Archive for the 'Firefox' Category

Firefox 3 Honors Windows Internet Settings

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

FirefoxIn Microsoft Windows, the Control Panel has an entry for “Internet Options.” Many of these settings apply exclusively to Internet Explorer, even though it’s obvious that Microsoft wants them to be Windows-specific and not IE-specific. Firefox 3 is helping to make this desire into a reality, as it “now honors your Windows security settings for downloading applications and other potentially unsafe files from the Internet.” The author of the linked article hypothesizes this was done so that corporations, which are usually quite concerned about computer security policies, may find Firefox more palatable.

Link: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/…
(via digg)

Firefox 3 Gets the Colbert Bump

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

FirefoxComedy Central’s Colbert Report, with host Stephen Colbert, is a great show. The “Colbert bump” is the increase in popularity affecting guests who appear on the show (e.g., increased book sales for authors, a rise in poll numbers for politicians, etc.). And Firefox has joined the growing ranks of those receiving the bump. The linked article contains a graph showing spikes in the number of Firefox 3 downloads—spikes that happened immediately after the browser was mentioned on the show.

Link: http://blog.mozilla.com/…
(via digg)

Disable Blinking Text In Firefox

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

FirefoxWeb designers have long known better than to use the annoying <BLINK> tag (or even its CSS counterpart). But there are some not-so-good designers who seem to consider the <BLINK> tag to be an elegant and forceful statement. Fortunately the linked article tells how to configure Firefox such that blinking text is disabled.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Firefox 3 Tips

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

FirefoxWith the release of Firefox 3 yesterday, the linked article has some tips for the power user.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Web Browser Speed Test

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

FirefoxThe linked article performs various speed tests on four different browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. There wasn’t really a clear winner, but Internet Explorer was definitely the loser.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Firefox 3 To Be Released On Tuesday

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

FirefoxMozilla has announced that Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008. They’re attempting to set the world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period. Personally I like to wait a bit so that most of my extensions get ported.

Link: http://developer.mozilla.org/…
(via Lifehacker)

Firefox 2.0 Officially Released

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Firefox

Version 2.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Download it here, and slightly more detailed release notes available here. As far as I’m can tell, there aren’t any major, must-have changes—the session save and tabbed browsing enhancements were already available via extensions. I’m going to wait a month or so before upgrading , so for those who update now, please let me know what you think.

http://www.mozilla.com/…

The History Of Firefox

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Firefox

Regular readers of Chad’s News know that I use and recommend the Firefox browser. BusinessWeek has an interesting article about Firefox and its parent company Mozilla, giving a bit of background as well as future expectations. Make the switch today—it’s worth it.

http://www.businessweek.com/…

Microsoft Is A Bit Behind The Curve

Thursday, July 27th, 2006

Firefox

Given that Microsoft is coming out with version 7 of Internet Explorer, what would you expect to find at www.ie7.com? Think again…

http://www.ie7.com/

Firefox Conflict Between VLC and Windows Media Player

Sunday, June 4th, 2006

Firefox

A while back, I lost the ability to play Windows Media Player (WMP) videos with my Firefox browser. The WMP controls wouldn’t show up, and there was just a blank space where the media was supposed to be playing. I downloaded and reinstalled the latest WMP version, to no avail. Eventually I just bit the bullet and opened WMP content in Internet Explorer.

Thanks to MozillaZine, however, I have identified and fixed the problem. Turns out there is a conflict between the VLC plugin and the WMP plugin. The solution is to remove the VLC plugin (accomplished by deleting the npvlc.dll file from the Firefox ‘plugins’ directory). I exited Firefox, deleted the file, restarted Firefox, and voila! I could watch Windows Media files.

If you have Firefox and VLC installed, there is a test page where you can check to see if you have this problem.

Power Surfing With Firefox Extensions

Saturday, December 31st, 2005

Firefox

If you’re using the Firefox browser (and if you aren’t, why not?), here is a list of 50 “power” extensions. Note there is some overlap between the extensions, especially for tabbed browsing. You can also check out my extensions, a good number of which appear on the “power” list.

http://pchere.blogspot.com/…

Malicious Spyware

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005

Computer SecurityI’ve been seeing a bunch of articles on a new type of spyware: keystroke loggers. A keystroke logging program will keep track of everything you type and then forward it to someone who will look for account numbers and passwords. This can be very bad when the information is for banking, credit cards, and such. A recent study found that 15% of all spyware is of the keystroke logging type.

Most of you reading this are quite tech savvy and know all about not opening attachments on incoming emails and not clicking through to web addresses given in emails (especially those purporting to be from eBay, your bank, or PayPal). But there are other ways to install malicious keystroke logging programs with which you may not be familiar.

Security Holes: Computer systems that don’t have the latest security updates are vulnerable for as long as they are connected to the internet. Malicious programs continuously scan the internet for computers with open ports to unpatched programs. Tests were run with a fresh installation of WinXP SP1, and it took approximately 4 minutes before the computer was compromised. The best way to protect against this type of attack is two-pronged: 1) Apply all patches and updates as soon as they are available, and 2) use a firewall.

Browser Vulnerabilities: Carefully crafted web pages or even web addresses can attain the ability to execute programs on your system. The best way to protect against this type of attack is to not use Internet Explorer. If you must, ensure that all of the latest patches are applied.

DNS Cache Poisoning: This is one of those cases where even if you do everything “right”, you can still be compromised. Essentially, a system that you use for DNS is given false DNS information and stores the data in its DNS cache. So when you type in www.paypal.com, for instance, you are redirected to a spoof site which gets your login/password information (and may also attempt to exploit browser vulnerabilities). The best way to protect against this type of attack is to minimize financial transactions online. In reality, you just have to trust that your ISP and upstream providers don’t let their systems get compromised—it’s really quite simple and comes down to having their DNS system correctly configured.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDN): IDN is a fairly new standard whereby non-Latin (non-English) character sets can be used in domain names. This is of greatest concern for Asian-language domains, but it was expanded to include all languages. It turns out that some languages have characters that are identical to the English language, but which are treated as different under IDN. This only works when you click through to a spoofed web site, via email or a link on another site. The best defense against an IDN attack is to use Internet Explorer 6, as it does not support the IDN standard. Other browsers, such as Firefox, have implemented security procedures to ensure the user is aware of IDN site names, but older versions do not have these measures in place and are vulnerable. More recently, researchers have found another IDN exploit in Mozilla/Firefox, and it seems like the best thing to do for now is to simply disable IDN.