We picked up a great Firefox bookmark tip from [Colin]. He wanted an easier way to look up bug numbers on the launchpad bug tracker. Because the url is always the same with the bug number at the end of the address, he replaced the final portion of the url with %s. Now, when he types the keyword followed by the bug number in the address bar the bug page loads right up.
We don’t do all that many bug searches but it’s immediately obvious that this can be useful in a lot of ways. In the photo above you can see we’ve set up a shortcut to the tag pages for hackaday.com. Now we just type “hack” with the tag we want after it. Add this to your bookmarks and try typing “hack firefox” into the address bar.
Why settle for the standard home icon on your browser? If your home button brings you to hackaday.com, why not make the icon reflect that destination? This hack is quick and simple. We’ll take you through it using Firefox 3 and the default theme with standard sized icons. Read the rest of this entry »
With netbooks being slim and mostly utilitarian, it seems a bit contradictory to use a standard and somewhat bulky web browser with them. After all, we’re trimmingdown the operating system to perform faster on these little devices, so why not thin out the focal point of the netbook: the browser. Firefox, Chrome, or Safari may be well and great for a full powered desktop or laptop, so how about something a bit more trimmed? Enter the lightweight Webkit based browsers: Arora and Midori.
Lifehacker has published an overview of some of the many ways you can secure your data. The post was prompted by recently released browser vulnerabilities: first IE, then Firefox. They cover techniques far beyond just browser security, like how to properly wipe your iPhone. They mention disk encryption go-to TrueCrypt along with password management tools like KeePass. They also suggest using temporary credit cards to mitigate the impact of fraud.
The Amazon MP3 Store may have the lowest prices on DRM free music, but for some people 79 cents for a song is just too much, especially when [john] and the folks at pirates-of-the-amazon.com can help you get that song for free. Pirates of the Amazon is a slick Firefox addon that inserts a “download 4 free” button next to the “add to cart” button in the Amazon MP3 Store. After clicking on the button, the addon refers users to a thepiratebay.org search page with bittorrent download links for the song or album. While there is no question that this makes getting your music easier, by using this addon you do run the risk of violating copyright laws, depending on which country you live in.
There isn’t much here that hasn’t been thrown into Greasemonkey scripts in the past and we wonder if they’re marketing this to anyone at all. People who absolutely love using Amazon but hate buying stuff perhaps? They cite a couple interesting projects in their about section: Amazon Noir robotically abused the “Search Inside” feature to reconstruct entire books. OU Library searches your local library to see if it has the Amazon book you’re looking for.
A coworker approached us today wondering if they could get a performance boost using Samsung’s newly announced 256GB SSD. Most of their work is done in browser, so we said “no”. They’d only see benefit if they were reading/writing large files. Their system has plenty of RAM, and we decided to take a different approach. By creating a filesystem in RAM, you can read and write files much faster than on a typical hard drive. We decided to put the browser’s file cache into RAM. Read the rest of this entry »
With new betas for both Firefox and Chrome being released, CNET decided to find out how good their JavaScript performance was. Both browsers got a performance boost with Firefox slightly edging out Chrome. You have to turn on TraceMonkey, Firefox’s new Javascript engine in 3.1b1, to get the improvement. We never thought Google was that serious about building a new browser. They just want wanted Firefox to get their act together and suck less. It seems to be working.
During the last day the web has been abuzz about Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity. It’s an addon for Firefox that can help you streamline how you get things done on the web. In the example above, they show constructing an email with a map and reviews using mostly keyboard driven input. The addon is quick to install and we think you’ll find it saving you a lot of time on tasks you’d normally hit the search box for. In the popup, you can do quick Wikipedia lookups, define words, translate, perform calculations, and many other operations. You can email a page to someone by just typing three words. The best part is: anyone can write a command that will expand Ubiquity’s function. Greasemonkey helped fix broken websites and we think Ubiquity will help make interactions between sites much easier. We can’t wait to see what clever uses people come up with.
[Kris Lamb], X-Force operations manager, is blaming the problem on a lack of a unified process for disclosing vulnerabilities. He also claims that the long-held practice of publishing example code of vulnerabilities should be frowned upon.
We generally try to limit the number of extensions we install for security, performance, and because we use a lot of different systems. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of interesting addons out there and Mozilla has recently announced the winners of their Extend Firefox 3 Contest. Lifehacker has a full rundown of each of the winners. Nothing really stands out in our eyes (although we might try Last.fm’s toolbar).
