Firefox and Thunderbird are phoning home every 24 hours regardless if update notifications have been disabled in both applications. This caused some stir yesterday when a post made the Reddit (thanks Ryan) frontpage that informed users about this. Firefox and Thunderbird are apparently contacting a Mozilla server transmitting information about the IP address, the time, the version number of the product, if any plugins or add-ons are used that are globally blocked and the total number of active users of the software.

While some users might question the reason to transmit some of the data, for example the number of active users, the reason for transmitting it is to make sure that no plugin or add-on is in use that is on the global ban list. This list contains only five plugins and add-ons currently but it seems to be a way to prevent harm to the products if the user decides to install malicious products.

The five plugins and add-ons that are currently on the blocklist are:

continue reading "Firefox is phoning home once a day"

Snap Links was one of the most useful Firefox 2 add-ons in my opinion and it was one of the few add-ons that I missed dearly after switching to Firefox 3. The add-on could be installed with a little tweak of the install.rdf file that can be found in every Firefox add-on installation package but it turned out that this version, it was Snap Links 0.0.4, was causing some side effects like opening the right-click menu or disabling it for a certain time that made it unusable for me.

I researched the topic and finally discovered a link to version 0.0.5 of Snap Links that is compatible to Firefox 3. Yes that is right, it is working perfectly and one can finally use it again to open multiple links in one fluid motion in Firefox.

Let me explain how Snap Links is working. By default it provides an option to draw a rectangle with the right mouse button. Every top level link in that rectangle will be opened in a new tab on release. Mighty useful if you want to open the last ten forum posts or search results in a search engine.

continue reading "Snap Links for Firefox 3"

Cookies, or more precisely HTTP cookies, are small text files that are stored on a users computer when he visits a website that is making use of them. They can store session information, shopping cart contents, website preferences, can be used for authentication and for tracking the user.

The first applications are beneficial and most of the time necessary to use all of the functions of a website. Blocking cookies on a website that is storing session information in them will have the result that the user is asked for authentication whenever he loads a new page on the server.

Tracking cookies on the other hand do not benefit the user at all unless you would say that targeted advertisement is beneficial. It does not really make sense to enable cookies for all websites, especially those that use them to track the user. It’s more of a privacy issue but one that many users take serious.

continue reading "Why you should restrict Cookie Access"

I’m normally not using the full screen mode in Firefox because I have a large enough Samsung LCD monitor that displays most websites just fine. Lifehacker discovered that Firefox 3 changed the display of the full screen mode. If you remember Firefox 2 still displayed the tab bar and location bar in full screen mode. Firefox 3 changes this behavior and hides everything. Yes, that is right, there is no bar visible on top when Firefox 3 enters full screen mode and even the status bar moves to a hiding place while in that mode.

There are probably some users who prefer the old ways and Mozilla Links posted a nice quick about:config fix that is bringing back the full screen mode of Firefox 2.

To change the Firefox 3 full screen mode type about:config in your location bar and filter for the parameter browser.fullscreen.autohide. Change the value of that parameter to False to change the full screen mode so that the tab bar is displayed as well.

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The new Stumbleupon toolbar is now compatible with Firefox 3 and the developers have added an interesting function to the toolbar. Are you stumbling a lot of sites and use the Stumbleupon toolbar regularly ? You might be delighted to hear that you can know export the stumbled websites to your Firefox bookmarks.

The process can take a lot of time depending on the amount of websites that you have stumbled in the Stumbleupon account. Firefox will not react to user input during that time and it pretty much looks like it hangs. In the end however all stumbled websites are added to the Firefox bookmarks in a folder named Stumbleupon and several subfolders for different categories like Computers, Health or Business.

The export function is located in the Search & Tagging tab of the options of the Stumbleupon add-on. All websites that get stumbled after upgrading or installing the new toolbar will be saved automatically in the Firefox bookmarks as well which means that it is not necessary to export the Stumbleupon websites more than once.

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