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Mozilla Add-ons Part 2

On the topic of themes for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser; there are a ton of them. Choosing the right one is about as complex as choosing what art to hang in the living room, assuming you can choose from nearly any piece of art, ever.

A theme is what your general background will look like while you are surfing the web. For the most part that’s just the top bar across the web browser application window, which shows the options, navigation buttons and address bar, search bar and tabs. So, if you choose a Hello Kitty theme, you are going to have a white cartoon cat peeping at you while you check your email.

There are several ways to manage your theme, but the most direct way is to click on Tools in the option menu at the top of the browser. Then choose Add-ons when the menu drops down.

Choosing that option will open a second window which is your ad on manager. At the top are the three basic types of add-ons for Firefox, along with a Get Add-on option. For now ignore everything but the Themes option, which has a painter’s pallet and paintbrush as an icon.

When you first click on themes the only thing available will be the default Firefox setting. However, near the bottom right of the window is a get themes option, which if clicked will lead the viewer to a web page within Mozilla.com which houses the sizable selection of various themes available.

This web site is pretty easy to navigate, with a helpful and quick search feature and some common sense categories listed along the right side of the page. And, it’s even easier to actually use. After checking out the various categories of persona’s and themes, simply click on the ‘wear it’ option, and the theme is instantly downloaded and activated.

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Mozilla Add-ons Part 3

Sure, surfing the web is a great way to kill the time, but who in the world wouldn’t want to be even more distracted as they checked email, chatted and shopped for the best deal on garage door openers?

To solve the problem of internet continuity the good folks at Mozilla have recommended a great add-on called SimilarWeb. This clever little application will ensure your brief stops on the internet turn into the marathon surfing sessions they should be.

SimilarWeb, designed by the development firm of the same name is a simple way to make sure that no matter what you are looking up or checking out you aren’t missing anything that might be remotely related.

Mozilla’s add-on management site promotes SimilarWeb as the hands-down most efficient way to browse on multiple layers at one time. Install the add-on and it will create a sidebar along the web browser while you surf.

As you navigate from page to page the sidebar will feature small photos of other pages and content which are in some robot-logic fashion related to whatever you are currently viewing.

But it doesn’t stop there. SimilarWeb will also conduct multi-layered searches of its own of the particular web page, and content you are currently checking out, and then will look for other news, gossip or content related to the current site.

So, if you are checking out reddit.com, you will have a few choices to the side which will bring you up to date on how many times reddit was mentioned on Facebook, which news agency is reporting on its success as a web site and who blogged about it earlier that morning.

In the end, SimilarWeb seems to be pretty good at what it does, which is take your browsing to an almost Inception-like experience. The question just remains; do you want to go deeper?

Filed Under: FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , , ,

Mozilla Add-ons Part 4

There may come a time when human civilization realizes there is a such thing as being ‘too connected’. The combined updates of Twitter and Facebook, however, are enough evidence to come to the conclusion that mankind is currently far from making that deduction.

A recently developed add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, for instance, is a perfect example of how as a species humans are constantly looking for more effective ways of staying ‘plugged in’.

WebMail Notifier is an add-on available through the Mozilla.com web site which will manage all of a person’s multiple email accounts and social networking accounts. This add-on will notify a person of incoming messages from any of those other sites, and it’s easy to use.

The quickest way to get it is to choose the Tools option along the top of the browser window. Then click the Add-ons option, which will open the add-on manager window. Click Get Add-ons and just underneath that enter WebMail Notifier into the search field.

From there it’s a simple matter of following instructions to get the feature up and running. The application supports Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite, and on and on. Just enter those addresses and passwords for your other accounts, and this thing will spend all day making sure you know when a new message has arrived.

And it doesn’t stop there. Just in case you were worrying about when your uncle Ted was going to finish mowing the lawn and turn on some M.A.S.H. reruns, this application can also let you know when his Facebook status changes.

One drawback to consider comes from a user review and points out that this application does not support email coming from POP3 or IMAP email accounts. That means certain work emails and other types of accounts coming from secure and non-public servers might not work right.

Filed Under: FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , ,

Creating your own persona

In this day of custom paint jobs and monogrammed lip rings why shouldn’t a web browser be as distinct as the person viewing it? If this problem has been vexing you ever since you thought up your penguin-themed browser, then worry no longer.

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has the answer to your flightless bird dreams. Using a simple tool and a few online resources anyone can have their internet experience look exactly the way they want it to.

The first step is to create a file which will display correctly on the browser’s header bar. That’s the strip at the top of the browser window which starts out a simple gray when you first load Firefox.

If you don’t have a program like Adobe Photoshop loaded on your computer, that’s not a big deal. There are a couple of online resources which will allow you to start with a basic picture and create a file which will work for Firefox’s make-it-yourself persona feature. You can find a huge collection of images that can be used to create your persona using a P2P network like ares P2P.

SUMOPaint and Photoshop.com are two free online browser-based photo editing platforms which will let you open and manipulate a photo. Basically you need to either crop the image into a 3000 pixel wide by 200 pixel tall canvas. A simple way to do this is to open the photo, then create a new file the correct size. Copy the photo into the new canvas, and crop it to fit.

When you are saving the file, be sure to use JPG or PNG file extensions, and make sure the file is no bigger than 300k. Once you have the picture file the way you want it, go back to the Tools option and click Add-ons. From there, browse for new themes and when the web page opens look for the Create Your Own option near the top left of the window.

Finally, the penguins you wanted.

Filed Under: FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , ,

Bad Weather(Bug)

In a perfect world the internet would always be free, fast and void of spam, malware, spyware and the like. Things being the way they are, however, the internet is a potentially dangerous place.

You don’t want your computer wandering, unsuspecting through the untamed internet landscape, after all. It could catch a serious virus, or even worse, relinquish your vital data to some nefarious web bandit.

We take precautions to try and keep our various PCs, laptops, Macs and so on safe from the nasty things lurking in the web. We load it with anti-virus this and scan it for anti-malware that.

We know a few basic tips for staying safe we like to pass along. For instance we know the African prince who needs help getting his millions of dollars is a scam. We’ve even heard of Snopes.com which has proved useful when trying to weed through countless forwards and discerning fact from urban legend.

But did you realize sometimes the problem is your browser? It hardly makes sense that during these times of high competition between web browsers that any of them would fall in with the sorts of companies and individuals who (shudder) spam our in-boxes. And yet, that’s what can happen.

Take WeatherBug, for instance. When this neat little widget first showed up everyone and their mother had it blipping away the local weather in the corner of their desktop. It was, after all, pretty neat to get the current weather and a short forecast at a glance.

But things sort of fell apart when people starting realizing WeatherBug was a spyware distributor. And WeatherBug is a recommended Add-on at Mozilla.com, just going to show you can’t always trust a company to do the right or the smart thing. While it doesn’t make Firefox any less of a great browser, it’s important make sure you know what you are agreeing to when adding an add-on.

Filed Under: FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , , ,

Firefox 4 beta 3 for mobile

For a long time it didn’t really seem possible that smart phones would ever seriously compete with actual computers. There would still be a need and a reason to sit with a pc or at least a laptop and get some real work done.

For instance it hasn’t always been seamless or quick to load an attachment into an email. Also, the web pages sometimes didn’t look right and selecting click areas could often prove to be a pain on certain sites.

These complaints, however, are rapidly being answered by ever faster and more capable phones. In fact, it’s not really fair to call them phones anymore. We have to call them smart phones.

Admittedly, the things are pretty bright. Where one used to sort of lurch around a web page on a phone, you can now skate through the content with a finger tip, zooming in and out with simple pinching motions.

And if the features announced in the new Firefox 4 for Android phones are anything like what we can come to expect, then the day of mobile productivity has truly arrived.

Willing participants in the beta, which can be found in the Android Market by searching for “Mozilla Firefox” will discover this new browser literally integrating with their phone.

For instance it will add notification icons in the system bar along the top of the phone’s screen. It will also allow you to use the physical menu button along the bottom of the screen to access menu features within the browser.

Two of the neatest innovations are the Android keyboards and the File Picker system for uploading. The former adapts to what you are trying to do with the browser at that time by changing the enter button from either ‘go’ for url locations, or an hourglass ‘search’ button. The latter makes uploading and attaching files simple and quick.

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New Web Privacy Icons

Western Civilization, for all its glamor and splendor, is not a very responsible consumer. In America in particular we are quick to purchase and worry little for buyer’s remorse.

Our habits on the internet are really not very different from our spending habits. Studies show that a great deal of the working stiffs in America whittle away an hour or more a day while surfing around online.

Social networking takes a huge chunk out of each day and recently experts have tagged sites like Facebook as the most notorious places on the web to catch a virus. For some, however, viruses aren’t really even the issue.

Developers at Mozilla, for instance, have become increasingly anxious over the lax habits most internet surfers display toward internet privacy. Often without realizing it we are sharing loads of our personal information with advertisers and with law enforcement. Some sites share every detail, every update. Others keep a tight lid on their data and a strong majority are a mix.

And while the rules are often spelled out in black and white, they are also absurdly long and complex. Most of us click “I agree” without ever reading the first word. For that reason the Mozilla crew put together some easy-to-understand icons they are hoping will someday be mandatory for web pages.

The icons are four circles including simple representations of the internet user, advertisers represented as AD, and law enforcement officials.

The first circle represents web sites where your information is never shared with advertisers. The second symbol shows that your data will be shared with advertisers. A third represents sites where your information will not be shared with law enforcement unless due to proper legal process. The fourth and final symbol will issue a warning to visitors that these sites may give your data to law enforcement even without legal processes.

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Safety Extensions for Firefox

Since the beginning of time we can assume people have had to hide their goods away behind lock and key to prevent them from being stolen. For whatever reason there have always been people willing to take what is not theirs.

The same is still true today considering your personal computer. Our machines are under constant attack from the outside world. The assaults come in a variety of forms, using a myriad of methods and it can seem expensive and confusing to gain a little confidence.

Still, understanding your attackers and knowing a good defense doesn’t have to be either expensive or daunting. In fact, just taking two basic steps can relieve a lot of security pain.

The first step is related to ads on the internet. In this instance the thieves are after your demographic information. The advertisers want to know where you have been and what you have been looking at. Ads have a nasty way of leaving behind malware and spyware. Both of these nasty bugs can cause serious problems for your computer.

Adblock Plus is a free add-on available through mozilla.com. Just click Tools, Add-ons and search for ‘Adblock Plus’. Click on the big green ‘Add to Firefox’ button and the browser will do the rest. This feature will block incoming content from a massive list of ad sites, keeping you from ever seeing the banners or bouncing boxes.

Another good step to take is to deny all cookies by default. These little packets of information are where a great deal of trouble is passed along through the internet. Simple go to Tools, the click Options, and the Privacy. Make sure to Disallow all 3rd party cookies by default and Disallow all cookies by default.

The drawback is that now in order to log in anywhere you will have to make an exception for that website.

Filed Under: FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , ,

Firefox’s answer to Facebook Fodder

Unfortunately there is money to be made by jamming bright, poorly done banners and quiz traps all over our favorite websites. This is evidences by the myriad of jumping, flashing and otherwise nauseating ads one can easily find by logging in to Facebook.

For those who just want to keep tabs on their friends and see what’s going on around them, and don’t want to find out if their IQ is higher than Rhianna’s, there is an answer.

If you are using Mozilla’s Firefox web browser the answer is as simple as Facebook Purity, touted as the Facebook Homepage Cleaner. This feature is installed the same as most other add-ons, by clicking Tools, then Add-ons. Search for F.B Purity and then click on the green button to install it.

Once the program is on your computer you can check to make sure it’s running right by refreshing your Facebook homepage. If it’s installed and running correctly there will be a new information bar just above the Top News and Most Recent options on your homepage. This little ticker will tell you how many application and extra messages have been hidden.

The ‘apps’ being hidden are the application messages. If you want to see them you just have to click show and they will displayed with a light red dotted line surrounding the text.

The extras being hidden are the messages about this friend becoming friends with that one, and this other person attending that one thing. Again, if this sort of thing is what you are looking for, you can have the add-on show those as well.

A final neat little thing F.B Purity offers is the ability to further customize your FB page. For instance if a certain font has always been too small you can now bump it up and if the layout has never seemed just right you can fiddle with that, too.

Filed Under: FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , ,

Don’t Track Me

For those of us who are loyal for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser it is sometimes painful to learn of the decisions the company has been making of late. For instance when they recommended the add-on Weatherbug, a known malicious distributor of malware and spyware it seemed contradictory.

Firefox, after all, is the open source answer to big money’s Internet Explorer, right? We have slowly been taught that Microsoft is the ‘Man’ and he’s keeping us down. Well, apparently things are not always as they seem.

Take for instance Mozilla’s recent actions regarding a Do Not Track tool they were developing. This tool would effectively limit ad companies and other evil web prowlers from loading up our computers with cookies. They want these cookies on our PCs and Macs because they want to know where we have been on the internet and what we have been looking at.

Mozilla removed their Do Not Track tool from the browser being beta tested, presumably because the ad companies were worried something like that would hurt their profits. It turns out the traditional method of advertising on the web isn’t nearly as profitable as the subversive and invasive kind of advertising.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has recently announced they will be enhancing IE9 with a Do Not Track tool, for the explicit purpose of protecting web users. This sort of pro-populous decision counters what we’ve been taught to think about big business versus open source.

It turns out Microsoft actually has a division devoted to privacy strategy and it’s chief of that division believes there is a healthy balance to be maintained between consumer empowerment and privacy and the needs of the internet as a business. He said in a statement that tools like Do Not Track are important because they maintain the level of functionality internet users are used to and demand.

Filed Under: Explorer, FireFox, Web browser Tagged With: , ,
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