 4 version couple of days back.

Upgrades in FF 3.6 B4:

  • Third party components lock down
  • Fixes for more than 140 bugs since the last beta version.
  • It can run scripts asynchronously

I just kept it simple by giving some major upgrades, the list is pretty big, you can check it out at this page.

Download FF 3.6 Beta Revision 4 (For Windows–English (US), 7.7 MB)

Click on the below link to go to download page:

Firefox 3.6 Beta Revision 4 version download

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Is Out

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Mozilla has released the latest  beta 1 version of Firefox 3.6.This latest Beta version of the upcoming Firefox version was built on the Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering engine, which includes many improvements for web developers over the previous versions.

The Features:

  • Built-in support for Personas, so now your Firefox can be personalized fully.
  • Built-in Plugin-Check feature to alert users about outdated plugins , Web version of which was announced recently.
  • WOFF font format support
  • Enhanced JavaScript performance that improves browser overall responsiveness and startup time.
  • New CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies support.

Download Firefox 3.6b1 (Windows):

Firefox 3.6b1 windows download

via Mozilla Blog Post

Mozilla Plugin Check Lets Firefox users to Keep Plugins Up to Date

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Mozilla has announced the launch of Plugin check webpage intended to check for insecure and outdated plugins of Firefox.At present this tool can check only 15 plugins (do not confuse with Add-ons).This also warns the user when they are not up-to-date and need to be updated.

Right now the Plugin-Check page can only be accessed through Firefox but in future Mozilla is willing to extend this to all browsers.

Mozilla Plugin Check Page

Before this, only Add-ons were being checked for update leaving plugins as such.This lead to emergence of various attacks through those vulnerable outdated plugins, hence it became a primary concern for Mozilla team to identify such plugins.

Firefox 3.6 Beta is set to be launched on the next Wednesday.According to Mozilla team,Firefox 3.6 will warn users when they visit any web site that needs to run on an outdated plug-in.

How to Auto Refresh a Web Page in Firefox

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Refreshing a web page in  Mozilla Firefox has always been easy in the manual way, just press F5 or CTR+R will do it for you.Let’s  say you are viewing your favourite team scores in a web page which doesn’t automatically refresh its content,then you may have to manually refresh the page so many times to be updated with the score. But what if you want your browser to do automatically for you?

This wonderful Add-on “ReloadEvery” for Firefox does this for you.Just go to this add-on page and add the add-on to your Firefox[Just Click on Add to Firefox button] and restart Firefox.

ReloadEvery Firefox Add-on reloadevery from context menu in firefox

Now you can find a new function Reload Every being added to the options (a special context menu Reload Every) that you see when you right-click on the page.The same function can also be accessed from the main menu (see the second image).Through this fucntion web pages can be automatically refreshed every so many seconds or minutes.