Adblock Plus is a Firefox add-on that blocks advertisement, and sometimes other elements, on websites. It supports black- and whitelists and is very flexible. One thing that is missing is an option to generally whitelist all bookmarks.

Some users might prefer do whitelist websites on a per-site basis and that is perfectly reasonable. Others prefer to whitelist all bookmarks at once which is not doable in the options of the add-on. The author of the add-on however has created a script (discovered at Firefox Mastery) that takes the contents of a bookmarks file and creates a whitelist file out of it.

The process itself is pretty simple, users do need to have access to their bookmarks in html format though. Firefox 2 users can simply access the bookmarks.html file in the Firefox profile folder while Firefox 3 users need to export the bookmarks into html format first which can be done in the Bookmarks Manager.

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Several posts have made the round in the last weeks that explained how a specific webmail service could be selected as the default client when the user would click on a mailto link on a website. One article that can be seen as an example would be my How To Make Gmail The Default Mail Client article that I wrote last week.

That’s fine if you use Gmail, or another mail client as your primary mail client and practically no other. But what if you have accounts at Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail? That’s where Mail From steps in. The Firefox add-on provides a way to select the mail client that should be used to send the mail from.

Mail From currently supports Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and the default mail client but the author has plans and offers a forum to suggest additional mail clients that should be added to the Firefox add-on.

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Flash Cookies, or Local Shared Objects, are stored on the user system by Macromedia Flash applications. They function a lot like cookies and can be used to store session information or save a game progress. The real problem that many users have with them is that they do not know that they exist because they are not stored in the same directory as the normal browser cookies.

Adobe is providing a website with options to change Flash Cookie behavior. Users can change the storage space - default 100K - or deny access to Flash Cookies to websites that they have already visited.

It’s not a practical solution though. Objection on the other hand is a Firefox add-on that is giving access to the Flash Cookies right in the browser. It is not possible to change settings with the add-on but it provides an easy way to delete selected (or all) Flash Cookies.

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Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 has been released and it introduces several new features and improvements to already existing ones. The buzz feature of Firefox 3.1 will definitely be tab previews which opens up a small overlay whenever the user presses CTRL TAB. It looks similar to Windows Vista’s Alt Tab behavior by displaying the tabs as visual thumbnails that the user can flip through.

Three tab thumbnails are shown by default but the value can be changed in the about:config settings by changing the parameter browser.ctrlTab.previewsCount. Users who prefer the old way and do not need or like this new tab thumbnails preview feature can turn it off completely by setting the parameter browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to false.

Firefox 3.1 also introduces several changes to the Firefox location bar. Users will finally be able to define the Firefox 3 auto complete feature. The first noticeable change is the addition of five characters that, when entered in the location bar, will restrict the search. The characters can be entered anywhere in the location bar.

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The Orca Browser is based on the Firefox 3 core but adds lots of unique features and options to the table. The first thing that you notice after installation is the speed of the browser. It’s obviously a felt speed but it seems a lot faster than Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5 for that matter.

It already has several features build into the browser that Firefox 3 users can only gain by adding add-ons to their browser. Talking about ad blockers, mouse gestures and autofilling forms among other things. The layout looks cleaner and is slimmer than that of Firefox 3, even with an installed Tiny Menu add-on.

This is mainly achieved by combining the header (that contains only the page title and the buttons to close, maximize and minimize the window in Firefox) with the Menu getting effectively rid of one toolbar at the top.

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