Control Your Facebook Privacy in Firefox

Facebook’s privacy controls are notoriously dubious. Most users believe their posts and photos are only visible to their friends, but this simply is not true. And, even those users who have properly aligned their Facebook privacy controls can have their controls reset at any given time, with no notice, by Facebook.
Firefox users can take control of their Facebook privacy by using uProtect.it. This service allows Facebook users to decide exactly which of their friends can see each comment or status update. Not even Facebook’s administrators can see these posts unless a user specifically allows it.

While using Firefox, click the Connect with Your Facebook link on uProtect.it’s homepage. When prompted, click Allow to grant the service access to your Facebook account.

Enter the same password you use for Facebook, then click Create Account.

Move the Reload, Stop, and Home Buttons on the Firefox 4 Toolbar

Firefox 4 added some evolutionary features to the web browser that are sure to delight and frustrate long-time users. One feature new to the browser is the placement of the Reload, Stop, and Home buttons.
Rather than being next to one another, they are spread out among the other commands on the Navigation toolbar. Learn how to place the Reload, Stop, and Home buttons to the left of the Firefox 4 toolbar.

The Firefox Navigation Toolbar Buttons

When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 (and later version 8), long-time users were shocked to find that buttons that had always been close to one another on the toolbar were now spread out in a haphazard fashion. This was especially frustrating to users of widescreen monitors who now had buttons very far apart from one another.
Following suit, the developers of Firefox 4 did something similar with the release of Firefox 4. Most notably, the Forward and Back buttons are where they always were on the far left of the Navigation toolbar.
The Reload and Stop buttons are located between the Address bar and the Search box. Finally, the Home button is found to the far right of the Navigation toolbar.

Disable the “Work Offline” Option in Firefox

If you lose connectivity while surfing the web in Firefox, it may decide, automatically, to “work offline.” If you don’t want Firefox to choose to do that automatically, the setting can be turned off.
NOTE: This procedure works in Firefox 3.6 and above in Windows and Linux.

To access the preferences for Firefox, type “about:config” (without the quotes) in the address bar and press Enter.

Using the New Firefox Aurora and Beta Channels

For a long while now, if you are an early adopter of technology, Google Chrome was the place to be.  You could always download the current release version, but if you wanted to live on the edge a little bit, you could install the beta version.
The beta version offered features deemed not quite ready for the stable release version, so could likely crash more often, and was not recommended for production environments.  If you were even more gutsy, you could install the development version, which in effect was two releases away.  So, if the stable version was Chrome 9, the Beta version would be Chrome 10 and the Development version Chrome 11.

Firefox users wanting a rougher, new-features-the-second-they-arrive version, haven’t been so lucky.  You could always downoad Minefield, the in-progress beta version, but there wasn’t anything official.
Until now.  Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox (and the Thunderbird email/news client), recently unveiled its three-prong development model, which mirrors Chrome, quite closely, although it does use slightly different terminology.  The stable version will always be just that, Stable.  Currently Firefox is sitting at version 4.0.1, and if you download it from mozilla.org, that’s what you’ll get.  If you want the newer versions, however, read on.
Point your web browser of choice to this address, to see the in-progress versions of Firefox.

Get the Status Bar Back in Firefox 4

If you have upgraded to Firefox 4, you have most likely noticed and possibly been annoyed by the fact that the status bar has been removed. The status bar in Firefox 3 displays the progress meter and status text.

Launch Linux Applications and Documents With Synapse

One of the traditionally popular application and file launchers for Mac OS X is called Quicksilver.  Quicksilver, like Launchy (originally for Windows but now also available for Linux), is a keyboard launcher.  To use Quicksilver, you would simply type Apple-Space, which called up its simple interface.  Then you just started typing the name of the application you wanted to launch.
Quicksilver would then search through your installed programs and as you typed show you the results, until the one you wanted to use appeared in the list.  You could also open documents, manipulate files, and even perform more complicated tasks.  It was incredibly powerful.

As a bonus, the more you used Quicksilver, the “smarter” it got, as it learned which applications you used most often.  So, when you wanted to use Firefox, it would eventually place Firefox at the top of the list (instead of Finder) after only having typed the first letter.
Linux has a program called  Gnome DO, which looks and behaves almost exactly like Quicksilver.  Development eventually slowed on Gnome DO, however, and then a complete rewrite was promised.  That
rewrite seems to still be in the future, but a new launcher, called Synapse, may replace it for many people.

Turn Off the Download Complete Notification in Firefox

In the Firefox web browser, when a download is complete, you’ll get a notification bubble in the lower right corner of the screen.  It looks like this.

There’s nothing wrong with the bubble, but it seems aimed entirely at Windows users.  First is because of its looks, which seem designed to blend in with Windows, and not Mac or Linux.  Second is because of placement.  For Mac and Linux users, the alert bubble seems to slide in from nowhere.  In Windows, the bubble appears to come from the notification area in the lower right corner, but in Mac and Linux, the notification area is often in the upper right.  So as far as fitting in, it doesn’t.

Add to that the fact that sometimes you find yourself downloading a large number of files simultaneously.  The

Get Back the Tools Menu and the View Menu in Firefox 4

The new interface in Firefox 4 does not display the Menu Bar by default. A Firefox button in the upper, left corner of the Firefox window has been added. Clicking the Firefox button displays a menu providing access to the different tools available in Firefox. The Add-ons, Bookmarks and History options are all available as they were in previous versions of Firefox.

Scrollbar Search Highlighter Makes Firefox Searches Better

If you search a lot of web pages using the Ctrl-F feature in Firefox (Apple-F in Mac OS X), then you might be interested in Scrollbar Search Highlighter, an extension for Firefox that shows you exactly how far down the page the results to your search query are.
To give you an example, go to any website, hit Ctrl-F and type in something you want to search for.  Let’s use something simple; the word “the” will do just fine.


As you can see, all of our search terms are highlighted.  This is because of a feature build into Firefox.  But what we can’t see until we scroll down is if there are any addition results further down the page.  With Scrollbar Search Highlighter, you can.  Here’s how it works.

Control Flash in Firefox with Flashblock

To configure Flashblock (and all your extensions), first go to the Tools menu and select the Add-ons option.

Next, select the extension you want to configure.  Here we are about to edit the Flashblock settings.

Flashblock is a pretty simple extension to configure.  You can turn it on or off from the On/Off tab, as well as having it block Microsoft Silverlight content as well.

Open pages with IE in Firefox

Are you a die hard fan of Firefox? And you still can’t completely kick out the boring internet explorer because there are lot of websites that can be viewed best in Internet Explorer only.

Now you have a solution for you. You can still view these pages in a Firefox tab but render the page using the Internet Explorer. So how can this be done?
Firefox provides you the ability to install add ons. One such add on is called “IE Tab”. Once you install this add on, you can open the pages using IE rendering engine at the click of your mouse.
After installing this add on, you will get an option to switch the rendering engine in the context menu of tabs.
This add on is very easy to install and also provides lot of configuring options. you can customize certain pages to always open in IE.
This add on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website. This add on is available for Firefox, Flock and SeaMonkey also.
Firefox is really cool

Using App Tabsin Firefox 4

Mozilla created Firefox 4 with an extremely useful feature – App Tabs. The purpose of App Tabs is to place any website in permanent tab from at the top of your Firefox window.
For all those websites you visit daily, hourly or even more frequently, you can now keep them within easy reach. No more bookmarks, typing addresses or adding links to your bookmark bar. App Tabs appear on the left side of any tabs you have open and display as a small tab with the website’s icon.

Add An App Tab

Open your favorite website in Firefox. The website must be open before you can add it. Right click the tab the website is displayed in. Select Pin as App Tab.

A Replacement for the Smart Bookmarks Bar Add-On in Firefox 4

Have you upgraded to Firefox 4? If so, you may have lost the use of some your favorite add-ons because they are not compatible with Firefox 4. One such add-on may be Smart Bookmarks Bar, which allows you to hide the text on your bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar so you can view more on the toolbar at one time (see our post, Condensing the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox).

Easily Speed Up Firefox by Changing Four Preferences

Firefox is a very flexible and powerful web browser. It’s also open source, free, and speedy, most of the time. However, there may be times when it doesn’t seem as fast as it should be. This post will show you four preferences you can easily change to speed up Firefox. We also provide links to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base so you can read about each preference to learn more about its purpose.
We tried tweaking these preferences in Firefox 3 on an old, slow computer and noticed a significant change in how fast Firefox opened, how fast we could open a new tab, and how fast we could open a web page onto a new tab from a bookmark. The same preferences are available in Firefox 4, which is the version we used as an example in this post.

To change the preferences in Firefox, enter “about:config” (without the quotes) in the address bar and press Enter.

Firefox 4 Tips: Using Tab Groups

Open each site you want to add to your Tab Group. You can change the group later, but you should have at least several tabs open to create the initial group. Press the small arrow at the far right of Firefox window, at the end of your last tab. Select Tab Groups. This opens the Tab Groups window.
The Tab Groups window lists a small preview of every tab that’s currently in the group, along with the name of the site.