Web Browsers

Backing Up Your Firefox Bookmarks

By terry Leave a Comment

Firefox has a convenient function in its Bookmark Manager (Bookmarks / Bookmark Managerr). Once you’ve opened BookMark Manager, which opens in a new window, just click on File, Export and choose where to save the bookmarks file. By default, the file titled bookmarks.html.

Of course, if you ever need to restore the file � or to import it into a new Firefox installation � there is a similar Import function there.

That makes it easy to back up the Firefox bookmarks. It also makes it very easy to take a copy of them with you — on a floppy disk, a CDROM or a USB Flash Drive, or on any type of memory card (Compact Flash, Memory Stick, SD/MMC card, etc) if you have a card reader to take along.

I usually do it the hard way, though � just out of habit because early browsers didn’t export and import well. Plus, my way, I always have a backed up copy from my nightly backup across my network using Karen’s Replicator Firefox actually stores the bookmarks all in one file, which you can even open with your web browser. You might need to know that, if somehow Firefox becomes corrupted and you are unable to get it to start up or to export the bookmarks.

Filed Under: Backup, Firefox, Internet Access, Stability, Storage, Terry's Computer Tips, Web Browsers

WinClear – Clean Your Windows & Internet History

By terry Leave a Comment

WinClear is a computer history cleaner program designed to delete or erase the history of your activity on your computer. Obviously, it can’t dig into the guts of every program to find and delete the history each might retain (and you probably would not want that).

WinClear targets general Windows items, recent document lists in many programs, chat history, and all sorts of data that Internet Explorer records on your use of IE.

I wrote several weeks ago in my email newsletter that I had been trying out WinClear. I was impressed with it from the start.

On my notebook, after I had deleted my temporary files (I thought) and the Temporary Internet Files, I was surprised that WinClear found over 800 MB of temporary files for me. Since I was down to only 2 GB free on my notebook, getting 800 MB more was a significant find.

Read more in my WinClear Review — or download the trial scanner

Filed Under: History Cleaner, Internet Privacy, Software, System Control, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Web Browsers, Windows XP

Free Software From Google

By terry Leave a Comment

There’s a great package of goodies available from Google for us to install on our computers — Google Pack!

Terry’s Computer Tips

Google Pack is the combination package of Google Earth (view and zoom the Earth from space), Picasa (photo gallery), Google Pack Screensaver (create your own photoshow screensaver), Google Desktop (easy searching of your computer) and the Google Toolbar (a great search tool and popup blocker for Internet Explorer).

Read more and download it via my Google Pack article at Terry’s Computer Tips.

Filed Under: Internet Explorer, Sales, Software, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Web Browsers, Windows XP

Firefox 2.0.0.1 Released

By terry Leave a Comment

Firefox 2.0.0.1 has just been released. If you’re running Firefox 2.0, you’ll see the update as it automatically installs.� When you exit Firefox and restart it, the update will finish its installation and check for updates to any Add-ons (formerly called Extensions) that you have installed..

Primarily, v2.0.0.1 is a security-fix update, although it has changes for increased compatibility with Windows Vista. (Gee, I wonder why they were needed? At least it’s not the same old “Windows doesn’t run on DRDOS” bogus error messages.)

Filed Under: Usability, Web Browsers, Windows XP

IE7 Phishing Filter Speedup Patch

By terry Leave a Comment

Microsoft has released patch for IE7 that speeds up the built-in phishing filter, which otherwise can slow down your web surfing.

Unfortunately, MS did not push it out in their December updates on Tuesday. If you can pass the Genuine Microsoft test, you can download the patch from Microsoft’s site.

Thanks to Infoworld for spotting this patch.

Filed Under: Anti-phishing, Internet Explorer, Speed-up, Web Browsers, Windows XP

Firefox Extensions (Firefox Add-ons)

By terry Leave a Comment

I’ve been using Firefox for a long time now and have my short list of favorite Firefox Extensions. That’s not the slang “short list” meaning “the most important” — it’s my really short list of Firefox extensions that I use.

But, it’s always fun to see which extensions other people prefer…

Lorelle on WordPress has a fantastic article giving Awesome Lists of Firefox Must-Have Extensions Lists which is a list of lists.

Filed Under: Web Browsers

IE7: Now on Automatic Downloads

By terry 4 Comments

I read a couple days ago that IE7 was showing up on Windows Updates automatic downloads. At first, I believed it. Then, when I checked manually (I have automatic turned off), Microsoft Updates did not show it available for my computer.

This morning, though, my desktop (my only computer that still has IE6) had the “updates available” icon in the status bar.

Sure enough, IE6 was there and waiting…

On that particular machine, I will _not_ install IE7 — but only because I need IE6 to be able to view sites in the browser that the Win98, WinMe, Win2000 and much of the WinXP world will be using.

Since I design web sites, I want to make sure that they look good in Firefox (my normal browser), Opera, IE6 and IE7.

Whenever you install IE7, make sure you have 20-30 minutes for the upgrade process. You’ll think that Windows is installing all over again .

The instructions say to turn off your antivirus and antispyware, since both of those types of programs try to protect Internet Explorer from changes — in this case, the protection would mess up the upgrade. So, I turned off NOD32, CounterSpy and WinPatrol. Since I was safely behind a router, I also turned off my firewall during the installation.
Of course, a reboot is required at the end. Actually, it took 2 reboots on my computers, the changes during startup interfered with my other startup programs.

Filed Under: Anti-Adware, Anti-Spyware, Firewalls, Updates, Web Browsers, Windows XP

Firefox 2.0 Launches to Massive Downloads

By terry Leave a Comment

The blog at Mozillazine.org reports that Firefox 2.0 had over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours and a peak rate of 30 downloads per second.

A little math shows that they must be talking about downloads INITIATED per second, because dividing 2,000,000 by 24 hours, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute means that they had an average of 23+ downloads initiated per second for the whole day!

Comparing that to earlier versions (and quoting the site):

Firefox 1.0: 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours.
Firefox 1.5: 1.5 million downloads in the first 24 hours
Firefox 2: 2 million (actually slightly more) people using Firefox 2 in the first 24 hours.

Filed Under: Web Browsers

Firefox 2.0 Tweaks

By terry Leave a Comment

I found a site with some good tweaks for Firefox 2.0.

You’re probably familiar the concept of “Extensions” for Firefox — these are small programs that you can download to add features to Firefox. As of Firefox 2.0, Extensions have a new name — “Add-ons.”

But, I’m not talking about extensions or add-ons now..

Firefox also has a huge number of configurable parameters. You can reach these by typing
about:config
in the address bar and pressing the Enter key.

This is the only way to change some of Firefox’s parameters. But, be careful if you decide to experiment. You can make changes such that Firefox will no longer start.

It’s much easier to learn about parameter tweaks from someone else. In this case, it’s the LifeHacker.com site has an article Geek to Live: Top Firefox 2 config tweaks that I found quite useful.

I quickly was able to change two new features of Firefox 2.0 that I did not like. First, Firefox 2.0 took the single, always in the same place button for closing tabs — and put the button on each tab. Second, when you open multiple tabs, Firefox 2.0 scales the tabs to fit more on the screen — but, once you get “too many” on the screen, it adds scroll buttons.

The combination of these two things makes closing a bunch of tabs into a pain.

With the tweaks from LifeHacker.com, I got back my tab-close button at the right of the tabs. I also was able to reduce the minimum tab size so that I’d have to have a lot more tabs open before the scroll buttons showed up.

Yea!

Filed Under: Web Browsers

Hackers claim zero-day flaw in Firefox

By terry Leave a Comment

It was a bad weekend for browser security.

Midweek, Microsoft released an early patch for a critical VML bug in Internet Explorer. Then, cyber-badguys started hitting a Windows Shell bug that was vulnerable through Internet Explorer. Fortunately, some third parties have already released bug fixes for that one.

Also, reported in by Joris Evers in CNet’s security blog entry :

The open-source Firefox Web browser is critically flawed in the way it handles JavaScript, two hackers said Saturday afternoon.

An attacker could commandeer a computer running the browser simply by crafting a Web page that contains some malicious JavaScript code, Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi said in a presentation at the ToorCon hacker conference here. The flaw affects Firefox on Windows, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X and Linux, they said.

Filed Under: Web Browsers