mozilla firefox browser

[How To] Disable Firefox Taskbar Tab Previews

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Multiple tasbar tab previews

Taskbar tab previews is a great feature introduced in Windows 7, with the help of which you can access any opened tab right from your taskbar without opening the browser. This feature was first meant for Internet Explorer only, but later it was adopted by almost all the browsers.

Even though this is a great feature, however it may sometimes annoy you particularly when you open a lot too may tabs in the browser. That’s why we posted a tutorial on how to disable the multiple taskbar tab previews in IE, Firefox and Google Chrome. Now that Firefox 4 is coming with this taskbar tab previews feature enabled, we thought we’d revisit and bring to your attention if you are looking for a way to get this feature disabled in your Firefox. Follow the steps carefully:

Steps:

1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.

2. Accept the warning message and proceed (Click “I’ll be careful, I promise) to the configuration page.

Firefox about:config warning

3. Type

browser.taskbar.previews.enable

in the filter and look for the entry with the same name as shown in the following screenshot.

Firefox 4 taskbar previews config
4. Change the value to “false” by double-clicking. That’s it. You will only see a preview of the one (active) tab preview instead of the multiple taskbar tab previews.

Firefox taskbar tab previews disabled

You might also want to read our tutorial on how to enable All Tabs Preview in 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 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.

How To Disable Multiple Tab Previews of Browsers in Windows 7 Taskbar

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web_browsers

Tab preview feature in Windows 7 is very helpful. But sometimes if your Internet browser has the facility of tab preview for each tab opened, then it may be annoying. It is actually better to have only one preview of the tab which you were active last to avoid all kinds of confusion in selecting the tab previews. An example of multiple previews of each tab in the taskbar is shown below:

multiple_tab_preview

This kind of previews is normally seen in Internet Explorer 8 as it comes with this feature by default.

You can disable multiple tab previews for the popular web browsers like IE8, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome etc. Follow the steps below for each browser.

Internet Explorer 8

To disable tab previews IE 8 go to Tools->Internet Options->Tabs->Settings

internet_options_ie8

ie8_tab_settings

In the Tab Settings Uncheck Show previews for individual tabs in the taskbar. Click OK.

tabbed_browser_settings_ie8

Now restart the Browser, you will find the multiple previews gone.

Mozilla Firefox:

To disable tab previews in Firefox, open a new tab. Enter in the address bar as:

about:config

This will open the configuration page.Now in Filter Type:

browser.taskbar.previews.enable

Make the value to false by double clicking on it. Now your previews will be only one for the currently active tab.

mozilla_firefox_about_cofig

Google Chrome:

In Chrome there is no settings to disable multiple tab previews. But you can change the shortcut compatibility settings to disable previews.

Go to any shortcut of Chrome like in the Start menu or desktop. Right click on it and select Properties.

chrome_shortcut_properties

Go to Compatibility Tab and check Run this program in compatibility mode for: and select Windows Vista (Service Pack 2). Click OK.

shortcut_compatibility_chrome

Now you have learnt how to disable multiple tab previews feature in the World’s most popular browsers. If you want to enable them back, follow the reverse process.

How To Create Profiles in Mozilla Firefox For Customized Browsing

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In Mozilla Firefox we can create and use more than one profile.This is also another useful feature Firefox. Here we will see how to create new user profiles and use it to browse more efficiently pertaining to each user.

This feature will enable Firefox as an Operating software for the web where each user profile can be thought as a different user in the computer.

Firefox Logo

Benefit of Profiling in Firefox:

Each user can develop his/her own profile according to their preference and desire. But there is another concept of profiling. A single user can maintain different profiles for different purposes. For example, for using the browser for Social Networking, the profile setting can be made a bit relaxed and all the scripts allowed to run. If you are using the browser for secure internet banking, then you can create a new profile with strict settings like disallowing scripts and cookies.

Enabling User Profiling in Firefox is very Easy. Just follow the steps below:

Step 1: Enable User Profiles in Mozilla Firefox Startup. To do this Just Create a different shortcut for Firefox and Right click on it. Select Properties and add the following in he Target.

-profilemanager -no-remote

Firefox profile manager

Step 2:  Create a user Profile: In order to create a user profile, open Firefox using the shortcut. Click on create profile button. Enter your profile name. Click on Finish.

Firefox profile create

Firefox profile naming

Step 3: Now open Mozilla Fire fox using the Created profile.

Firefox profiling

Now you can use your profile and customize the settings and preferences in the way you want your Firefox should behave.

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

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.