I’m a huge fan of the Awesome Search, now Searchery, add-on for Firefox 3 which added the capability of performing Google searches in the Firefox 3 location bar. I loved it so much because it helped me get rid of the search bar in the main Firefox 3 toolbar which in turn gave me more space for other icons and menus in that toolbar.

I had some complaints however. The major one was that Amazon Search was included when using the add-on which was pretty useless to me and that there was not a way to add other search engines, say Wikipedia, Yahoo Search or even from my own website to the add-on.

Ryan from Cybernetnews seemed to have similar thoughts when he reviewed the add-on after finding it on my website. He went a step ahead however and wrote his own version of it that provides all the features that I missed in the original extension.

continue reading "Cybersearch Firefox Extension"

Good news for those users who prefer to stick with Firefox 2 for now. Their browser was updated to version 2.0.0.15 today and it is recommended to update Firefox 2 as soon as possible. The update is a security and stability update which should be available right now from the official download page.

That page is unfortunately down at the moment as are the release notes for that new version. Not exactly sure what’s going on currently because the main pages and the developer news website with the announcement is reachable. The update can also be installed by checking for updates in Firefox 2. This can be done in the HELP menu.

The website is working again. The direct download link and the release notes are now accessible. The update fixed four critical, four high, 2 moderate and 2 low security vulnerabilities. Make sure to update asap.

continue reading "Firefox 2.0.0.15 released"

I reviewed the RAMBack add-on for Firefox 3 yesterday which provided a function to clear RAM in Firefox 3 to avoid an steady increase of memory usage of Firefox during a session. The only thing that was not optimal was that the user had to press a button to clear the RAM. An automatic solution to clear the RAM would be preferable.

Cache Status is a Firefox add-on that can clear the RAM and Disk Cache of Firefox automatically when it reaches a defined number. The add-on is not yet compatible with Firefox 3 right away but it works flawlessly if the install.rdf file is alterered that comes with the installation package.

To do that you need to download the Firefox extension from this link by right-clicking on the button and saving it to your hard disk. Now open the downloaded file with an unpacker like Winzip, Winrar or 7-Zip and extract the install.rdf file from the package.

continue reading "Automatically clear RAM in Firefox"

Many users had a problem with memory usage in Firefox 2 and although Firefox 3 was further optimized it still seems to be a problem for some users. Something that I do not understand for instance is the problem that RAM usage of Firefox is always increasing over time but never decreasing much. I was always under the impression that closing tabs should reduce the memory usage of Firefox (and any other browser of course).

This does not seem to be the case however and RAMBack introduced a routine that reduces the memory usage of Firefox 3. Firefox 3 does keep some files in the cache for performance purposes and RAMBack will cause Firefox to issue an internal notification to free up memory.

A commenter on the add-on page said that this add-on “only clears the internet memory cache of sites not currently loaded in the browser” which makes a lot of sense to me. I had troubles finding a way to find out if the add-on is as useful as it sounds.

continue reading "Free RAM in Firefox with RAMBack"

Many applications that were able to check the boomarks in previous versions of Firefox are no longer working with the latest Firefox 3 because of the changes that have been made to the way those bookmarks are stored. Firefox 2 and previous versions did store the bookmarks in a file called bookmarks.html while Firefox 3 stores them in a database file called places.sqlite in the Firefox profile folder.

There is however an easy way to check all bookmarks of Firefox 3. The software AM Deadlink can still be used to check the bookmarks with a slightly more complex procedure. Bookmarks can still be exported as bookmarks.html in Firefox 3 and then loaded into AM Deadlink. The other difference is that the bookmarks have to be imported again into Firefox without ending up with duplicate bookmarks.

Bookmarks can be exported in Firefox 3 by pressing CTRL SHIFT B, clicking on the Import and Backup link on top of the Firefox bookmark manager and selecting Export HTML.

continue reading "Check For Dead Bookmarks in Firefox 3"