Recently in Firefox Category

I subscribe to redmond mag and mcpmag but pages from these sites in google results (see top result here) are being flagged as possibly malicious and clicking through the "go ahead show me the site anyway" then leads to a blocked page (in firefox beta 5) at stopbadware.org stating that the site has been "reported bad". Unfortunately there is no way to see *why* it's reported as bad so I can't make the decision myself and there is no continue button either. Instead my only other choice is to use internet explorer which is more likely to expose me to problems as there isn't a flashblock/noscript plugin for ie like there is with firefox to provide basic protection straight away.
stopbadware.org sounds like a good idea but could actually expose someone to more dangerous content (and there really should be a "yes I know what I'm doing" button!)

I got an invite to Photophlow this morning. Photophlow is like IRC with flickr pics, all on steroids. A nice interface but be warned that it will suck up time when you start using it! I had an issue with firefox trying to get to the chat rooms - the system would just sit there and never connect into the room.
This turned out to be an issue with flashblock - if you use flashblock you need to go to the tools menu, Addons, Select Flashblock and choose options. Then add www.photophlow.com. Restart firefox and you should be able to connect. For some reason this didn't work first time for me - only after I totally disabled Flashblock, logged in and then re-enabled it, would I be able to connect.
I have some invites available if anyone wants to try it.

I've been getting an annoying dialog box that pops up whenever I tried to open a web page from the start/run or my address bar in windows. The dialog box would say "Windows cannot find . Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search."
I've just kept clicking ok (or ignoring the dialog box) and the page would load anyway. Today I found out from the mozilla bug database that this is normally caused by AdBlockPlus, an extension to assist in hiding adverts but in my case it turned out to be AdBlock - the original version. I removed adblock, installed the latest version of adblockplus and everything is working again.

For some reason my Firefox Bookmark toolbar was blank, yet going to bookmarks, Bookmark toolbar folder showed all of the links there so the data wasn't completely gone. Doug has a solution of restoring the default set which didn't work for me until I disabled all extensions (using MrTech's install extension), restarting firefox, right clicking the empty toolbar, selecting customize and then clicking Restore Default Set. That brought back all the links to the Bookmark toolbar. I then enabled all extensions, restarted firefox and everything is almost fixed. I still have an issue with Web Developers Toolbar being blank and if I click Restore Default Set I loose all the links again.

The day I install an old version of the firefox to onenote extension (using the override version check), it was announced that a new version has been released that is marked as compatible with existing firefox versions. You can download the new Firefox to OneNote extension here.

I've been puzzling over the missing pictures in internet explorer after the post two before this one had the picture missing. In internet explorer on the main page at absoblogginlutely.net you will get just an empty space where the google map picture is, but if you click on the space you will get taken to the larger image so it really is there.
If you click through to the monthly archive or individual entry the image shows up fine.
I know the problem is partly to do with the align="left" attribute on the image - if I remove this, then the image appears again properly. I know that this should really be styled with css, so I put the float="left" on the image and the image disappears again. If you add the "position=relative" to the css then the image appears again and the text wraps around correctly but if the page is wide the graphic overflows out of the background image and spoils the effect.

There are several posts on the internet that I've found describing my problem but I couldn't find a solution.1 2 3

The following posts were made from a sample posting to demonstrate the problem (I chose a garish yellow background to make it easier to see where everything is). As all these screenshots are hosted on zooomr and I've used the blog picture functionality, which includes styling on each picture posting, these images look ok in this posting but the styling is a pain to type in for each picture and not exactly easy to remember either.
The original posting with an empty picture.

The same posting viewed in firefox - looks great

and in firefox again, extra wide - the image stays within the background box.

Remove the float left and the picture appears in internet explorer

But if I set float=left within css the image disappears again.
Add position="relative" and the image reappears again and looks great

Until I change the width of the browser and then the image bleeds outside of the box.

Somehow I've managed to get firefox beta 2 installed on the parents in law computer. I'm not quite sure how it managed to get installed as I was on 1.5.0.6 with automatic updates turned on. As usual it was prompting me that a new version was available to download and then all of a sudden 2.0 was active! All of the extensions apart from tabmixplus were gone, but I'm not really sure how many were installed on this computer in the first place so it's not that much of a problem. TabMixPlus was there, but disabled as it is incompatible with Firefox 2, probably because a lot of the functionality (but not all) has been duplicated into firefox2.
With ff2, the active tab is in bold with all the other tabs inactive - a great improvement over previous versions as it was often hard to tell which was the active tab when there were many (20+) open . However, it manages to do this by only opening up a certain number of tabs across the screen, any more tabs get added to a drop down list to the right of the screen which actually displays all of the tabs, not just the ones that don't fit on the screen.
You can't middle or right click on the drop down list to close the tabs though.
The other thing that is different is that using the mouse scroll wheel when hovering over the tab row scrolls the tab row, but the active tab does not change until you click on it - this is different to how tabmixplus behaves. I'm not quite sure which behaviour method I like - it would be nice to get a choice between the two.

One of the addons (they're not labeled extensions anymore) that I will need to add is mouse gestures as I am so used to right-left clicking to go back and left-right clicking to go forward - I really miss that on pc's/internet explorer that don't have this option enabled or installed.

Microsummaries are a neat bookmark extension which means that if you bookmark a site that has a microsummary, the name field has a dropdown arrow next to it. By selecting the Live Titles information, the bookmark data will change as the web page is updated. Great for having a mini ticker like functionality, but not much use if you are used to using certain keys to navigate to a site in your bookmarks, or just trying to find the site (ie Absoblogginlutely! stands out a lot better than Firefox2 or Google Analytics or Event 1030) as it will no longer be called the same - see woot for a good example with the deal of the day where this would work.

Oh - spell checking is now available within the browser - this post has 11 "mistakes" in it - www is a spelling mistake apparently!

There's a new version of firefox out now and the notification in the current version has actually been pretty useful. Rather than telling me there is a new version, I download it and *then* discover that most of the extensions I have won't work, this time the installation gives me the ability to find out which extensions are not set to work with the new version. The only downside is that most of the extensions that it wouldnt work with are currently disabled in the version that I am running at the moment.

There's a new zero day exploit for firefox and internet explorer which involves javascript. So if you are running firefox, then installing NoScript will give you added protection. If you are running IE - then ooooooops :-)

Having said that, it doesn't look that malicious - you would have to be tricked into entering data into one page, which can then be sent to the malicious site at the same time, so you are probably only at risk if you do random surfing or surf in dodgy web site areas in the first place - and if you are doing that then I really hope you are not running internet explorer (or as an admin!)

How to fix ie freezing when you use the drop down box and the answer (at least official) isn't to use firefox. This is due to a known issue with HP hardware and the MS06-015 / KB908531 patch.
On a related note I was wondering what readers policys on implementing patches are. We tend to wait a week or so to see if there are known issues (like above) but if everyone waited a week to see if there were no issues then this policy isn't very practical. Also testing the patches on machines isn't often very practical either - with a vast array of software on users desktops - most of which I would not use, just how do you test the effect of patches? Even getting hold of a spare box in most companies is unlikely as they are all in use. I've also found that the details in the patch documentation is getting sparser so it is also difficult to tell just what the patch does or what it affects.

And as to firefox - I'm not that impressed with the autoupdate facility for 1.5.0.2 - now most of my extensions don't work and on my home computer they seem to have been ALL wiped out - not sure if that is because it's loaded a new profile or not. I'll look at that later, but having all the extensions disappear is very annoying. The other strange thing is that I wasn't aware of there being any major patches or bugs in firefox - they've kept them pretty quiet unlike the latest MS patches - is there a mozilla security zine like the MS security posts that I should be subscribed to?

I'm currently reading the Firefox Hacks book which is so much better than the firefox garage book. One of the extensions listed in the book is infolister which lists all extensions and themes installed in firefox and can publish it to a website. (Which would possibly reduce these firefox extension posts :-) Combined with the Mass Installer extension it looks like you can replicate an install of software from one machine to another easily - this would make it a lot easier for me to keep my machines in synch. Note that I've not tried this yet as the infolister on this machine is very bare - only two extensions but that is because all the extensions that were loaded got wiped when I moved my Firefox profile directory. It would be good if infolister also listed greasemonkey scripts installed - perhaps that will come in the future. The forum discussion is 20+ pages long so I've not had chance to read it yet to see if anyone else has had the same idea.
Update The infolister is merged into Mr Tech's Local Install (but doesn't have the ftp uploader facility) but you do have the ability to copy/paste the output as html, text or bbcode - I've added the html output from my machine in the extended entry.....

A useful tip to provide a bit more screen space in the browser (useful for low resolution monitors) is to move the bookmarks toolbar in between the throbber and the help menu.

Anyone know how to get firefox to NOT auto remember fields in a form on certain (banking) web sites? My new bank which is an online account remembers my account number in the form which I really do not want to have kept in the browser. I know I can turn the autoremember form details off, but thats a global function which I really do not want to do.

I think I've worked out that the session saver extension in 1.07 is causing firefox to crash on startup when it tries to restore the session. By disabling this option to restore, I've not had a crash (yet). I've also uninstalled the undoclosetab extension as the functionality is included within the TabMix extension. I'm also looking at TabMix+ which looks like tabmix on steroids.

I'm not sure why yet, but two machines that I have installed firefox 1.07 on are crashing on startup. I'm figuring it is an imcompatible extension as it seems stable until the extensions are loaded. A new profile fixes things but it is rather annoying. I've lots of extensions so it is taking a long time to test them, especially as you have to restart firefox each time you change an extension :-(

As I'm sure many bloggers have posted, firefox 1.07 is out and is a security fix. (I've not read many blogs yet and I'm about 3 days behind). However as Steve pointed out they ask you to install into a new directory. I thought they had fixed this kind of hassle around the version 0.9 days. Out of interest I did an inplace upgrade and its behaved ok and removed the 1.06 (that I installed yesterday) onto the machine - or at least as far as add remove software from control panel it did remove it cleanly. Shockwave and flash installers offered to install into the 1.06 installation too so something is not quite right.

I tried my first web page in .net using the visual web developer beta 2 (why am I a sucker for trying out beta software?) and it didn't work - returning an error message http error 403 Forbidden. Oddly enough, if I opened the same page in Internet explorer it worked ok. From my experience with IIS I knew this was something to do with NTLM authentication but trying to find out where this was configured was rather bewildering. In the end, the post on the microsoft forums gives the answer - "Select the Solution Explorer view, and right click the very first element of the tree (the project itself). Choose property pages and select Start Options. On the Server section, clear the NTLM checkbox and save the configuration and it now works in firefox. MS's official response is that this is by design to ensure websites are secure. Personally I just wonder how many websites on the internet insist on using NTLM authentication.....not many I guess so I'm afraid this excuse doesn't ring true to me.
As a side note, I can't see how you are meant to permalink to the individual post in the forum - there doesn't seem to be any visible anchors to use. I had to use the WebDevelopers Extension to display the anchors. I've logged a bug in the forums on this point too.

Tip of the Day: Pasting wrapped URLs in Firefox
This must be on everybody's pet peeve list: Somebody e-mails you a URL, but it's long (it seems they all are these days) and wraps in your e-mail client, so when you click to open it you only get the first line, which is completely useless. In 2005, you'd think that most e-mail clients would be smart enough to get this right, but many of them don't. For Firefox users, thankfully, there's a fix on the browser side, but for some reason it's not enabled by default nor available on any screen in Preferences. As the power users reading have probably already guessed, it's in about:config.
The trick is this: type about:config into your address back and hit enter. After boggling at all the arcane options now available to you, find editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines (use the Filter box at the top to skip to it quickly). Double-click on it and change the value to 3. That's it!
[via Download Squad (Windows)]

A while back I requested the library to obtain a copy of Firefox hacks instead they have purchased 3 copies of the book Firefox and Thunderbird garage which seems to have a lot of fluff in it and aimed at firefox newbies.
I might just put another request in for the original book or the new one Hacking Firefox

CodingForums.com - Firefox 1.0 Tips and Tricks has some good tips on optimising and stopping some new popups.
The only thing that I would change on the user.js file is set the privacy popups to 1 instead of 2 (so they are treated the same way normal popups are) and also add the line
user_pref("dom.disable_window_move_resize",true);
to the file - this stops windows from being resized.
I've not actually come across any flash based pop windows yet so I'm not really sure if I'd want it set to 1 or 2 but as 2 denies all popups, there might be a case where I want a popup to occur and this would block it.

Using the New Links: Get Firefox Floaty Banner Code Generator, I've added a banner at the bottom of this page if you are using internet explorer. The only problem is that if you scroll down the page the button moves up the screen until you hover over it, then it jumps out of the way and moves back down to the bottom of the screen.

I've reinstalled greasemonkey following the Greaseblog: Mandatory Greasemonkey Update by installing version 0.3.5 from greasemonkey.mozdev.org

Firefox 1.0.6 is now out to fix the problem with broken extensions. Unfortunately it breaks roboform's extension even more as they added version checking into their latest patch so it can't be used in 1.0.6. I'm still having problems with this extension - I thought I had narrowed the problem down to a mailto link in a form but it also crashed on me this morning when adding some more urls to the MT blacklist. It didn't like me selecting some text with the mouse, but when I repeated the action after it had relaunched it was ok.

Apparently there is a major security hole that allows any website to view the contents of any file on your harddisk if you have greasemonkey installed (see greasemoney mailing list post for information. I can't reproduce the problem with their proof of concept code, but its a pretty scary possibility. Annoyingly, turning off greasemonkey will reduce the functionality on my flickr/geocaching pages :-( Thanks to Pip for the tipoff

Got back home today and downloaded the new firefox extension for roboform and it still crashes the browser :-(
More on this weekend when I get home (Just checking some internet pages from the library and had to post this as a reminder to myself)
(Sheila - a fox thingy is a web browser like internet explorer but much better - nag Dave to install it on your computer.)

If you use roboform with firefox 1.0.5 you may find it crashes about 3 seconds after a web page is loaded. I've therefore gone back to 1.0.4 whilst I do some more digging. I've sent the reports off to roboform and microsoft, can't do the mozilla ones as the talkback agent still doesn't work.
Update I reinstalled 1.0.4 and then installed the roboform extension (I was previously using the .exe file addin. Then upgraded to 1.0.5 and boom - the browser crashed after a couple of secs. THEN the whole computer blue screened...this was not good. After a reboot I uninstalleded the roboform extension and everything is hunkydory again. Hope they fix this quick as I've come to rely on this extension.

Firefox 1.0.5 is available as a download to fix several security vulnerabilities. The automatic updates within firefox doesn't pick this up yet. Thanks cdavis

I can now upload images in firefox again. (see this post for when it failed).
I ran firefox in safe mode using firefox -safe-mode and I was able to upload an image to flickr ok. This meant that the problem was a conflicting/corrupt/flakey extension. I went through my list of extensions and deleted some that were duplicate in other extensions and tidied up the ones I no longer needed. I removed informeter, livelines,tab clicking options, undoclosetab, sitebar and evernote extensions and the problem went away. I reinstalled sitebar and evernote (as I use these) and the browser doesn't crash.

Grrr - firefox crashes after I've uploaded a file to a website. Happens on geocaching.com, this blog and on Microsoft's site uploading a bug report. Very annoying as the whole browser crashes :-( Not sure what has caused this, probably some faulty extension or something. (It happens when the page you get after uploading a file is displayed). I've sent several reports back to Microsoft and the mozilla group, but the latter is annoying as most of the time the bug reporting application seems to freeze too :-(