Pages Tagged “Firefox”
Reviews
- Consent-O-Matic ★★★★★ Convenient browser extension that detects cookie consent pop-ups and automatically fills them out according to your choices. Lets you know it’s working without getting in your way.
- Firefox ★★★★☆ I still have a soft spot for Firefox. At times it’s been the best web browser on Windows and Linux. It’s still good, has a solid extension ecosystem, and serves as an important bulwark against one company dominating browser tech.
- Firefox Sync ★★★★☆ Works on nearly every Firefox-based browser and can mix and match. Even IronFox and LibreWolf recommend using it, as it’s encrypted end-to-end.
- Floccus Bookmarks Sync ★★★★★ Very flexible, syncs across many different desktop browsers and mobile devices, and for privacy it can run on your own server or encrypted on another cloud service.
- GNU IceCat ★★★☆☆ Firefox minus all branding and connections to Mozilla services, plus add-ons to block non-FSF-approved JavaScript.
- IronFox ★★★★☆ A privacy-hardened Firefox variation for Android, comparable to LibreWolf on desktops. Removes Mozilla tracking and services like Pocket. Locks down features that can leak data, but those changes can break some sites.
- KeePass Password Managers ★★★★★ KeePassXC, its browser extension, and KeePass2Android are a nice, clean set of apps to manage your passwords on your OWN desktop and mobile devices, auto-fill websites and apps, and sync over your own server or cloud provider.
- LibreWolf ★★★★☆ Customized Firefox, with an eye toward security and privacy. Follows the stable release channel. Works well most of the time, but privacy features can break some sites.
- Mastodon – Simplified Federation ★★★★★ A Firefox add-on that automatically opens remote Mastodon users or posts in your home server when you interact with them.
- Privacy Badger ★★★★★ Tracking protection add-on for web browsers that also converts embedded media to placeholders and adds GPC support to browsers that don’t have it built in. (It used to detect new trackers automatically, but had to stop when someone figured out how to track that.)
- Regarding Mozilla and Brave On Brendan Eich’s brief promotion to CEO at Mozilla, the fallout for Mozilla and the creation of Brave.
- Tor Browser ★★★★☆ When you really want (or need) to stay private while using the web, Tor is the way to go. Just keep the drawbacks in mind when you do.
- Waterfox ★★★★☆ A Firefox fork aimed at improved performance and privacy, without sacrificing usability. Also available on Android.
- Wayback Machine Browser Extension ★★★★☆ Useful for when you want to make sure the pages you’re reading will still be around in some form in the future, and to easily get at additional context. Checks every page you view against the Wayback Machine, so turn it off when you’re not using it.
- Xmarks (Discontinued) ★★★★☆ Xmarks was a cross-browser bookmark sync service that I used for a long time to keep Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari on multiple computers using the same set of bookmarks. It shut down in 2018.
- Zen Browser ★★★★☆ Similar to Arc, Zen has a non-cluttered design that stays out of your way. Unlike Arc, it’s built on Firefox, runs on more platforms, and doesn’t require you to log in just to use it!
Tech Tips
- @font-face Crashes Firefox on Fedora 11 (Obsolete) Until Fedora updated one of its libraries, Firefox on Fedora 11 would crash on any website that uses an embedded font.
- Can’t Log into Feedly or Pinterest on Firefox 40? Check Ghostery! (Obsolete) After upgrading to Firefox 40, logging into Feedly with Google or Pinterest with a Facebook account failed. It turned out to be Ghostery.
- Cloning a GitHub Repo via Mobile Firefox Even on a tablet with a big enough screen that GitHub looks like it’s showing the desktop version, you might have to insist on it to get all the buttons to appear.
- Don’t Hide Version Numbers It breaks user expectations with no real benefit, and makes it hard to tell if you’ve actually gotten the latest security fix.
- Firefox Thinks It’s Running an Older Version Than Last Time (But Isn’t!) Look for the compatibility.ini file in your Firefox profile, and delete the LastVersion line.
- Keep Your System Updated! Most drive-by computer infections use old vulnerabilities for which patches are already available.
- KeePass Password Managers KeePassXC, its browser extension, and KeePass2Android are a nice, clean set of apps to manage your passwords on your OWN desktop and mobile devices, auto-fill websites and apps, and sync over your own server or cloud provider.
- KeePassXC Browser Extension vs. Flatpak (Not Working Yet) Web browsers running through Flatpak have trouble interacting with KeePassXC.
- On Broken HTML From time to time the idea is put forth that less common browsers need to start dealing with bad code. There are two problems with that view.
- Pure CSS Buttons As part of a minor site optimizing kick, I replaced the validation labels with something smaller, less obtrusive, and directly on the page. I tried to duplicate the look of the classic antipixel-style buttons in CSS.
- Reverse the Colors when Viewing a Web Page Not as good as a real dark mode, but you can easily reverse the colors on any website you’re viewing, turning light pages dark and dark pages light.
- Simple Browser Categorization (Obsolete) Sometimes you want to know exactly what software people (or bots) are using to view your website. Sometimes all you want to know is which rendering engine’s quirks you need to cater to.
- Tell Firefox to open Gemini links with your favorite client You’ll need to click on a Gemini link to get the config options, and then you can choose what to open it in.
- Toolbars That Phone Home (Obsolete) I installed the Firefox versions of four toolbars and used netstat to see when they connected.
- Useful Bookmarklets A collection of bookmarklets that I’ve found useful.
- Using Bookmarklets on Android You can’t use menus for bookmarklets, but you can use auto-complete.
- Web Design is Like Pizza A lot of pages aren’t as specific as the authors think they are. When you write code and test it on only one browser, you’re not testing that the code is correct, you’re testing that that browser makes the same assumptions you do.
- Webslices and Microsummaries (Obsolete) Both features have since been removed, but they offered and interesting way to let visitors know when a site had been updated.
- Why is NginX serving different localhost sites to Chromium vs. Safari or Firefox? If you have NginX listen to IPV6 in one localhost server {} block, listen to it in all of them!
- Workaround for Gmail being blocked by “Temporary Error” in Firefox on Fedora (Obsolete) In this case it was a Fedora-specific issue, but it could be worked around by holding down shift and hitting reload.
Blog Posts
- Machine Translation LOCALLY on Your Computer!
Mozilla and Project Bergamot have released a translation tool that runs on your own device, not sending the data to the cloud.
- Internet Explorer Goes Chromium
Microsoft has confirmed: They’re building future versions of Edge on top of Chromium, bringing the web another step closer to monoculture.
- Firefox 4 Beta: The Missing Status Bar
If you’ve been following the Firefox 4 betas, you’ve probably noticed that they’re dumping the status bar. OK, a lot of people didn’t use it, but here’s the thing: When you hover over a link, the status bar tells you where it will take you. This is important (especially for security) — important enough that […]
- Protecting Firefox from Farmville
Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week. Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie […]
- Webkit display:table-cell Problem
Bug: I wanted to retrofit an old table layout with CSS to help out iPhone & Android users, but WebKit only applies block style to some table elements.
- Moz-something
A good tech support one-liner from (The customer is) Not Always Right: A Flock Of Explorers On A Safari Singing Opera. Me: “Alright, so what browser are you using to view your websites?” Customer: “Mozzarella Firefox!”
- About Those Robots…
I don’t know how I missed this easter egg before: In Firefox, type about:robots into the location bar. (via @Aeire & @IsobelWren) If you’re a science fiction fan, you’ll get a kick out of it!
- Does That Have a Hyphen?
Why is it that Firefox consistently truncates the title “Google Analytics” at the worst possible spot?
- Beta Than Expected
I haven’t been following the progress of Fedora 9 very closely (possibly because it took me until last month to finally upgrade my home PC to Fedora 8), but as the release date of April 29 May 13 approaches, I thought I’d take a look at the release notes for an overview of what’s new. Of course […]
- Cleaning up Firefox’s Memory Usage
One of the biggest complaints about Firefox since 1.5 was released has been its high memory usage. Go to a forum anywhere and you’ll get people griping about “have they fixed the leak yet?” It is, of course, much more complicated than that. There are caches, fragmentation, places where memory is used inefficiently, bunches of […]
- Firefox, Kindle(ing) and more
Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out. Nice so far. Oddly enough, it runs better than the current Opera 9.5 previews on my old Linux box at work, though that mostly seems to be the fault of the find-in-history option. I usually avoid any sort of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, online included, but I’ve […]
- Fire-ony
Five years ago, Mozilla was forced to rename the Phoenix web browser because Phoenix Technologies was working on an in-BIOS browser that would let you get on the internet and troubleshoot/download drivers/etc. even if your operating system was trashed. It became Firebird, and then Firefox. The Phoenix product has finally been released. Ironically, it’s evolved […]
- Spreading to the Converted
The problem with all these Get Firefox! and Get Opera! buttons is that some people already use those browsers, and it’s a waste to advertise to them.
- Opera Really Satisfies
The Opera Web Browser is in the news today. First, they’ve just released version 9.20. In addition to the usual security, stability, and compatibility fixes, they’re promoting a new feature called Speed Dial, to make it easier to reach your most-frequently-visited websites. Meanwhile, a recent survey by NetApplications and Surveyware found that while Firefox is […]
- Firefox too mainstream for Alternative Browser Alliance
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it’s time to refocus the Alternative Browser Alliance. Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler has referred to Firefox and Internet Explorer as the “mainstream browsers” for more than a year now, and it looks like that’s become true. The web is no longer an IE monopoly. It’s become an […]
- Don’t Hurt the Web
The Mozilla Developer Center has just posted some desktop wallpaper promoting open standards, (and the MDC itself) with the theme, “Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standards.” Apparently the design was a big hit as a poster at SXSW. For those who haven’t seen it, the MDC is a great developer resource for web […]
- Firefox and Opera: Allies?
Opera Watch posted an interview with Firefox co-founder Blake Ross yesterday, in which he talks about Firefox, Opera, and the relationship between the two. When asked about the rivalry between fans of the browsers, he says, “I think it’s ridiculous. Millions of people out there rely on us to make the Web better, not have […]
- The Danger of Saving Passwords
ISC is reporting a new type of vulnerability in web browsers that the discoverer has termed as “Reverse Cross-Site Request,” or RCSR. Basically, on a site with user-generated content—like a hosted blog—it’s possible to add a form that looks like the site’s login form. If the victim has an account on the same site, and […]
- Know Your Enemy (Web Browser Rivalries)
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about various web browsers. Opera can/can’t do this. Firefox can/can’t do that. There’s only so much you can do to promote one product when you only know rumors or outdated facts about another. Opera users: If someone told you that Firefox was better than Opera because it doesn’t […]
- Conditional Firefox Get/Upgrade Banners in JavaScript
It’s redundant to show a Get Firefox! banner to someone already using Firefox, but it’s useful to show them an upgrade banner if they’re on an old version.
- Voyage of the FyreFawkes
A tale of the Browser Wars on the high seas. Harken, lads, and listen to my tale. It is the tale of the FyreFawkes, a vessel that turned the tide in the never-ending battle for the high seas. In this day, shipping lanes criss-cross the ocean like a Web, and in years past, that web […]
- Browser War, OS War
It occurred to me today that if you lay out the three major players in computer operating systems and the three major players in web browsers, the results track remarkably well. Windows and Internet Explorer. The dominant player. Obtained that position by being good enough, cheap enough, and promoted enough to win a protracted two-way […]
- Take Action: Browser Choice for an Open Web
Domination by a single web browser harms the web, whether it’s Internet Explorer or Chrome.
- Why Alternative Browsers?
When Internet Explorer won the first Browser War, the web stagnated. Lack of competition led to a lack of technical innovation, and with 95% of people using the same software (with the same vulnerabilities), the web became a breeding ground for viruses and other malware.
- The Alternative Browser Alliance
I’m launching a new browser switch site, with a bit of a twist. It’s promoting all alternative browsers, kind of like Browse Happy, but a bit more inclusive and aimed at a slightly different audience. The idea is that a diverse browser “market”—one with three or four major browser suppliers all competing with each other—is […]
- Who needs version numbers, anyway?
Just a day after Firefox decided to jump from 1.1 to 1.5 (triggering far more discussion than the numbering change really deserved), Microsoft has announced the official name for Longhorn: Windows Vista. Okaaay. Yeah, I can see the connection: a vista is something you see through a window. But at that point, why not just […]
- Tabs ≠ MDI
The ridiculous Firefox/Opera rivalry (it’s software, not religion) has given rise to one annoyingly persistent meme: the belief that tabs are just MDI (Multiple Document Interface). They’re not. MDI, as implemented in many Windows applications and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, involves having a mini-desktop inside your application, with its own windows that you can minimize, […]
- Fixing broken sites in the browser
The new Opera 8.0.1 includes an experimental feature called Browser JavaScript. It’s a collection of client-side scripts that automatically corrects known errors on websites as they’re displayed. Opera downloads updated scripts once a week. It’s an extension of the User JavaScript concept. Firefox’s Greasemonkey is basically the same thing, and it’s gotten a lot of […]
- Elephants in the Web 2: Firefox
Following up on my comments on Opera, Firefox supporters have a major blind spot as well. It has to do largely with the heavy emphasis on web standards among the developers and the early adopters, and the ideals of the open source/free software community. There are a lot of websites out there that don’t look […]
- No Free Lunch
Some potentially nasty browser security vulnerabilities found this weekend in Mozilla and in Safari. Both involve software update mechanisms. The Firefox one tricks the browser into thinking it’s installing from a trusted update site (the maintainers of updates.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org—the only trusted sites by default—have made some changes on their server to prevent the exploit […]
- Opera CEO All Wet
Sorry for the misleading title, it’s sort of an homage to CNET’s recent coverage of Firefox.* Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, excited by the response to Opera 8.0, promised to swim from Norway to the US if Opera 8.0 managed 1 million downloads in 4 days. (By comparison, Firefox 1.0 managed 1 million in less […]
- Cross-browser Java Spyware
Talk about convoluted. Someone has developed a Java applet that will use one browser to install spyware on another. The applet runs in any browser using the Sun Java Runtime Environment—Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, etc.—and if it can convince you to run the installer, it will install spyware on Internet Explorer. And since you can’t remove […]
- Trusted Site, Untrusted Browser
I installed the just-released Netscape 8 Beta. It imported most of my settings from Firefox, including bookmarks, cookies and even history. One of the first things I always check with a new browser is how it identifies itself, which in this case is as Firefox 0.9.6. (Presumably they’ll get on this by the time the […]
- Browser Switch Campaigns Compared
Firefox – Switch [archive.org] is the first of these sites I noticed. Based on Apple’s “Switch” campaign, it’s aimed at raising awareness of Firefox and convincing people to switch from IE. It has stories of people who have switched, a top 10 list of reasons to switch, and answers to questions about just how you […]
- Netscape: Re-Clutter the Web
CNET has posted a write-up of AOL’s new Netscape prototype based on Firefox, as well as a screenshot. It seems to be a combination of Firefox + theme + bundled extensions… plus a mode that embeds Internet Explorer for compatibility. There are some nice ideas: adapting Firefox’s RSS capabilities to create a headline ticker, for […]