High memory usage can slow down a program or the operating system. While I personally never experienced that in Firefox on my computer systems, I know of users who did and still do. Finding the cause for the high memory usage in Firefox would obviously be the best solution for the issue. Sometimes though that [...]
Mozilla Firefox
Google Funded Browser Security Comparison Says Chrome Most Secure
A recently conducted and published browser security comparison by Accuvant Labs comes to the conclusion that Google’s Chrome browser is more secure than Firefox and Internet Explorer. The researchers looked at specific browser security technologies and their implementation in web browsers. That’s an analytical what-if approach, and fundamentally different from analyzing a browser’s vulnerabilities in [...]
Open Typed Urls In New Tabs In Firefox
Web browsers can be configured to open website urls either in the current tab or in a new tab. The developers of Firefox have added options to Firefox that give the user a choice when opening links with mouse-clicks. A left-click opens the url in the same tab, a middle-click in a new tab. I [...]
Display Open Tab Count in Firefox
It is sometimes the little things that can make a big difference in day to day activities on a computer. The open tabs count of Firefox has gone up significantly on my computer system in recent times as I’m currently going through all 20k tags here on Ghacks to consolidate them. Firefox by default only [...]
Generate File Hashes Directly In Firefox
Comparing file hashes of files that you have downloaded to your computer with those provided by the provider of said downloads can be a great way of verifying that a file is genuine and that it has not been tampered with by third parties. Security only works if the sources you get the files and [...]
How To Tweak The Firefox Address Bar
Address bars ten years ago were used to enter website addresses, and that was it. Address bars today get fancy names like awesome bar, one bar or omnibox to highlight that they provide a lot more than just the ability to enter and load urls in the browser. For Firefox, the address bar is called [...]
Delete Facebook Friends In Bulk
Sometimes you may want a clean slate. Maybe you have realized that you are communicating only with a handful of friends on Facebook, and that you have added the majority only to feel good or to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. On Facebook it is only possible to remove one friend at a time. If you [...]
Close Tabs Efficiently In Firefox
Sometimes it is little things that can make a big difference. When it comes to closing tabs in the Firefox web browser, users have options to close the tab with a click on the x icon that is either displayed on the right of the tab or at the end of the tabbar. They can [...]
Modify Facebook To Your Liking With Social Fixer
Most Facebook users probably have one or two page elements or features that annoy the hell out of them. This can be a small recent change like the top posts feature that promotes some posts and modifies the timeline by doing so, or something bigger like the new photo viewer interface or the highly annoying [...]
Use Pixiv Tool To Download Pixiv Images Automatically
Pixiv is a popular Japanese art community that is in many regards similar to Deviant Art. Pixiv artists concentrate mostly on drawings, either on the computer or on paper or other materials, and less on other forms of art. The website supports manga and novels as two other forms of art that can be uploaded [...]
FastestFox, FastestChrom, Faster Browsing Add-ons
I had my eyes on the FastestFox add-on for the Firefox browser for some time now. In the beginning, I thought it was just another add-on to speed up the browser like Fasterfox which tweaks the network performance of Firefox. Turned out that FastestFox, and its FastestChrome clone, offer a lot more than that. The [...]
A Better Firefox Add-on Bar
The standard location for Firefox add-ons to place icons in is the add-on bar, which was previously known as the status bar of the browser. That’s different from the Chrome browser where extension icons are plastered on the address bar instead. The functionality and information that the icons provide is usually not needed all the [...]
Hide Firefox With TrayHotKey
Firefox cannot be minimized to the Windows system tray, at least not without add-ons or third party tools that add the functionality to the web browser. One of those add-ons is the newly released TrayHotKey extension which, unlike related extensions, has a few aces up its sleeve. Firefox users who have installed the extension and [...]
Mouseover Popup Image Viewer Userscript
One of the not so comfortable experiences that users can make on the Internet are websites where small images or thumbnails are displayed that reveal little to no information due to their size. Some of those images link to a bigger version, and while that may provide the information the user is looking for, it [...]
Firefox SearchWP, Adds Text Highlighting To The Search Bar
I have to admit that I’m not using Firefox’s built-in search bar to search on the Internet. I use the space for other interface elements and search directly on sites that offer search. It is a trade-off, other users make use of the search bar in the browser. One of the things that is missing [...]
Google Enables Forward Secrecy For HTTPS Services
Last year Google started to push the HTTPS protocol on many of their services which basically meant that users always connected to the https version of the site regardless of their own preference. Before that, https was only an option in a service’s settings. Gmail users for instance were able to enable https for their [...]
Firefox 8.0.1 Officially Available, What You Need To Know
You may remember that I published a news article on November 16 about the release of Firefox 8.0.1. The release was available on Mozilla ftp servers and on third party sites like Softpedia, but not officially announced by Mozilla on the Firefox website. While that has not been a big problem in the past, with [...]
News360 Periscope, Related News On Popular Online News Sites
Sometimes when you read news on a site you may be interested in additional information or perspectives for a deeper understanding and better picture. While you could use a search engine for that, you could also try the browser extension Periscope of the news aggregation service News360. The extension basically works like related post links [...]
Wallflower, Block Social Media Buttons To Speed Up Web Surfing
Every third party script that gets loaded on web sites when a visitor loads the page increases that page’s load and rendering times. Web browsers have made big improvements performance wise in recent times which has speed up page rendering times considerable. The rise of social networking sites on the other hand has seen an [...]
Mozilla Starting To Deploy BrowserID
Remember BrowserID, the Internet sign-in system developed by Mozilla? The project went silent shortly after the initially announcement in July, and it was not really clear if Mozilla was going forward with it or putting it on ice for the time being. A recent post on the Mozilla Identity team blog revealed that Mozilla was [...]