Have you ever had the feeling that someone was looking over your shoulder to see what sites you were visiting at the moment ? The currently active site might be a harmless one but the text of the tabs that are open as well might reveal something that you would love to keep secret.

Today seems to be browser day on the Internet. After the Firefox update this morning a new version of Opera was uploaded on the Opera ftp site. It usually takes a few days before the official announcement will be made available on the Opera homepage. If you are an early adopter and can’t wait to test the new version I suggest you head out to the Opera ftp site and download the version that you want to use.

The mozilla team has released a new version of Firefox which can already be downloaded from the Help > Check for Updates menu in Firefox or downloaded from the official download site. Three critical, two high, one moderate and two low security vulnerabilities have been fixed in this release making it a must have update for every Firefox user.

Firefox is still on the rise in Europe where it reached an impressive overall 27.8% market share in June 2007. Finland, Slovakia and Slovenia lead the pack with 45.4%, 40.4% and 47.9% market share while Great Britain, Spain and Italy still linger at the bottom with a market share below 20%.

You can download and install many Firefox extensions that display a preview image or text of a link on the Internet. There are also several scripts for webmasters to enable the feature by default on their websites. Archer, who is a regular reader of my blog, send me a link to a new Firefox extension called Interclue which provides a better way of previewing links in Firefox.

Firefox is a great browser which is easy to customize and expand by using so called extensions. One major difficulty for inexperienced users is to find the extensions that they would like to use because there are so many of them and navigating the Mozilla website is not as user friendly as it could be.

The Firefox Environment Backup Extension -short FEBE – offers a great and easy way to backup all Firefox settings, themes and extensions. I was looking for a way to synchronize all of my settings from my desktop computer to Firefox that was also installed on my notebook.

A great feature called SpeedDial has been recently added to Opera. It’s a solution providing quick access to your “Top 9″ websites and it’s faster than using Bookmarks. However the limited number of sites that you can add does not make it a universal feature to speed up surfing in general.

The new version of Opera introduced a so called Speed Dial feature which displays nine thumbnails of websites for fast access that have been selected by the user. The nine websites are displayed when the user opens a new blank tab or a new blank window and can be accessed by either clicking on the thumbnails or pressing the corresponding numbers (1-9).

The exact same feature is now available as a Firefox extension Speed Dial. Websites can be assigned to the nine spots by using the “Set as Speed Dial” entry in the Bookmarks menu. This is slightly more uncomfortable than in Opera where it is possible to click one of the nine spots and select an entry from the bookmarks.

Firefox is not optimized for widescreen or dualscreen monitors leaving lots of empty space when surfing the Internet. Jonathon Weare came up with a solid way to change the layout of Firefox to suit the needs of widescreen monitors by moving several elements of Firefox to different positions.

His first idea was to move the bar with all the tabs from the top location into the sidebar which adds two benefits. The first benefit is that the space on the sides is used to store elements that are needed for browsing while the second is that the tab bar is removed from the top location adding more space for the actual website.

Grab++ is a freeware addition from the developers of the Orbit Download Manager which runs in the background scanning all elements of a website for multimedia content. All content (music, video, flash) that is found is added to the list with information about its name, size and domain.

There is no obvious way in Firefox to reduce the size of the menu toolbar. I always thought that it was a big waste of space to have this bar enabled all the time. I’m personally using the Tiny Menu Firefox extension which displays just a Menu item next to the usual buttons such as forward, back and reload. I added a screenshot of how my setup looks like at the end of the article.

I did find another interesting Firefox extension called Personal Menu which reduces the menu bar to three buttons that can be placed in the other toolbars. Two buttons are for the bookmarks and the history function while the third is fully customizable. You can add any kind of menu from the menu bar for instance to this personal menu.

I recently read an article written by Amit from Digital Inspirations who was describing a way to set Gmail as the default email client in Firefox. Whenever a email link would be clicked on the Gmail compose mail page would be opened. His way required users to download Google Talk and activate the option “Open Gmail when I click on Email links”.

There is however a way to reach this goal without installing Google Talk at all. All you need is the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

I really hate the behavior of Firefox in Windows when you open the options. The complete browser is not accessible anymore until you close the options again. This is extremely frustrating if you want to test a few settings. There is however a really nice way to change the behavior and make it that the options are independent from the Firefox browser.

To do this you only need change one setting in Firefox and restart the browser afterwards. Type about:config in the address bar and search for the string browser.preferences.instantApply and change the setting from false to true. This ensures that the options can be accessed and changed while it is still possible to surf the Internet.

Did you know that it is possible to override the way a website is displayed by default in Firefox. This can be useful for instance if a webmaster decided to use CSS code to remove the underline of links, change the color for links that open in new windows or display additional information for certain file type downloads.

The first thing that you need to do is locate or create the file usercontent.css in your Mozilla Firefox profile directory. It can usually be located in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\chrome in Windows where xxx is a random number and yyy the name of the profile (default for instance).

Secure Login is a Firefox extension that is similar to Opera’s Wand feature. Instead of logging into a website by filling out the username and password form you login by clicking a button or using a shortcut. This is a great way to prevent the execution of malicious Javascript code that could “phish” your data.

Javascript will be temporarily disabled during login and the data is send right to the website that you want to login to. The Domain that you are currently on and that you want to login to are compared to ensure that you are indeed at the right website. A mismatch would result in a popup warning.

Bebo is one of the many social networking websites that is extremely popular in the United Kingdom. It has a large music category that hosts band profiles including several songs that can be played on the site in an embedded player.

The music category lists a multitude of genres to choose from starting with Rock over several kinds of electronic music like Trance and Hardcore to Comedy and Christian music. I honestly do not know most of the bands that have a profile on Bebo making it ideal to find new unknown bands.

I was looking for a way to automatically scan specific file types immediately after finishing the download instead of scanning them when unpacking or executing them. This way I could sort out malicious files immediately without having to worry about some files that contain viruses or other sorts of malware sitting on my hard drives for a longer period of time.

The latest version of Mozilla Firefox has been uploaded to the ftp mirrors to prepare for the storm of Firefox users who want to update their favorite browser once the new version is announced officially through the website and the update check from within Firefox.

I prefer to watch videos in my favorite video player VLC instead of watching them embedded on the web. If you click on a video file on a website you open it either in your default video viewer or view it right in your browser using a plugin. You may also open websites in different browsers which is great for developers who were using several add-ons to view a website in different browsers.

Just right-click the link and select the application that you want to use to view it from the menu. Launchy, that is the name of the Firefox add-on, supports more than 60 applications right out of the box with the ability to add more applications using an XML file.

Did you know that you can download mp3, video and other files from almost any website with just a little effort ? All you need is Firefox, the Firefox extension Firebug and a download manager. This knowledge is especially helpful if the tools you normally use to download videos or mp3 does not work on a website.

Firebug is actually a great web development extension for Firefox which does also list all objects that are loaded with their full url on the server. I suppose you are already seeing where this is going, huh ? You just have to take a look at the objects and filter out the largest files which are most of the time the media files. Copy the url from that file and paste it into your download manager to download the mp3, video or other media file.

Firefox is already really comfortable when it comes to searching the web. One search box is displayed by default which is great if you want to do a fast search for something. Did you know that there is another way, even faster and better than this one ? Firefox supports so called keyword searches which means that you define a keyword for a certain search engine and can use that keyword to search it without visiting the website of that search engine.

Let me give you an example to clear things up. You may right-click any form field in Firefox and select the menu entry Add a Keyword for this search. Selecting this opens a new Add Bookmark menu which asks for a name and a keyword. I went to ebay.com and did a right-click on their site search. I entered the keyword “e” and the name eBay.

What a pleasant surprise. The Opera development team has published a new version of Opera raising the version from 9.20 to 9.21. The new release fixed a number of crashes and memory leaks making Opera even more resource friendly. Downloads are available as usual for Windows, Macintosh and Unix.

I found this interesting article at the Lifehacker website. The articles lists 15 tweaks and tips for Firefox of which several have not been known by me. Did you for instance know that you could move a page down by pressing the spacebar, that you could move around tabs by pressing CTRL + TAB or that you could use so called smart keywords for searching IMDB in the Address Bar (try typing in imdb Johnny Depp) ?

It is not happening that often that you have to accented characters or umlauts but it sometimes happens. Maybe you want to write a name like Søren or a unique German street name such as Bachstraße. If you never had to type those characters before you might wonder how it would be possible to write them down using your keyboard. They are obviously not printed on the keys of it.

If you want to make sure that you never miss a change on your favorite website again and stay ahead of the crowd by always knowing when the website has been updated you do need the Update Scanner Firefox extension. It basically monitors any website that you have added to it and informs you whenever a change has been made on the website. You may alter the change threshold so that you are not informed about minor changes on the website.

OperaTor is a combination of Opera, the anonymization service Tor and Privoxy similar to Foxtor which offers the same functionality for Firefox. I don’t want to bore you with a lengthy technical description of how Tor is providing anonymity, just that much: Tor uses a layered approach sending your request through a series of servers that only know the server before and after them. This means that the destination server does not know that you requested the package, it only knows the IP of the server before that made the request.

Flash cookies are a new way of tracing your movement and storing a lot more information about you than with normal cookies. One major disadvantage of flash cookies is that you can’t locate them in your browser. They are not shown in the list of cookies that you can see when you take a look at the cookies that are currently saved in your web browser. Normal HTTP cookies can’t save more than 4 Kilobyte of data while Flash cookies can save up to 100 Kilobyte. If you want to try out how they work you could do the following.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 has that strange limitation that you can only download two files simultaneously. This might not bother casual downloaders but what if you have to download many files in a short time ? Sure, you could use a download manager to download all the files and forget about the limit in Internet Explorer. A nice download manager would be for instance Orbit, which I reviewed earlier this year.

Early adopters take note. The Firefox 3 development team has released a new alpha version of the upcoming Firefox 3 web browser codename Gran Paradiso. The new version of Firefox 3 can be downloaded right from the webpage where the developers made the announcement. Versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux are available. It should be noted that this version is for testing purposes only and mainly intended for web developers and the testers who test the alpha version for bugs.

I’m always looking for ways to reduce the toolbars and menus to have more space for the websites. I have already written about extensions such as Hide Menubar or the Firefox UI Tweaker that change the appearance of Firefox. The Tiny Menu Extension is another great add-on to this list. What it does is that it compresses all entries from the menu toolbar (File, Edit, View, History and so on) into one entry that lists the compressed items beneath each other. Take a look at the screenshot to get an impression of how this looks like.

If you have a website, did you ever wonder how your website would look like in another browser ? It is not that practicable to download and install all browsers that you have to use to test your site. Sure, you could install the most used versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera but what about previous versions ? What about browsers in another Operating System ? This is essential for many webmasters especially for business related websites.

Even many experienced Opera users do not know that it is possible to activate the so called “Voice” mode in Opera to use voice commands in Opera and also let Opera read text in websites for you. Before you can use any of the voice features in Opera you need to install the voice add-on package which can be downloaded right from withing Opera. Go to Tools > Preferences and select Voice from the left pane. Click on the button “Enable voice-controlled browsing” and follow the few steps that are self explanatory.

Computer users are lazy. Well, not all of them but most are. I just have to look around and see friends to try to automate as much as possible to save some clicks and time. The article Greasmonkey scripts for the lazy is for them, and everyone else who feels the same way. I don’t want to explain Greasemonkey (again) in detail but here is a rather short explanation. Greasemonkey can be installed as a Firefox extension that changes website behavior. To change the behavior you need to install so called userscripts which change elements on websites.

Some users prefer to have as much space in Firefox for websites as possible. One way to get rid of some of the toolbars and menus temporarily would be to press F11 which removes the title, the bookmarks toolbar and the menubar. Another way would be to just remove the menubar which is not needed most of the time anyway. To do that you simply need the Firefox extension called Hide Menubar which removes the menubar once installed.

I received an email from Heather describing a problem that she encountered. She enabled the content advisor option in Internet Explorer but lost the password that allowed her to configure or disable the content advisor again. The so called supervisor password is defined when you first activate the content advisor. The funny thing is that the password is still set even if you uninstall and install the Microsoft Internet Explorer again.

Some users are switching between Firefox and Internet Explorer on their computer depending on the task at hand. It is for instance essential for webmasters to check their websites in the most commonly used web browsers. I thought it would be nice to share bookmarks between Firefox and Internet Explorer to use the same bookmarks in both browsers. This can be done easily with the Firefox extension Plain old Favorites which adds the favorites from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The favorites menu is placed next to the bookmarks menu in Firefox.

I’m still using Firefox and I thought it would be nice to share some advanced configuration tips that helped me a lot with you. This article was inspired by Lifehackers Top Firefox 2 config tweaks but adds advanced tips to the mix. Rest assured that the configuration tweaks will not list the same tips that you see on every other site nowadays, I promise new unseen tips.

Google displays 10 search results by default which is probably enough for most users who statistically use the first ten results most of the time ignoring the rest of the results. I on the other hand tend to view more than one page normally and was looking for a way to increase my productivity by displaying more than 10 results on a single search result page. I found a Greasemonkey script which changes the value from 10 to 100 for normal Google searches.

Youtube Videos which are also used on sites like Myspace or embedded into blog posts sometimes take ages to load which results in freezes and stuttering which can only be solved by pausing the playback until the video is fully loaded. There is a possible way that would accelerate the download of the youtube video by up to five times. This is done by the free software Speedbit Video Accelerator which builds up five different connections to the video server to speed up the streaming of the video. This method does not help if you are already using the maximum bandwidth available of course.

Opera is already a very fast browser, but if you would have the choice between fast and faster than fast, what would you choose ? I took the liberty to compile a list of 10 great tips that speed up Opera in several unique ways. Many of the settings can be changed by simply going to Tools > Preferences in Opera but some can only be used by accessing not so obvious ways like ini files.

Please note that everything that I’m describing here worked fine on my computer. It speed up Opera and increased my browsing experience with it tremendously. While most tips will work for any users no matter their connection to the Internet some tips might only increase performance for broadband users.

The Opera team released a beta version of Opera 9.20 to the public yesterday. The new version comes with several new features and fixes that are worth taking a closer look at. It looks pretty stable to me and I did not witness crashes so far, you should still be aware that this is a beta version. The release notes line out the new features and fixes of Opera 9.20 beta. The most important features that are introduced is the so called Speed Dial Feature and the integration of Developer Tools. There have been several security and stability fixes as well.

If you have hundreds of bookmarks in different folders like I do you might know the problem that bookmarks are added from time to time that already exist in your list. It is not that easy to manage the bookmarks and keep an overview over them all. A complicated folder structure with many subfolders is adding to the problem. It really does not help to check your bookmarks manually every know and then, this takes to long and does not prevent that duplicate bookmarks are added at a later date again. The Firefox extension Bookmark Duplicate Detector is helpful for users with a lot of bookmarks.

Firefox has its extensions, Internet Explorer its plugins and Opera has Widgets. They basically mean the same: addons for your browser of choice that add functionality to it. I don’t think that Opera deserves to take the third place in the ongoing browser war, it’s fast and resource friendly and many users who rely on Firefox or Internet Explorer should at least take a look at it and evaluate it for themselves. They might be surprised about Opera after all.Widgets for Opera come in all colors and shapes and you can compare them pretty much to the excellent list of extensions that are available for Firefox.

It is not that easy to download all images from a page with many images in Firefox. It would be possible to use a download manager or wget to get all the images but this would mean that you would have to rely on external tools and know how to use them. A far easier method is to use the Firefox extension Batch Downloader. It does exactly what the name suggests, it downloads all images that have a resolution of 200×200 or more in one batch to your hard drive.

If you are like me and would like to upgrade important software as early as possible you might want to head over to the mozilla ftp site and download the latest version of Firefox which is 2.0.0.3. The latest versions always appear first on ftp and on the mirror sites before it gets announced on the official Firefox website. Update Information become available at the same time the homepage gets the update.

Youtube is still a great video site that hosts an incredible amount of videos that can be viewed online. Youtube is on the other hand missing some key features that would make it a even greater experience. I’m not only talking about video downloads but other small features that that would increase its usability. A stop button that would stop the download of the video, a possibility to change the size of the video output and a way to get rid of certain elements that one does not really need on Youtube.

I’m currently taking a look at Greasemonkey scripts in general. I always thought that it would be to complicated to install and use them which is absolutely not the case to my astonishment.Look it up is another Greasemonkey script that can be installed like any other Firefox extension. It becomes active once you reboot Firefox and works twofold. First you mark a word or phrase in Firefox and hit a key afterwards to send a request to a dictionary site such as wikipedia.

Did you ever have the problem that you needed information from two websites at once and had to switch between them all the time to access them ? I usually have the problem when I write a new article for Ghacks and have to take a look at another website to find the information that I need for my article. This gets extremely irritating if many tabs are open at once and I miss the tab that I want. To much clicks in my opinion, that is why I was searching for a way to display two websites next to each other in Firefox.

Microsoft tries to compete with its Windows Marketplace against the addon dominance of Firefox. The main difference between addons that you find at the Marketplace and those that you find at the Mozilla website is that some Marketplace addons are not free. This articles concentrates only on free addons for Internet Explorer 7. I try to point out similar addons that are available for Firefox to make this article useful for Firefox users as well. I do use both on different computers by the way.

Most of the addons that can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Internet Explorer are actually toolbars. I would estimate that about 50% of all addons are toolbars.

Most of the addons that can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Internet Explorer are actually toolbars. I would estimate that about 50% of all addons are toolbars.