Browsers

New Context Menu with Firefox 32

One of the new features with Firefox 32 is “Easier back, forward, reload, and bookmarking through the context menu” Mozilla has consolidated the context menu a bit by replacing the text for Back, Forward, Reload and Bookmark This Page options with the respective toolbar icons. Old Context Menu (Firefox 1.0 to 31) New Context Menu (Firefox 32+) Note: the items listed in your context menu may vary depending on what add-ons you are using. Now, I hadn’t really noticed this until recently as the only time I really use the context menu in Firefox is for the Copy Page Title and Location…

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Firefox 30 Released

Mozilla release the next update for Firefox with Firefox 30.0 on June 10th, 2014. This update includes a couple new features: Sidebars button in browser chrome enables faster access to social, bookmark, & history sidebars Mac OS X command-E sets find term to selected text There were several fixes included in this update and those can be found in the Release Notes. Depending on update settings, users will be prompted to update to version 30 or can do so via Help > About Firefox or going to getfirefox.com where they can download and manually install the latest version of Firefox. The…

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Prohibiting Pasting of Passwords

We have been told over and over and over again to use strong passwords. If you can remember your password then it is too weak. Because of this, many people use password vaults or password managers to store their super strong impossible to remember passwords. When they need to log into the site, they simply paste the password from their vault or use their password manager to fill-in the password field. Seems like a good security practice as the users have a very strong password…apparently not. Some sites are no longer allowing you to paste in your password (some may or…

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AdBlock Plus is a Memory Hog?

Ever wonder why your Firefox is using so much memory? Turns out AdBlock Plus could be the cause behind this. Mark Wilson with betanews performed an experiment using both AdBlock Plus for Firefox and Chrome: “So this morning I fired up Firefox. One tab open — BetaNews, of course — finds memory usage sitting at around 184MB (Chrome, for comparison, eats up about 112MB for the same). OK, so let’s get AdBlock Plus installed to check out these claims. Instantly, memory usage for Firefox rocketed to 383MB — so more than doubling — although it did drop slightly to 350MB after…

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Firefox 29.0.1 Released

Mozilla released the first incremental update for the 29 Stable branch on May 9th, 2014. Firefox 29.0.1 includes such changes as: disable seer fix crash in java rename Send Tab activity re-enable Send Tab on Beta don’t let invalid sessionstore.js files break sessionstor. Depending on individual’s update settings (Tools > Options > Advanced >Updates) users should be prompted for an update within the next 24-48 hours or can go to Help > About Firefox to trigger the update or download and manually install via the gofirefox.com site. The next planned update will be Firefox 30 on June 10th, 2014.

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Firefox 29 Back Button with CTR Issue Resolved

Last week I had contacted the developer of the Classic Theme Restorer (CTR) add-on upon discovering this add-on was causing my ‘back button’ issues. At that time the developer had advised that he was not able to find a way to restore back the functionality when using the ‘movable back-forward’ button option in CTR. Furthermore, he did not foresee being able to resolve this issue. Earlier today I received an email from the developer advising me that the functionality had been fixed in the recent Beta update of CTR to version 1.1.8 beta 8. After updating the add-on, I am…

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Changes to “Holding” the back button in Fx 29

Another annoyance I have discovered with the upcoming Firefox 29 is holding the left mouse button when clicking on the back button no longer brings up your “history”. There are many times I don’t want to go back one or two pages, but rather several in one click. To do this I would simply left-click on the back arrow and hold the mouse button down until the list appeared and then select which page I wanted to go back to. This is the way it works in Firefox 28 (and older), Google Chrome and even Internet Exploiter. In fact, I…

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The New Firefox Sync (Firefox 29)

Besides the UI overhaul aka Austrilas, Firefox 29 features a new and improved Firefox Sync. I didn’t really know what was so new about it since I had tried a long time ago to use it without much success. Turns out, Mozilla has made the sign-up as well as management processes a lot simpler now. This help article checks your user agent and will automatically direct you to Sync instructions based on what browser you are using. Reading through this article you will see the current method is very complicated and time consuming. Note: If you click the link in Firefox…

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Firefox 29 and Australis

In the post yesterday we asked if the screenshot below was that of Firefox or Chrome. The answer is Firefox. Firefox 29 Beta 1 release with the new Australis theme/UI. This is the first major UI change since Firefox 4 was released on March 22, 2011 (after over a year of developmental releases). Firefox 4 also introduced Tabs on Top, the hidden menu bar and the Firefox button, which with Firefox 29 will be a thing of the past. Kind of a shame too as it at least made Firefox standout from other browsers which are really all starting to…

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