Disable Adblock Plus on all bookmarked pages

I guess most of you are using the Adblock Plus Firefox extension to get rid of most advertisement on websites. I especially dislike aggressive ads like layer ads, popups and the like that force the user to act to be able to view the website.

As a webmaster I make a living from these ads however and have to ensure that they are working fine. I could do that manually and add all my sites, and the sites of the companies I work with, to the Adblock Plus whitelist so that all Ads are displayed. I just have to verify from time to time which ads are displayed to be able to remove offensive or inappropriate advertisements from my websites.

Adblock Plus offers a online script that transforms all your bookmarks into a handy list that can be imported into Adblock Plus which has the result that those domains are whitelisted. This means Adblock Plus will not disable the ads on those websites. You can naturally remove websites from that list again before you import them all.

Firefox Master Password Recovery Tool

Every Firefox user should set a master password if he has chosen to save usernames and passwords in Firefox. If no Master Password has been set all usernames, passwords and urls are accessible in the Firefox Security menu which is a huge security risk.

A problem that could arise is that a user forgets his Master Password which has the effect that he can’t access the saved usernames and passwords option and that Firefox is not filling out the forms on websites automatically anymore. Without the Master Password those information are lost and can only be reset.

FireMaster is a password cracking tool that uses three different methods of cracking a password, those are dictionary, brute force and a combination of both methods. The brute force method is the only guaranteed method but it could take months, years and even decades depending on the strength of the selected Master Password.

Save Flash Games in Firefox

This Firefox tip is probably known by many already but I get the occasional request to write about it. Flash Games are small games that are embedded on websites. They are extremely popular and many users want a way to save them locally to be able to play them on their computer without having to be online during that time.

Firefox thankfully comes with an option to save flash games so there is no need to rely on third party tools like download managers to save them. All that you need to do is visit the page where you can play the flash game and right-click a free area on that website and select View Page Info from the menu.

Make sure you do not right-click on an element such as an image or link because this will open another right-click menu without the View Page Info link. Now click on the Media tab of that window and scroll down until you find an entry of the Embed Type.

Speed up Browsing by using Keyboard Shortcuts

Are you using your mouse to browse the web or do you rely on keyboard shortcuts to speed things up a bit ? If the first is the case you might be interested in some useful keyboard shortcuts that speed up web browsing by a good bit. It may take a while until you get used to the keyboard shortcuts but once you do you will notice that everything is working out just a tad faster.

I’m only going to list the keyboard shortcuts that I’m using in my daily activity. If you want to take a look at all the keyboard shortcuts you can by pressing F1 which opens the Help and clicking on Keyboard Shortcuts. That’s the first keyboard shortcut by the way as well, hehe.

10 Firefox config settings

I spotted an interesting article over at Ghacks while reading through all the updated RSS feeds in Netvibes which was named 10 lesser known Firefox about:config parameters and I immediately thought that this would probably make a great article for Firefox Mastery as well.

Guess what, I did actually find two settings that I have not heard about yet and that would help me tremendously in my daily work. The first notable setting is the double-click behavior on words. Firefox marks a space behind the word as well by default and the setting made it possible that the space would not be marked as well. Not sure why anyone would want to mark the space as well..

The second change that I made determined how Firefox handled copy and paste operations into forms of text that consisted of more than one line. By default only the first line gets pasted in Windows while Linux pastes everything and I was able to change that behavior as well.

Firefox 3 Website Concepts

The Mozilla team will release a new version of the Firefox portal during the release of Firefox 3 and are currently considering four concepts that they published in a jslater directory on their website. John Slater happens to be the Creative Director at Mozilla which means that these concepts do have some weight and are not merely wishes of a fan.

I thought I make a screenshot of each concept and put it up here so that everyone can take a look without having to visit the website. The website has only four links to the concept images and one called Brand Insights. If they want an advice, I think they should make a thumbnail of each image as well and post that.

After seeing all four images I think I would vote for number 2, the one called agile, with number 1 being a close second place. Which do you prefer ?

Speed up Firefox Website Rendering

Firefox is waiting 250ms for data before it starts rendering a website which works well for most connections. If you however have a fast connection you can speed up Firefox website rendering by decreasing the amount to 0. Users on slow connections might play around with the setting as well and increase it a little bit which would mean that they would have to wait a bit longer before the website is displayed.

To change the waiting time type about:config in your Firefox address bar and filter for the string nglayout.initialpaint.delay. This is not a default string which means that you usually have to create it. Right-click the white space somewhere and select New > Integer. Enter nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it the value 0 if you are on a fast connection. The default value for this is 250.

The benefit is that Firefox will immediately start rendering the website even if it did not receive all the data yet. It could increase the total page loading time on slow connections if they would change the value to 0 as well.

Firefox 3: Make the switch or wait ?

The Mozilla Firefox team did release Beta 2 of Firefox 3 just two days ago and with each passing Beta I’m asking myself if I should make the switch to Firefox 3, wait or use both versions next to each other. Most extensions do not work right out of the box though which is probably the greatest concern besides that this is still a Beta and not a release candidate or the full version.

Firefox 3 will be an awesome browser. The developers managed to get rid of some of the memory problems that seem to plague Firefox 2 users and incorporates several beloved extensions into the main product. The release notes are a bit sparse on the changes in Beta 2 compared to Beta 1, here is what they say:

Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Folders for your Temporary Bookmarks

When I first heard about the Read it Later extension I thought that this would be another extension that was not really needed. I use a system of temporary folders in my bookmarks toolbar and move website urls in there whenever I find an interesting article that I cannot read at the moment.

Instead of using just one Temp folder I have several temporary folders depending on the type of article. I sort them in the categories Webmaster, Tips, Tools and Temp for general content. All four are always visible in my bookmarks toolbar and it takes just the click of the mouse button to access those websites again or delete them once I finished taking a closer look at them.

There is no need for an extension that uses valuable RAM to do the same.

Different Cursors depending on link type

Links can open in a new page or new tab and it is never clear where they are actually opening until you click on them. I don’t like to open links in a new window because new Firefox windows consume more RAM than Firefox tabs. If I know that a link will open in a new window I tend to copy the link location instead, open a new blank tab and paste that link into the tabs address bar.

But, there is one way to make Firefox display if the link is opening in a new window or tab. It’s just three lines of CSS code that have to be added to the userContent.css file in the Firefox profile. The best way to find this file is to use the search function of your operating system.

Close Firefox, add the following lines of code to the end of the file and restart the browser afterwards to see if the changes have been successful. Links that open in a new window should be displayed with a crosshair cursor instead of the normal cursor.