A Firefox profile stores all personal information such as bookmarks and passwords in it. Everyone who is starting up Firefox with that profile is able to use your saved passwords and cookies as well which is a security risk if you ask me. One way to overcome this would be to protect the Firefox profile folder by moving it to a location that is not accessible to anyone except you.

I did this by moving the profile to my encrypted hard drive. The hard drive is encrypted using True Crypt and the profile can only be accessed if I provide the security key to decrypt the hard drive. Other means are theoretically possible as well, use a portable device that has to be plugged in before you can use the profile.

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I’m a fast typer and it occasionally happens that I make errors when entering urls. I always hate it when I have to edit the url because i typed ghacks.nez instead of ghacks.net for instance. I’m lazy and always looking for ways to keep being lazy. Url Fixer is one of those nice little extensions for Firefox that helps me a lot when I’m using Firefox.

Url Fixer is auto correcting urls that have obvious errors like a unknown extension (.cor instead of .com) but also takes a look at http and https and fixes those if an error occured. It does not however work with links that you click on websites which would be really awesome to say the least.

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The Firefox add-on Searchload adds three useful options to those users who use the build in search. Did you notice that every search string that you enter stays in the search field and that you have to clear it manually when you want to enter a new search ? Searchload’s first option is to reset the field after a specified amount of time. The second option resets the search engine to the default one after x seconds and the last one controls whether the search results are opened in the same window, a new window or new tab.

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It is sometimes really difficulty to figure out the real url of a link. Parameters and Javascript can obscure links and mislead the user. Advanced users will know the methods to figure this out really quickly while inexperienced users will have troubles doing so. The extension Splitlink for Firefox aids the inexperienced in finding out about the links that they intend to click.

It does not make sense to check each and every link that you encounter on the internet. It makes much more sense to manually check a link if you are suspicious about it or want to find out the real url. Using Splitlink is pretty easy. Right-click a link and select the Splitlink entry from the menu that pops up.

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Don’t we all hate those boring repetitious tasks that we perform everyday on the internet ? Open this website, log into that forum, check the ebay auctions, read mail accounts and rss feeds. Would not it be nice to start all of this with just a few clicks ? That is not the only thing that you can do with the Firefox add-on Dejaclick.

It can be useful for website testing or e-learning as well. Want to show your clients how something is done in the browser ? Why not create a script that shows them exactly how ? Recording starts with the click on the record button and from that moment on everything you do in Firefox is recorded until you press the stop button.

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