Have you ever noticed the small site identification icon left to the address in the Location bar. It is one of the new features of Firefox 3 from where you can quickly have a comprehensive overview of the details of site. Click on it and it shows the site identity information. Now click on 'More Information' button and a window pop ups that contains comprehensive information about the details of the site.
General: This tab shows the general details of the website like type, Size of the webpage etc..
Media: In this tab one can see the list of all the media(image,flash etc..) objects present on the webpage. Here you can also preview the images and even save a whole gallery of images to your computer by using Ctrl+A and selecting the range of images and using the 'Save As' button.
Feeds: Here you can get the list of feeds provided by the website
Permissions: Here you can view and edit the permissions that particular website. Here you can disable the Cookies for the website or disable pop ups/image loads from the website.
Security: Finally here you will find the security details about the website like saved passwords, cookies etc.., and the encryption details of the connection.
When ever you click mailto hyperlinks like these the default mail handler pops up. On windows the default mail handler is Outlook and its really annoying when it pops up especially if you are do not use outlook like most of the people. Well here is a way to tweak Firefox settings so that instead of outlook compose box you are directed to your yahoo mail or gmail compose box automatically.
Here is the procedure..
From the browser menu bar select Tools --> Options.
From the pop up options window select the Applications tab. Go to the mailto content type and in the actions field from the drop down list you can select your favorite mail client.
Note: For the mailto link to work properly you must be already logged in to your mail account or else you will have to enter later.
Firefox and the extraterrestrial robots robotrons are secretly planning, preparing and conspiring for an alien robotronic invasion. Don't you believe me? OK, its normal for you to question the truth of my account and I am here with the proof. Firefox guys were apprehensive about the ulterior motives of the robots so they built a back door for them selves in case some thing goes wrong. So now I am going to share that secret with you but careful not to leak it because it would not be a secret any more not to mention that it will piss off the robots.
Here you go. Go to your location bar in your Firefox window and type about:robots and voila! So now you believe me? There are some more secret doors hidden some where over there and now its up to you to find out all those and save the world.
Warning: And please don't press the button if it says so or else you may trigger the alarm.
P.S: Did you notice the title of the page. Its "Klaatu barada nikto" and those are the exact same words that Klaatu told to Helen in the movie The day the earth stood still(1951), to stop the robot Gort from destroying the earth. Now memorize these words and one day they may save you from the clutches of the Robotrons.
Adblock Plus is a content-filtering extension for the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Application Suite web browsers. Adblock allows users to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed.
Online advertising has reached its peak and now a days its hard to find a single website without ads. Ads are mostly multimedia files(like images, flash objects) and consists of a significant size of the web page. These ad elements not only make the loading of web page slower but contain distractions which can easily carry us away from our task at hand. Hence by using AdBlock one can effectively block these unwanted content and make web page loading faster and also reduce the data consumption of the Internet Connection.
Post Installation:
After installing Adblock Plus you need to choose a filter subscription. Normally its a daunting task to write filters to each and every website we visit hence instead of creating filters ourselves we can add to a filter subscription which contains a comprehensive list of filter for blocking ads from most of the advertising websites, which is usually maintained by someone else.
The first time you install Adblock you come across a window like the one below where you can choose you subscription.
A Sample Result:
Here are two images showing a sample web page before installing and after installing Adblock. You can clearly see the results for yourself.
Before Adblock. Ads on the page are circled in red color.
After installing Adblock. For this I was using the 'EasyList + EasyElement' Subscription
For other details:
Firefox Addon
AdBlock Plus Website
Installation
FAQ
Documentation
Is Firefox eating up all your memory? If yes, then its probably because you are a frequent heavy tabbed Firefox power user with lots of addons and self made customization. Then here are some tips to customize your Firefox and minimize its memory load on your CPU. These tips work really great and a few of these small tweaks can get you impressive results.
Gone are the days of Netscape and I Explorer. Today Firefox is the most preferred browser by computer techno s because of its flexibility and customization. But the price to these added advantages is massive memory and processor usage. Back in days Firefox was popular for its tabbed browsing and customization not available with other browsers. But today Firefox has grown into a powerful browser with lots of addons and other popular features in demand to the peoples web usage patterns. The downside of all these things is the high amount of memory usage. But if tackled properly the memory usage of Firefox can be effectively managed in compliance to the available system resources.
Tips and Tweaks for Firefox effective Memory Management
1) Restart Firefox
This is the dumbest and the best of all the tips. Increase in the Firefox memory usage can be due to continued usage of the browser with many tabs. If you think that the memory usage of Firefox is exceeding the limits then just close the unwanted tabs and restart the browser. Here you can use the Firefox Session Manager feature to revert back to the previous state.
2) Minimize memory usage upon Firefox Minimize
There is a tweak that you can perform on the internal settings of the Firefox browser where it allows one to minimize the memory usage of Firefox when you minimize the Firefox window. For this you will have to add a new Boolean Variable with name 'config.trim_on_minimize' and set it 'true' using the 'about:config' interface of Firefox. By adding this preference Firefox reduces the memory usage of Firefox when we minimize it, freeing memory for other computer tasks and then slowly increases it corresponding to the available memory.
Procedure:
In a new tab enter 'about:config' in the location bar, without the quotes and press enter. You will reach a page where you can view and modify the User Preferences which are mostly set to default.
Enter a new value by Right Clicking and selecting New -> Boolean. In the next step enter the preference name as 'config.trim_on_minimize', without the quotes and set its value to ' true'. You will have to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.
3) Fix the size of Firefox Memory Cache
In Firefox when media files(like images) are loaded they are automatically cached to avoid the overhead of decoding and uncompressing for later redisplay. For this purpose Firefox does not use a fixed memory cache size but it varies depending up on the available system memory. By lowering this value one can reduce the memory usage by a few MB.
Note: If you regularly browse pages with lot of multimedia its better to leave this field to the default state.
Procedure:
Go to the 'about:config' page and go to the 'browser.cache.memory.enable' entry and set it to 'true'. If the entry is not available then create the same entry of type 'Boolean' and name 'browser.cache.memory.enable' and set it to 'true'.
Now enter a new entry of type 'Integer' and name it 'browser.cache.memory.capacity' and enter its value as per following recommendation.
Physical Ram Default Size(KB) Recommended Size(KB)
128 MB..................... 6144............................. 4096
256 MB.....................10240............................4096
512 MB.....................14336.............................6144 or 8192
1 GB..........................18432.............................10240 or 14336
Confirm that the entry is correct. The finally setting looks like this and it may vary according to your preference
Note: If you are a user who woks with lots of images then its advised to set it to default size. To restore to the default settings chance its value to '-1', with out the quotes.
You can check your current Memory Cache usage by typing 'about:cache?device=memory' in the Location bar and hitting 'Enter'.
4) Periodically Clear Download History
Firefox saves the list of all downloaded items and if you use frequently download using Firefox then its advised to uncheck the "Remember what I've downloaded" in the Tools -> Options -> Privacy, unless you need to keep track of your downloaded files.
5) Increase System's Virtual Memory
You can increase the size of the systems virtual Memory and there by increasing the Firefox performance.
6) Plugin to watch Firefox Memory usage
You can use the lightweight 'StatusbarEx' plugin that can be used to display important system information like System Memory Usage, Firefox Memory usage, Network Speed etc., on the browsers 'Status Bar'.
You can download and add the addon from here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/addon/3271
7) Keep track of your Plugins
Plugins are a wonderful feature available to the Firefox users but they can drastically increase the memory usage of Firefox even when the are not being used. Keep a track of all the plugins installed in your Firefox and uninstall any unused plugins. Its very important to keep the plugins updated for best memory management and performance.