You need to open up about:config in the location bar and filter for the term keyword:url. A right-click on that entry and the selection of Reset changes the search engine to the default search engine.

It is of course possible to use another search engine by modifying the entry and entering the url of the new search engine that should be used.

This has another effect. Websites that I visit regularly deserve the money that they make from advertisement. This does not mean that I click on a lot of ads but think of those banner ads that pay when someone visits a website. So, it’s good for those sites and helps them stay alive.

It’s pretty cumbersome to add all websites manually to Adblock Plus this is why the author created a script that processes a list of websites and makes them filter ready so to speak. A whitelist will be generated which can be imported into the Firefox add-on.

To do that you need to export the bookmarks in Firefox 3. Firefox 2 users can simply copy and paste the contents of their bookmarks.html file that is located in the Firefox profile folder into the form which will process the contents.

Firefox 3 users have to export the bookmarks as HTML before they can do the same. (Because Firefox 3 is storing bookmarks in a different way). Use the keyboard combination CTRL SHIFT B to open the bookmarks manager. Click the Import and Backup menu at the top and select Export HTML from the menu. After that open the file, copy all contents and paste it into the script.

All that needs to be done is to save the whitelist as a text file and import it into Adblock Plus to whitelist all bookmarked websites.

The first thought that comes to mind is that the error message is related to the Security Zone Policy of Windows. Guess what, indeed it is. Firefox 3 is now taking the Security Zone Policy of a Windows operating system into consideration when downloading files which might confuse part of the user base who always thought that Firefox 3 would be independent from the operating system.

Firefox 3 users can change the Security Zone Policies in the Internet Options which are available in the Windows Control Panel. The option that has to be checked is “Launching applications and unsafe files” by clicking on the Custom level button of the Internet Zone.

The solution for users with Internet Explorer 6 is to update their browser to Internet Explorer 7 to have the option and make use of it according to a Mozillazine (via Firefox Facts) article about blocked downloads in Firefox.

Controversy started with the release of Firefox 3 which mainly concentrated on a new feature called the Awesome Bar which was simply a change in the way the location bar worked. I do not want to get into that deeply here but if you are interested you can follow the Firefox 3 location bar discussion at Ghacks.

I did not mind it that much because I mainly use a bookmarks toolbar to access the sites that I visit regularly and since I have disabled the history it never was a problem for me.

My initial experience with Firefox 3 was not that positive. I experienced a huge cpu load and memory usage every 45-60 minutes in which Firefox 3 would become totally unresponsive. I first thought that it was caused by the Brief add-on which was the RSS Feed reader add-on that I had been using for a while but it turned out to be something else.

The culprit were Firefox Live Bookmarks which update themselves automatically. Whenever they did that my browser would freeze. Not a nice feeling if you are in the middle of writing an article or doing other time sensitive things. After exporting the live bookmarks, importing them into Google Reader and deleting them in Firefox 3 the high loads stopped.

That was a relief but it cost me half a day to discover why it was caused in first place. I also had some difficulties with add-ons that were not compatible to Firefox 3 and that would not even work if I would force compatibility.

I really like Firefox 3 now. It’s faster, more responsive and uses less system resources which is always great.

Now, what about you ? Care to tell me if you made the switch to Firefox 3 yet and how your experience was ?

All three files that need to be copied are located in the Firefox profile folder. This profile folder is normally located in your Application Data or AppData folder of the Windows user profile or ~/.mozilla/ in Unix or ~/Library/Mozilla/ and ~/Library/Application Support/ on a Macintosh.

The following three files contain all the information about the passwords: signons.txt, signons2.txt, key3.db. Moving them into another Firefox profile would remove the old passwords of that profile and replace them with the new ones.

This is not what I’m looking for. I would like to be able to pick multiple bookmarks at once and load them all in new tabs once I’m finished. Much like the left-click CTRL option in Windows Explorer when selecting files.

I tried to find a solution but no Firefox add-on or option seems to offer it. I know that I have got some Firefox geeks among my readers which is why I’m asking this question here.

It’s obviously better to use Clear Type fonts if you use a LCD monitor and have Clear Type enabled. Firefox by default uses Verdana and Arial I think as Serif and Sans-Serif fonts and another one for Monospace. The Monospace font was the one that was causing the troubles for me, here is a screenshot of the font setting in Firefox.

And here are some examples of how fonts change the display of text on websites. JPG is a lossless format and results might look different on your computer. The best option would be to test different fonts to see which works the best in your environment.

You can access the font settings in Tools > Options > Content Tab > Advanced Button.

Firefox Corbel Font:

Firefox Arial Font:

Firefox Cambria Font:

Firefox Candara Font:

You can check the installed plugins by entering about:plugins in the address bar. The list contains all available plugins that are currently loaded in Firefox. Information like the name, location on the hard drive and a short description are available. The description helps to determine if that plugin is actually needed on your system.

My preferred solution for plugins that I (think I) do not need is to create a temporary directory and move all unnecessary plugins into them. This ensures that I can move them back if I should discover that I do need the plugin.

I tried to remove the following plugins temporarily from my system: iTunes Application Detector, Windows Presentation Foundation, RealPlayer Version Plugin, RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnect-Enabled Plug-In (32-bit), Microsoft® DRM, Adobe Reader Plugin and the Microsoft Office plugin.

Some reappeared after a time which surely has something to do with Windows System file protections.

Plugins can basically exist in two locations. One of them is the plugins folder in the Mozilla Firefox directory, the other is a location in the installation folder of the third-party application. You need to refresh the list to see the changes. Some plugins seem to remain even though you refresh the list.

Min version specifies the Firefox version that has to be at least installed to run the add-on while max version specifies the Firefox version that can not be exceeded if you want to run the add-on. As I said it sometimes happens that a project is dead and that the author is not updating his add-on anymore.

Firefox then won’t install the add-on because of compatibility issues. It simply checks min and max versions and if those do not match it will reject the installation. One could use the Nightly Tester tools to force compatibility but also edit the installation file on its own to make it work.

Download the add-on to your hard drive. It has the xpi extension. Unpack the file. I use IZArc for it but most unpackers should do the same. The contents of the add-on should be extracted to your hard drive including a file called install.rdf.

Open the install.rdf file in a editor and search for minVersion and maxVersion. Change the values to of both entries so that your version of Firefox is compatible with the add-on and save the new file. Now drop it into the archive once again and install the add-on again.

The installation should go through without problems.

This means that you will accumulate lots of entries from add-ons in prefs.js that do nothing but waste space and could slow down Firefox this way. You probably have noticed that Firefox loads and behaves much faster if you create a new profile and use this to surf the web. This is due to two reasons.

First, no extension is loaded because none is installed yet. Second, all the entries that point to old extensions in prefs.js are also gone and not available in the new profile. Cleaning the prefs.js file is unfortunately not that easy as it sounds. You can load the file into a text editor but deleting a needed entry could corrupt Firefox.

Create a backup of the file first and make sure you close Firefox before you start removing lines. Firefox will update the file when the user closes the browser.

My approach was to look at each line and delete the lines that contained an add-on name that I was surely not using anymore. I was able to reduce the size of prefs.js from 440 Kilobytes to 310 Kilobytes this way. And I’m sure that I missed some lines but I did not want to take the risk and delete a line that is still needed.