Apr 29, 2008

Mozilla’s Bookmarks Toolbar

Mozilla’s Bookmarks Toolbar is a good place to save your most commonly used bookmarks. The easiest way to create a bookmark on your toolbar is to mark the site address (URL) and drag & drop it to the toolbar. To do that, select the URL, hold down the left mouse button and move it to the position on the toolbar where you want the bookmark to appear. Alternatively, you can also add a bookmark to the toolbar by using the "add bookmark" dialog. If you want to rearrange the order of your toolbar bookmarks, simply drag & drop the bookmark from its old position to a new one. To do that, click on a bookmark and don't release the left mouse button until the arrow is where you want the bookmark to be. When you right-click on a toolbar bookmark, you can easily access the context menu. Options marked in orange (note: this is not how it looks in Firefox) are for the bookmark you just clicked on, options in grey affect all bookmarks on the toolbar. Individual bookmark options are: Open: This opens the bookmark in the current browser tab/window. Open in New Window: This will open the bookmark in a new browser window. Open in New Tab: This opens the bookmark in a new browser tab. Cut: This will remove the bookmark from the toolbar and copy it to the clipboard, i.e. you can paste it somwhere else. Copy: This will copy the bookmark to the clipboard. Delete: This wil delete the selected bookmark. Properties: This opens the bookmark properties dialog (please see below). In Mozilla’s bookmark properties window, you can enter or edit the following: Name: This is the bookmark's name that will appear on the toolbar. It is prefilled with the page's title. Since the title is sometimes a bit on the long side, it is a good idea to edit the bookmark name to free up space on the toolbar. Location: This is the web address (URL) of the site/page you bookmarked. Keyword: Using a keyword is a great way to easily access your favorite sites. You can e.g. enter "news" as the keyword for your favorite news site. Once you have done this, simply typing "news" in Firefox's address bar (where you would normally enter the site's address) will then take you to this site. Think of the keywords as a "shortcut" to your favorite sites. Description: You can enter a description for your site here. This can be useful when you have many bookmarks or the site's address or name don't indicate what the site is about. Load this bookmark in the sidebar: When checked, this will make the bookmarked page load in Firefox's sidebar instead of in the browser window. This option is especially useful for live bookmarks, but perhaps less useful for the majority of sites.

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More on Bookmarks>

Bookmark all open tabs

Basics: Bookmarking a page

Source-mozilla.gunnars.net

Apr 23, 2008

Basics: Bookmarking a page

What would we do without bookmarks? With all the things we need to remember, not having to remember a site's address (URL) is a good thing, especially when the address is not as easy as "www.mozilla.org". With the help of bookmarks, Firefox remembers your favorite sites for you. add_bookmark To bookmark a page in Firefox, select Bookmarks -> Bookmark this page. add_bookmark_simple The "Add Bookmark" dialog will open, asking you where you want to save the new bookmark. add_bookmark_advanced1 Select the folder that you want to save the bookmark to from the dropdown menu and click on OK. If you want to save the bookmark to the Bookmarks Toolbar, select Bookmarks Toolbar folder as the target. add bookmark advanced 2 Alternatively, you can also expand the menu tree, if you want to save the bookmark in a subfolder. If you want to add a new folder, click on New Folder and enter the folder name. Firefox will create the new folder below the highlighted folder. Computer Repair and Computer Technical Support will always be provided at any time by Microsoft certified techs. Source-mozilla.gunnars.net

Apr 18, 2008

Bookmark all open tabs

You can bookmark all open tabs into a new bookmark folder. Open the Add Bookmark dialog (Ctrl+D or "Bookmarks -> Bookmark This Page" or "Bookmark this page" in context menu). Check the "bookmark all tabs in a folder" checkbox. Change the name to be the name of the new bookmark folder you wish to create, and then select a parent folder. Finally, click OK.

A folder with bookmarks to all open tabs will be created. You can later reopen the tabs you saved by middle-clicking the folder or selecting the "Open in Tabs" menu item.

Source- kb.mozillazine.org

Apr 14, 2008

Using Mozilla Features and Customizing Mozilla

Custom Keywords

Mozilla Custom Keywords ROCK! Not just for making shorthand for bookmarks but also for searches and queries. Simple keywords allow you to type a short string in the Location Bar and load its corresponding Bookmark URL.

An example is my bookmark for http://www.mozilla.org to which I've added the keyword m.o. So, with that set, I can type m.o in the Location Bar and it loads http://www.mozilla.org. Using keywords combined with autocomplete in Mozilla and I seldom type more than about three or four characters for all of the sites I regularly visit.

To set a keyword you must first create a bookmark for the URL. Then you add the keyword to the bookmark. Open the Bookmark Manager (Ctrl+B), choose your bookmark, and then open the Bookmark Properties window (Ctrl+I, or from the context menu). In the window simply add a short string to the Keyword field. Now close that dialog and you can type the keyword in the Location Bar, hit enter, and Mozilla will load that URL.

But that's just the beginning. Custom keywords can be used to create shortcuts for your favorite search engines too (the 'this ROCKS!' part). Here's how it works.

I'll use Bugzilla Bug Report lookup as an example.

  • Bookmark https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s , where the %s will be replaced by the bug number (query string)
  • Give the bookmark the keyword bug
  • Now typing bug 12345 in the address bar will load that bug.

The keyword "bug" followed by a space and the bug number will load the URL "https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=" + the bug number "12345".

There are probably other great uses for this, just try a query at your favorite search engine and look at the URL it generates. If you can replace your search string in that URL with "%s" you can probably make this work. Throw in a little java script and it's off to the races :)

Source- www.mozilla.org

Apr 10, 2008

Installing extensions in Mozilla

By default, extensions are installed for the current user only, but they can also be installed across multiple profiles and even globally.

Once installed, extensions can be configured by opening the Extensions Manager ("Tools -> Extensions") or by selecting "Extensions" from the the Add-ons Manager in Firefox 2.0 ("Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions") selecting the extension from the list, and then clicking the "Options" button. (If this button is disabled then the extension is not user-configurable.)

Single-user installation

  • Firefox: To install an extension in the current user profile, simply click the Install button on Firefox Add-ons or by saving the extension (which has a ".xpi" file extension) to your computer and dragging it into any Firefox window or opening it from the File menu.
  • Thunderbird: Download the extension, open Add-ons and click its the Install button.
  • Details...

Extensions installed in this way will not appear in any other profiles which currently exist or which are later created.

Multi-user installation

Multi-user installations are useful if more than one person uses your application. You should install and use the Mr Tech Local Install extension to configure your extension installations for multiple users. Alternatively you could simply allow multiple users to use the same profile; you must ensure that the profile folder is accessible to each of them on your system.

Global installation

A global installation will install an extension to the application directory rather than within a profile, so it will be available to all users. To perform a global installation you should not activate the .xpi installer file within your Mozilla application. Instead, download and save it to disk and ensure that you close the application completely.

Then follow one of the following options:

  • Restart your Mozilla application with the following command line arguments:

-install-global-extension "\extname.xpi"

where "extname.xpi" is the name of the installer file.

  • Copy the .xpi file into the \extensions folder. When you start your Mozilla application again, it displays an installation dialog, asking "The following items were found in your Extensions folder. Do you want to install them?"

Depending on the extension, each user may need to configure a globally-installed extension independently.

Apr 2, 2008

How to configure Mozilla's privacy and security features

People have various reasons for choosing Mozilla, be it that they want to try a "different" browser, they like Mozilla's features such as tabbed browsing or because they appreciate Mozilla's privacy and security features such as the Cookie Manager, encryption of saved data, the Spam filter and much more. Mozilla in my opinion is very secure browsers, even in their "out of the box" state. Still, with the right settings, you can make it even better at preserving your privacy and security while you are surfing the Net. Please note that there probably is not such a thing as perfect security, i.e. there may be security-related bugs that have not yet been discovered. Plus, safe use of the internet is always also the individual user's responsibility.

>Taming the Cookie Monster

> Popup Windows > Passwords >Scripts and Plugins

Keeping the Cookie Monster in check:

Cookies are small bits of information your browser remembers for a web site. Your browser saves your cookies in a text file on your harddrive. Cookies by themselves pose no security risk: They cannot contain a computer virus, nor can they be used to spy on you by reading your harddrive's content. They can be very useful and make surfing the Internet easier when used properly by making sites remember who you are and in some cases what you like. However, some companies use cookies to track you across various websites, thus recording your user behavior. What makes it worse is that often those are companies you never directly dealt with, which means that you neither gave them the permission to track you, nor do you know what you get out of the deal. With older browsers such as Internet Explorer 5.x or Netscape 4.x, you only had the choice of either completely disabling cookies, losing their benefits, allowing all cookies or having to say "Yes" or "No" to endless alert windows asking you if site "x" was allowed to set a cookie. Fortunately, newer browsers like Mozilla, Netscape 7, Opera 7 and to some degree Internet Explorer 6 give you the option to selectively allow and disallow sites to set cookies.

IMHO, the ideal setting is to check "Enable all cookies" and "Ask me before storing a cookie". This will make you answer "yes" or "no" to quite a few cookie dialogs, but with Mozilla you only have to do it once per site. Simply make sure "Use my choice for all cookies from this site"" is checked.

There are several alternatives, depending how you surf the web:

  • If you don't visit sites that need to remember who you are, or if you don't care for that feature, but you visit sites who only allow you to enter with cookies enabled, select "Enable all Cookies", check "Limit maximum lifetime of cookies to - current session" and uncheck "Ask me before storing a cookie". This way, Mozilla will accept all cookies but they are automatically deleted once your session is over (i.e. you close Mozilla).
  • As an alternative to the general recommendation, you can also select "Enable cookies for the originating website only" or "Enable cookies based on privacy settings". This should work in most cases and especially with larger sites, but it may not work properly with all sites.

If you have accidentally blocked or allowed cookies from a site, you can easily change that by using Mozilla's Cookie Manager.

Either open Cookie Manager by selecting "Manage Stored Cookies", which will show you all cookies that are currently set and site permissions ("Cookie sites"), or (un-)block cookies for the site you are currently visiting by selecting "Block Cookies from this site" or "Unblock Cookies from this site".

Source-mozilla.gunnars.net