Browserland » Firefox

Listen To Pandora Web Radio From Anyywhere: HTTPS Everywhere

Nicolo' Canali De Rossi — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:52:57 +0000

Many web-based music services are raising lately, and we all have used them at least once, specially when away from home, or can access our music library. One of the coolest one though, and maybe one of the first ones to be born, is Pandora. Unfortunately this amazing service is currently available only in the US, leaving everyone else without this fantastic resource.

As a matter of fact, using Pandora through the HTTPS protocol bypasses this limitation, allowing everyone to access the service, no matter where located. The trick is simply to use a software that forces the web-browser to utilize a secure HTTP session any time that this is available.

The extension is called HTTPS Everywhere: it is available for both Chrome and Firefox and, after installed, it works seamlessly testing if the website you are currently visiting allows HTTPS sessions and, for Pandora, this works.

There’s nothing more to explain as this is one of the simplest extension for the end user…we just hope that Pandora doesn’t fix this, or at least keeps granting us with a secure session from everywhere we are.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Mozilla Firefox Is Running Really Slow

Giovanni Panasiti — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:57:06 +0000

I usually had two different symptoms where my Firefox was just running really slow.

I only had like 2 or 3 add-ons installed and it was slow not just to browse websites but to open a new tab or just to open up the “Preferences” dialog window.
The other symptom I had was that any site that used JavaScript would make Firefox completely freak it out and go Not Responding for sometimes a minute or more before snapping back to life.

To try to fix the crash follow these steps:

Unistall Firefox (remove everything)
Delete your profile:
I think its like C:\\Users\Shared\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox. Make sure to save your passwords and bookmarks before doing this, you can export your passwords with an add-on and you can export your bookmarks right from the bookmark window.
Use a tool like CCleaner to make sure all the Firefox registry entries are deleted.
Make sure Firefox is gone from your Program Files folder. We want no traces of it except the backup copy of your passwords and bookmarks.
Then, reinstall Firefox, and reimport all of your old passwords and bookmarks.

I bet this will solve your issue. If not, then that can only be caused by a virus on your computer, or something like you don’t have enough RAM.

In the latter, open up your task maanger (CTRL + ALT + DEL) and see what is hogging all your processor and RAM and shut it down, or install some more memory.

Otherwise you can try to restore Firefox default settings without unistall it.

If you have any question, please drop us a comment!

How To Mute Every Sound From Firefox

Giovanni Panasiti — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 10:51:18 +0000

Sometimes, while we are browsing on the internet, we like to listen to music or watch a movie but, occasionally, some websites might play videos, sounds and advertisement automatically, and this is one of the most annoying things that can happen, especially if you’re in a public (silent) place. So is there a way to mute it all?

Finally I’ve found a very interesting Firefox Add-on that lets you mute every sound that comes from your Firefox’s windows.

It’s name is “Muter“: once installed, it gives you a sound icon in the Firefox addon-bar at the bottom. Just click on it and all sounds from your browser will be completely muted.

The default keyboard shortcut for muter in Firefox is Ctrl+Alt+M, but you can also change the keyboard shortcut, the icon style for the mute button or even select from around 7 themes as well.

Download Muter

Restore Default Search Engine In Firefox 5

Giovanni Panasiti — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:05:15 +0000

By default Firefox 5 browser location bar is associated with Google search.

This is a wonderful feature of Firefox which I love. But this feature disappeared after installing some software that hijacks this feature by replacing Google with Yahoo, Ask.com, or other search engines without our consent.

Apparently you have no options to restore this modification.

How to reset your Firefox default search engine or modified it:

Open Firefox browser

Type about:config in location bar and press enter

Search for configuration key keyword.URL and select it

Right click on the configuration key keyword.URL and choose Reset from the shortcut menu.
- If clicking on “reset” nothing happens just write this string:
  http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&cp=4&gs_id=i&xhr=t&q=
- Otherwise if you like Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky feature you have to write this line:
  http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

That’s all.

Make Firefox 4 Start Quickly: Start Faster

Giovanni Panasiti — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:12:58 +0000

Start Faster is an awesome add-on that it’s developed by an official Firefox developer.

In the beginning this add-on had to be integrated in the next Firefox 4 beta release, but it wasn’t so this guy released his idea as a Firefox Add-on so people can benefit from it while they figure out how to properly integrate it into Firefox.

Think of this as a work-in-progress technology preview.

How does it work?

Start Faster bypasses the Windows prefetch feature to start Firefox faster.

It adds a ‘faster firefox’ shortcut to the Desktop which should launch Firefox up to 2x faster than without this addon.

This add-on requires Windows 7/Vista and Firefox 4.0b10pre or later.

Click here to install Start Faster

Play 35+ HTML5 Games

Giovanni Panasiti — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:41:32 +0000

Back in October I told you about the Mozilla Labs Game On competition. The guys at Mozilla now have selected 35 finalists in their game development competition and they are all online and ready for you to play. These games were the top qualified entries in the competition and are being evaluated for the prize awards.

If you want to go check them out, you can do so on the Game On website. Here are a few of my favorites:

A to B

A physics based game where the goal is simply to get the ball from point A to B. Each level, you get a set of modifiers.

Dave’s Galaxy

4x MMO Strategy game on top of a google maps style interface. Instead of sending bitmap tiles, the map is built client side with Javascript and SVG.

DrunkenWeb

A game to test your mixology skills and help you learn how to bartend.

Favimon

Favimon is a web-based game in which you battle your favorite websites, building a collection of icons as you attempt to conquer the web.

Grave Danger

GraveDanger is an action puzzle game based on chaining color groups together to race against the clock. Created by two friends in about one month.

Mad Tanks TD

Tower Defense game. Mad tanks attacks your base, you have to defend it. Please read in-game help for keyboard shortcuts.

Go check out the rest of the submissions and let me know which ones you liked playing. The winners of the Mozilla Labs Game On competition will be announced on Thursday, February 3.

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Home Dash for Firefox 4

Giovanni Panasiti — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:40:55 +0000

Mozilla Labs has released a very interesting new browser interface you can try out in Firefox 4. Home Dash for Firefox 4 removes a lot of the Firefox user interface and gives you what they call "Browse-Based Browsing". It really does bring a radically different way to use Firefox right to your fingertips. Is it worth using?

Once installed, you are left with what is really an almost empty Firefox window. The only browser interface elements that remain are the title bar, the search box, the scroll bar and that is about it. Here is a little more about the project from Mozilla Labs:

Home Dash is the newest Prospector experiment to improve search and content discovery in Firefox. It removes all the standard web browser interface like the location bar, search bar and tabs; and leaves behind just a Firefox logo that is used to bring up a dashboard. Here on the right-hand side, Home Dash has found my top 24 sites and organized them based on my browsing behavior. While still far from it’s end goal, this was the original idea of making a browse-based browser (as opposed to a search-based one).

Overall, I thought it was an interesting user interface to try out – but I am not ready to retire the current browser interface just yet. I am excited to see what they do with it in the future. Almost makes me think of Firefox as a operating system when you go full screen, rather than just a web browser.

If you are running Firefox 4, you can try out this add-on immediately without even having to restart Firefox. Go pick it up at the Mozilla Add-ons website and learn more about it over at the Mozilla Labs.

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Google Shortener

Giovanni Panasiti — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:40:51 +0000

Looking for an add-on that will let you use the Google link shortener (goo.gl) right from your right-click menu inside of Firefox? Google Shortener will get the job done. This simple little add-on for the Firefox browser simply gives you a browser-based front end to shorten your own links using the goo.gl link shortening service. Is there more under the hood though to this amazingly simple add-on?

Not only will the Google Shortener let you shorten links, it also adds a button to your address bar so you can shorten or expand the URLs in the address bar too. Google’s URL shortener service is pretty simple itself, so not sure this Firefox add-on could do much more as far as features go, even if it wanted to.

A nice feature they might be able to bring to it would be to show you the detail page of when the link was clicked and some of the basic statistics too. I have been using the Google URL shortening service via FeedBurner for my Twitter posts for some time, and I do like having those basic features handy.

You can pick up the Google Shortener add-on for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons website.

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Firefox 4 T-Shirt Design Challenge

Giovanni Panasiti — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:37:20 +0000

Are you a graphic designer looking for a new muse? Mozilla has a new contest going on for designing the new Firefox 4 launch t-shirt. All they need now is your submissions for some of the best and unique Firefox 4 logo designs. The winning design will be printed as the official Firefox 4 launch t-shirt, a limited edition item featured in the Mozilla store and distributed to the world wide audience of Firefox fans.

I always love these types of public events like this that Mozilla puts together because you see all kinds of unique and excellent designs. Here are a few more things to consider and keep in mind when designing:

Ideal printing space is roughly a 10×10 inch square canvas on the front of the shirt.
You’ll be designing for the front only, as the back will already have the Firefox wordmark printed.
Please include a background color suggestion in your mockup. This will be the color of the t-shirt your design is printed on.
You can use a basic t-shirt template as a reference guide for placement and size when designing. But please submit only the design itself, not a mockup with the t-shirt.
Files should be uploaded as high-res (300 dpi) PNGs or JPEGs. But be sure to hold onto the original working files, because if you win we will need those. Be sure to optimize the file for print, and preserve all the layers.
Original artwork should be created using a scalable vector graphics editor program (SVG format), such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

The submission period ends on March 13, so act now and get your design together. Let me know if you submit one too – would love to feature it here on Firefox Facts. To learn more about how to participate, check out creative.mozilla.org.

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Firefox 4 Beta 10 Adds Stability

Giovanni Panasiti — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:27:51 +0000

Firefox 4 Beta 10 has been released by Mozilla. This update, on the heels of the Beta 9 release, really only brings more stability to an already amazing new browser interface. The official release notes as far as changes go have been pretty sparse, but it seems stability is the big update this time around.

Here is the official word from Mozilla themselves:

This release continues our work to improve performance and stability in Firefox 4 Beta by including improved memory usage, remote blacklisting for hardware acceleration and better Flash support for Mac OS X users.

How Do You to Upgrade to Firefox 4 Beta 10?

You can go download the new beta to try it for yourself or if you are already using Firefox 4 Beta 9, click on the Firefox button, then go to Help > About Firefox to get the update.

Notice any other big changes? Let me know! Also, be sure to keep giving Mozilla feedback through the Feedback button in the Firefox 4 interface.

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