Firefox

Modify Incompatible Firefox Extensions to make them work with Firefox 3

Ever came across an extension that you badly want to run with Firefox 3 and are in no mood to downgrade to earlier versions of Firefox, and you aren’t comfortable with modifying about:config, the other day I came across this extension called minimize to tray and I badly wanted it to run with Firefox 3 ,actually what it does is that it minimizes Firefox to tray when you press CTRL+SHIFT+M, now whenever I am done with with Firefox I don’t close it instead I minimize it, it is working great so far in Firefox 3.0.1, I am using the same extension as an reference in this post:

first step is to get the .xpi file of the addon you want to make compatible with Firefox 3.0.1, to do that go to Mozilla addons site and open the page of your desired extension, now the problem is that the add to Firefox button is greyed out because its not compatible otherwise we would have right clicked it and chosen “save link as” option but now you  can get xpi file by changing your browser e.g Internet Explorer (you can use IE tab too) as it will turn the add to Firefox button to download now button and then you can easily save the xpi file to your hard disk
Read the rest of this entry

Add a “Clear list and close Window” button to Firefox download manager

I found this nifty little extension for Firefox while crawling on the web named “clear and close”, the name pretty much describes its function that is it replaces the default “clear” button in the Firefox download manager with a “Clear list & Close Window” button which clears completed or interrupted downloads and automatically closes the download manager window, it basically saves you one click .

it is very small and simple extension so I don’t need to write much about it. it’s in experimental mode on Firefox addon’s site so instead you can get it from softpedia.

Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 Released

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 was a major hit but because of the lack of time some features that were originally planned to be added in Firefox 3.0 were held and now are going to be added to the next major release of Firefox browser that is Firefox 3.1 code named “shiretoko”, these features include Support for the <video> tag as defined in the HTML 5 specification,Support for cross-site XMLHttpRequests (XHR) which would allow more powerful web applications,Native JSON DOM binding a powerful feature for web developers, full CSS 3 selector support, bookmark tag autocomplete, bulk tagging support, private browsing mode for corporate users,advanced search UI, a lightweight tagging user interface, integration of a browser’s download history and last but not the least Visual Tab switching which adds Thumbnail previews for tab switching (alt+tab). The final release of Firefox 3.1 is expected to be released in the last quarter of this year or first quarter of 2009 and will run on Gecko 1.9.1 Engine.

The most exciting feature of Firefox 3.1 is the Visual Tab switching feature which has been inspired by Ctrl-Tab Firefox extension, when you press alt+tab on your keyboard you are shown thumbnails along with the titles of the pages which allows you to recognise the tab you want to open quickly just like the Windows Vista Aero’s Alt+Tab Feature, to revert back to the old tab switching you need to use keys Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down, To know more about this feature read this.

If you want to try out the new features you can download Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 from the Official Firefox FTP site.

See your Gmail Unread Mail Count on the favicon

Yesterday I found a cool new extension named “Badges On Favicon”, basically what is does is that it shows a image on on the favicon with the use of java scripts called “badgets” which can show any kind of number like the Gmail unread mail count on the favicon, it isn’t limited to Gmail only there are few more badgets available that can show Yahoo Finance Quotes, unread messages from Apple’s Mobile Me Mail, number of unread items from Netvibes, number of new results since the start of the Twitter search,new items iGoogle Reader Gadget and unread mails from Zenbe, you can also create your own badgets if you cant find  anything interesting in the current badgets.

when you install this extension 4 badgets are installed by default that are Gmail Unread count, Google Reader iGoogle Gadget, Yahoo finance and Zenbe mail count, you can install other badgets from the developer’s site, once you install the extension it will start showing the badge on the favicon, this thing works great with Faviconized tabs extension which minimizes the tab to the extent that it only shows the favicon so that it doesn’t uses much space on the tab bar

Badge on Gmail Favicon

Gmail with badge Faviconized!

Read the rest of this entry

Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 Released Fixes Two Severe Security Flaws

A while ago Firefox 3.0.1 was added to the Firefox FTP site, I was waiting eagerly for this release and I hope that it fixes the issues that were making the browser crash very frequently with the Firefox crash reporter showing up every time, sometimes it would crash five to six times in a single browsing session! anyway I updated to the latest version and out of 25 extensions that I use only 1 is incompatible with this release, and as soon as the browser opened I got a page from the Mozilla site thanking me for trying out the beta, seems like the website hasn’t been updated yet!

this release fixes two severely rated security flaws, the first one being “remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter” and the other one being “command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running”, you can read more about these flaws here and here

Get Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 from here

Update: Here is the official Mozzila blog Post