Firefox 3 | Technology Blog

Firefox 3.05 Security Update

December 17th, 2008

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The Mozilla Firefox development team released version 3.05 of the popular web browser a day after the Opera team updated their browser. The latest update - like the Opera update - is considered a security update and therefor recommended to install as soon as possible to patch the security vulnerabilities.

A total of eight security vulnerabilities are patched in Firefox 3.05 including three critical vulnerabilities. Critical vulnerabilities are described as vulnerabilities that require “no user interaction beyond normal browsing”.

The other security vulnerabilities are rated as high, moderate and low. Most Firefox users should already be able to check for a new update directly in their web browser by clicking on the Help > Check For Updates link in the main Firefox menu.

Page Bookmarks

December 15th, 2008

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Bookmarks are references to websites that are stored on a computer system. They are usually stored in a web browser to make it easier to open a website at a later time again. They also aid the user by storing the relevant information like the url so that those do not have to be remembered by the user.

A page is usually displayed from the top on which is problematic on very long pages. Maybe the relevant information are stored somewhere in the middle instead of the beginning. It could also be that you were not able to work yourself through all of the page and bookmarked the page to continue reading at a later time. You would need to scroll and search for the place where you stopped in both scenarios.

Page Bookmarks aid Firefox users by providing the means to save a bookmark that does not only remember the url of the page but also the position of the scroll bar on the page. All functions are available through the right-click context menu. Whenever you want to save the position simply right-click that page and select the Page Bookmarks entry from the menu. The extension does not only save the position of the website but also the zoom level which is great for users who regularly zoom in and out of websites.

Fix: Cannot Delete Firefox 3 Bookmarks

December 12th, 2008

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Something strange happened today. Deleting a Firefox bookmark in the bookmarks toolbar or in the bookmarks folder removed that entry from Firefox. It did however reappear after a restart of the browser which was puzzling and annoying as it was not possible to remove old bookmarks from the computer system.

The best way to start the analysis of the problem was to create a backup of the Firefox 3 bookmarks to be on the save side. A quick search on the Internet suggested to delete the files places.sqlite and places.sqlite-journal which contained the bookmark information. Deleting them would force Firefox to rebuild the bookmarks from the last backup. The best option is to simply move them from the profile folder into another folder for safety purposes.

Firefox did recreated both files but it did not solve the problem. It was still not possible to delete bookmarks permanently. Next option was to remove both the files and the bookmark backups so that Firefox could not recreate the bookmarks and would have to start with a new blank bookmarks file.

Setup Firefox To Use Minimal Screen Estate

November 19th, 2008

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Firefox 3 displays five bars at the top of the application window before it is starting to show the website’s contents. There is the title bar, the menu, the navigation toolbar, the bookmarks toolbar and the tabs of course. They take up about 132 pixels in height on the screen which is more than a fourth of the screen estate of an Asus eeePC 7 and still an eights of the popular 1024×768 screen resolution.

If you analyse the elements of the Firefox header you notice that there is lots of free space there. That’s wasted space that could be put to much better use.

The following article is going to show how you can save more than 60% of that header space. It is not necessary to apply all the changes. If you feel that you need the title bar or the status bar then you are of course free to keep them. The article however will be radical and outline how to use minimal screen estate in Firefox.

Firefox 3.04 is out

November 13th, 2008

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Mozilla released a new version of Firefox 3 a few hours ago. The update is already available on the Mozilla website, the mirror servers and also available from the Check For Updates option in the Firefox Tools menu.

The release is a security and stability update. A total of nine security vulnerabilities have been fixed in the update including four critical vulnerabilities. You can access the list of security fixes at the Security Advisories page for Firefox 3. The release notes do not contain information about the stability updates but the full list of bug fixes mentions a few fixes that stop browser crashes.

Lastly language support and language related additions seem to have been a priority. Firefox 3.04 adds support for Thai and Icelandic as well as beta test releases for Bulgarian, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian, Occitan, and Welsh.

Firefox Bookmarks: Reset Special Folders

October 6th, 2008

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Firefox 3 introduced several special folders for Firefox bookmarks management, among them the Unsorted Bookmarks, Most Visited, Recently Bookmarked and Recent Tags folders. Unsorted Bookmarks is being used to store new bookmarks that have been added to Firefox by clicking on the star in the Firefox address bar. In case you have done that and could not find the bookmarks afterwards; That’s where you have to look. It is only visible in the Bookmarks Manager.

The Most Visited bookmarks folder is placed in the Firefox bookmark’s toolbar displaying the most visited items that can be found in the Firefox history. The Recently Bookmarked folder contains all the recent bookmarks that have been added to Firefox while the Recent Tags folder does the same for tags that the user added.

All but the Unsorted Bookmarks folder can be deleted easily by right-clicking the entry and selecting delete from the menu. Once they are deleted there is no obvious way to get the folders back.