5 Superb Mozilla Firefox Secrets !!!

While Firefox might be your chosen browser for its speed, useful add-ons, and open-source culture, it's also packed with many useful built-in features.

I've tried to dug through Firefox's endless list of features to find you the best, little-known secrets you can start using right now.

1. Customize search with Smart Keywords
A little-known Firefox feature lets you run searches within any given Web site from the browser's address bar. For example, to search for "TouchPad" within Amazon.com, all you'd have to do is type "amazon touchpad" in the Firefox bar.

To create a smart keyword, head to a Web site and locate the search field. Then, right-click the search field and select "Add Keyword for this search...". Create the bookmark, store it in a folder, and your smart keyword is now enabled. Try it with reference sites like Wikipedia and IMDB for quick access to answers.

2. Open multiple Web sites at launch
Who says you can have only one home page? You can set Firefox to open all your favorite Web sites at launch. For example, I'd like Prohackingtricks, Facebook, and Twitter to launch every time I open my browser.

In Firefox, go to Options > General. In the home page field, enter URLs separated by pipes. For example "http://www.prohackingtricks.blogspot.com | http://www.facebook.com | http://...." and so on. Then, hit "OK" and relaunch your browser to see the magic happen.

3. Bookmark an RSS feed
If you check certain Web sites frequently, especially news sites, you can create a bookmark that automatically updates with new stories from that feed. For example, Firefox stocks your toolbar with a "Latest Headlines" bookmark, but you can create your own.

Right-click the Firefox toolbar and select "Customize...". Then, drag and drop the RSS logo to the toolbar. Now, head to the site you want to subscribe to and click the RSS button in the toolbar. Then, enter the name of the bookmark and click "Add".

4. Take your settings on the go
Instead of re-adjusting Firefox--bookmarks, passwords, etc.--every time you use a new computer, take all your accounts and settings on the go. This is done by simply installing Firefox on a portable USB drive, and inserting into any computer you use.


5. Master keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures
Firefox has built-in shortcuts to help you browse a lot faster. For example, there are shortcuts for rotating through tabs, re-opening a closed tab, and toggling Private Browsing. View the full list here.

Firefox has mouse gestures, too. Although they're not as elegant as Mac OS X gestures, they'll become second-nature after some practice. For example, Shift + scroll down sends you back, and alt+scroll lets you scroll by line.

For advanced gestures--like reloading a page by drawing a circle with your mouse--check out the FireGestures add-on.

I am definitely sure there are still great tips you might know that I've omitted, please do share them in the comments below.

Mozilla message to enterprise customers: "Drop dead"

The Mozilla Corporation shipped Firefox 5 this week, almost exactly three months after it shipped Firefox 4.

Does that seem like an insane tempo? Ha! Fasten your seatbelts, because Mozilla plans to ship Firefox 6 in exactly six weeks, with Firefox 7 six weeks after that, and Firefox 8 … well, you get the idea. Not coincidentally, that release schedule perfectly matches up with browser archrival Google Chrome.

At that pace, in June 2014, a mere three years from now, Firefox will be on version 29.

If you’d prefer to opt out of that breakneck development cycle, Mozilla has some guidance for you: Fuggedaboutit.

Remarkably, that is Mozilla’s direct, uncensored response to its corporate partners.

If you are even considering migrating your business to Firefox, I strongly recommend you read two recent blog posts by consultant Mike Kaply.

Kaply, whose consulting company specializes in customizing Firefox for enterprises, calls the new rapid-release policy “a really bad idea.” The worst part is that with each new release, Mozilla is completely dropping support for the previous one.

Unlike consumers, who are thrilled at the chance to install new code every six weeks, enterprises crave stability:

Companies simply can’t turn around major browser updates in six weeks (and each one of these is a major update). With security releases, there was a reasonable expectation that web applications wouldn’t break as a result of changes. With these releases, there is no such expectation. So a full test cycle needs to be run with every release. By the time this cycle is completed and the browser is piloted and deployed, another version of Firefox would already be released so they’d already be behind.

In a follow-up post, Kaply quotes two fellow enterprise admins who are extremely worried about their ability to support Firefox.

So, has Mozilla reached out to Kaply to reassure him that they’ve got his back? No. In fact, Firefox evangelist Asa Dotzler showed up in the comments of Kaply’s post to tell him, bluntly, that he can expect zero support:

Mike, you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types, right? Your “big numbers” here are really just a drop in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base.
Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.

Some 14 hours later, after Kaply argues that Mozilla should “throw a few resources at [the problem] and try to solve it,” Dotzler doubles down:

A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I’d much rather Mozilla spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don’t have enterprise support systems already taking care of them.

You hear that, enterprise admins? You don’t count, and Mozilla has no intention of supporting your extensive investments in testing browser releases before deployment. And if you think that’s just a misunderstanding, Dotzler wants to make it very, very clear that Mozilla is serious:

As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL [end of life] when Firefox 6 is released?” 

He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.

Update: As of June 24, 2011, less than six weeks before the scheduled release of Firefox 5, this is the published product roadmap for that release:

• TBD
• TBD
• TBD
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

That’s also the “roadmap” for versions 6 and 7, both due before the end of the year. If you’re developing on the Mozilla platform, is that enough information for you?

Source: Zdnet

Firefox 5 Around the Corner: To Be Release Soon

The official release date of Firefox 5 has been set to June 21, which is three days from today. If you do not want to wait until then to play around with the latest stable release of the popular web browser, you can go ahead and download the browser for your language and operating system from the official Mozilla ftp site. As with all releases that appear there, there is a slim chance of last minute bugs that could force Mozilla to pull the release and replace it with another one. If you want to be on the safe side, or want to upgrade or install Firefox 5 in a productive environment, it is better to wait until the official release announcement.

So what’s new in Firefox 5? The release notes list the following new features and changes:

• Added support for CSS animations
• The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability
• Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance
• Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas
• Improved spell checking for some locales
• Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users
• WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures
• Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance
• The Firefox development channel switcher introduced in previous Firefox Beta updates has been removed

Those are almost exclusively under the hood changes, some may be noticeable on day to day like the improved performance.

It should be noted that Firefox 5 introduces HTTP Transaction sorting by CWND which can improve page loading times considerably. See Firefox 5 Gets Faster Connections, Up Next: Memory Improvements for an in depths review and explanation of that feature.

The do not head tracker preference has been moved to the Privacy tab to get more exposure. Users can activate it to send a “do not track” request to each website they open in Firefox.

Interested users can access the complete list of bugs fixed in Firefox 5 here. Each entry links to Bugzilla where additional information can be found.

The latest version of Firefox 5 can be downloaded from the official Mozilla ftp server. It is likely that most Firefox release mirrors will offer the new version on their servers as well.

Next in line is Firefox 6, which will be released in about three months time.

Firefox 5 Gets Faster Connections, Up Next: Memory Improvements

Firefox 5 is a week away from being released as a final version. The browser is expected to be released as final on June 21. When you look at the changelog you will notice quite a few under the hood improvements that have not been talked about yet. HTTP Transactions sorted by CWND is one of those features. Most users probably wouldn’t associate a faster browser with that feature in particular, but the explanation on the Bugzilla site might change that.

What really distinguishes different connections to the same server is the size of the sending congestion window (CWND) on the server. If the window is large enough to support the next response document then it can all be transferred (by definition) in 1 RTT.

It basically means that Firefox may load resources faster if connection handling and priorities are changed.

I’ve done an experiment to show the best case – a link to a 25KB resource off of a page that contains a mixture of small and large content. In both cases the 25KB resource is loaded with an idle persistent connection. In the historic case it reuses a connection that had loaded a small image previously and it takes 3RTT (793ms) to transfer it.. in the case of sorting by cwnd the window is large enough to accommodate the entire resource and it is all complete in 1 RTT (363ms). Cool!

Even better, the worst case scenario is the status quo of Firefox 4. Users who are interested in a longer, more technical explanation, can visit the Bitsup blog for a taste of that.

Firefox 4 transfer

Firefox 5 transfer

The guys over at HTTPWatch have tested the new feature and found the “the performance benefit [to be] substantial”.

In other news: Firefox has a bad reputation for excessive memory usage, and related to this slow downs especially on startup or when closing the browser window. While that is certainly not the perception of all Firefox users, many perceive Firefox as a browser that uses to much memory.

The MemShrink project aims to optimize Firefox’s memory consumption. The developers list speed, stability and perception as the three core benefits of optimizing the memory usage of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

The project members will analyze memory leak reports and prioritize them based on numbers of affected users and their default priority.

The developers have created a new website called Are We Slim Yet which tracks the process of cutting down on Firefox’s memory usage.

If things go forward as planned, we might see considerable memory footprint reductions in coming versions of the browser.