firefox

Maybe this Slashdot user should get a Mac

One Slashdot user is blaming his ThinkPad for an inability to use Slashdot error-free. Dude, you should have got a Mac. It works flawlessly with Slashdot.

In fact, as an interesting sidenote, my Mac browsers (Firefox and, on occasion, Safari) work with an increasing array of websites. Yes, Firefox and Safari have always worked with 98 percent of websites, but I would occasionally stumble across one (like Delta.com's print-a-ticket page) that didn't work properly with one or the other. Those poorly designed pages seem to have grown up, or perhaps the browsers have been improving compatibility.

Either … Read more

Researchers: 637 million browser users at risk

A group of researches on Tuesday said 637 million Web users are surfing with outdated Internet browsers and therefore at greater risk of Web-based attacks.

Using data collected from Google Web searches and security firm Secunia, the researchers, Stefan Frei (of ETH, Zurich), Thomas D?bendorfer (Google), Gunter Ollmann (IBM ISS), and Martin May (ETH, Zurich), analyzed the browsers used in a new report (PDF). They did so in an effort to understand why so many recent attacks by criminal hackers have been aimed at the browser, and why those attacks have been so successful.

Overall the authors found that … Read more

Surf your bookmarks by thumbnail with Bookmark Previews

While not nearly as cool as the Muxtape playlist viewer we wrote about a few months back, if you're looking to add a little extra eye candy to your bookmarks folder, it's worth checking out an extension called Bookmarks Preview. When installed, it adds two new views to your bookmarks folder that let you surf your bookmarked sites with small thumbnail previews. You can either view them in a large grid, or Apple Cover Flow-style, which will scale up each thumbnail to a maximum of about 440 pixels wide.

Each time you bookmark a new site a thumbnail … Read more

Firefox 3 hits 4 percent market share...in just one week

Opera has been striving to break 1 percent of the browser market for years. Firefox 3 did four times that amount in just one week, according to Net Applications.

This not to criticize Opera but rather to laud Firefox 3. If you haven't downloaded it and tried it out, do so. It's lightning fast and stocked with a plethora of add-ons (many of which have, in fact, been updated to work on Firefox 3, and not merely Firefox 2).

Two quick fixes for Firefox 3

Just looking at the download count from Mozilla for the first 24 hours of Firefox 3, it looks like the browser upgrade is one of the fastest-adopted new program versions ever. Eight million downloads in the first 24 hours can't be wrong, right? Of course, no new program--even one as heavily beta-tested as FF3--is problem-free, and so I've got two fast course corrections for those struggling with incompatible plug-ins and Flash foul-ups.

Let's look at Flash first. Towards the end of my use of Firefox 2, before upgrading to Firefox 3, I noticed a peculiar Flash problem: … Read more

Live now! Ask Rafe and Seth about Firefox 3

Join our live forum from 11 a.m. to noon Pacific Time on Thursday.

Seth Rosenblatt (from CNET's Download.com) and I are co-hosting a CNET Ask the Editors live session, during which we'll be answering questions about Firefox 3. So if you've got any, check in to join our chat forum. We're here to help.

Why both of us? Because Seth knows more about using Firefox than I do, but I've spent some time with the Mozilla and Firefox executives, and can talk about the strategy behind the browser.

It should be fun. I … Read more

Random Sampler: Appeasing trolls, Firefox boosts market share, and more

Some of the news today was surprising, but some not so surprising. Here goes:

Don Marti makes a smart but flawed (in my view) suggestion that appeasing patent trolls with a settlement may be the way to go, rather than fighting them off. I see his point, but the problem is that if everyone does this, patent trolls will proliferate. Do we really need to encourage them to have offspring? Firefox has apparently boosted its market share at the expense of Safari and Internet Explorer according to Net Applications. Net Applications also says, however, that it may have overcounted. Watch … Read more

Firefox: checking for updates?

I happened upon a computer today that hadn't been used in a couple years and was running Firefox version 1.0.6. That version still had a single X on the far right side for closing tabs. It wasn't until later that each tab got its own little X.

Clicking on "Help -> Check For Updates" told me that the latest version was 1.0.12. Nothing about version 1.5, 2, or the just-released 3. Likewise, when Firefox 2 users check for updates, they are only told about the latest go-round for version 2, … Read more

Keep two different Gmail accounts open at once with CookiePie

Have two Gmail accounts that you want to keep open at the same time in the same browser? Check out CookiePie, a simple browser extension that will fool your browser's cookie manager into thinking you've got one account open. Once installed, you can have several instances of Gmail, Google Docs, or any other service that doesn't let you have two windows or tabs open with different accounts.

What makes the extension nice is that you can toggle it on and off with a simple right-click on any tab. My test with Gmail got me to the point … Read more

Five ways to master bookmarks in Firefox 3

Besides the face-lift, one of Firefox 3's less flashy, but incredibly useful features, is the new bookmarking system. Yeah, there are still folders and bookmarklets, but joining the party are useful items like tags, smart backup, and a new way to track which sites you're actually visiting to help weed out what's unneeded.

We've put together a small guide to help you take advantage of bookmarking in Firefox 3. If you put these lessons to use, you'll go from having a big, clumsy menu of sites you like to an ever-changing list that can quickly be parsed and prioritized with minimal effort.

Step 1: Master the quickie On a site you like? Don't bother with keyboard shortcuts (although Ctrl+Shift+L is dead easy); just hit the new star button in the address bar. It'll quick-save it to your bookmarks list the same way the keyboard shortcut does, although it saves a click or two by skipping the "edit this bookmark" dialogue that usually pops up when you try to squirrel a link away.

If you do want to access that dialogue without having to delve into the full-fledged bookmark editor, just click on the star again and you'll get that same drop-down menu with quick fields you can fill in to edit tags or simply remove the link from your bookmarks.

Step 2: Use tags Tags are helpful. If you're bookmarking a site you think you're going to keep around, it's worth tagging. The biggest reason is that Firefox will now use tags as shortcuts in the address bar, meaning that if you tag this article "awesome," typing awesome into the bar will automatically pull up this page as one of the top results. It'll also take any tags you've previously added and autofill them for you as you type. This makes it easy to fill in some simple descriptions quickly and efficiently.

To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing anything, just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This will list all of the tags you've typed in before, and simply clicking on any one of them will add it as a tag.

Step 3: Use smart bookmarks and folders to discover new content Are you an iTunes user? If so, you may be familiar with smart playlists, the playlists that will automatically fill with tracks based on what boolean values you set up. Firefox 3 has two similar features called smart bookmarks and smart folders that let you do this using query strings or simple searches. Now as a warning, this isn't as simple to do as it is in iTunes, which has drop-down menus, but the good news is… Read more