Then, Gmail arrived and exploded the whole notion of desktop email clients forever, almost overnight. It was fast, robust, logical, and integrated – many things Outlook still isn't to this day (Outlook 2010 + IMAP is pure hell).

Slowly, Google brought out more and more features that made the fine line between web and desktop emailing thinner and thinner, and today, it finally disappeared, at least for me.

The final nail in the coffin turned out to be something I'd desired for a very long time – taking screenshots and pasting them directly into Gmail in the browser window. Inline image pasting from the clipboard if you will.

I take a lot of screenshots of my desktop or certain parts of it when doing reviews or reporting bugs (with OneNote or SnagIt), and having to save the image, find it on the disk, and drop it into Gmail, while relatively easy, was still too cumbersome. In that regard, Outlook was great – I could quickly pump out a few screenshots and send off an email with all of them inline with text in only a few seconds. If I attempted to do that in Gmail, I either got nothing or a little image basically saying how full of fail I was.

It all changed with Firefox 4 (at least that's my theory) – I am now able to take screenshots and paste them straight into Gmail, right in the browser. Let's take a look:

Amazing, isn't it? This does not work for me in Chrome 12 or IE 9 – only Firefox 4 at the moment. I'm not sure how it works or why it started working only now, but I'm sure one of you will eventually come here and provide a sensible explanation.

Goodbye Outlook, I hardly knew ye.

P.S. I'm using Windows 7 in case it matters.

• 2 Gmail Tricks I Bet You Didn't Know About
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• How To Fix Redrawing Problems In Your VNC
• Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

Everyone who uses SVN knows that most repositories are set up to allow viewing of their contents via a web browser. For example, here's the trunk of WP Plugins SVN: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ and here is the current trunk version of a specific file, let's say http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt.

The Problem

However, what if you wanted to view a specific revision of a file or directory in your browser?

Let's say I wanted revision 100,000 of http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

Normally, on a command line, you'd do something like

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt stats
cd stats;
svn up -r100000 readme.txt

or simply

svn export -r100000 http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

However, how would you do this in your browser? Trying something like ?r=100000 or ?revision=100000 parameters doesn't work.

The Solution

Here is the syntax to get a specific revision of a file or directory:

1. Take the root of the repository (in our case, http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org)
2. Append this string !svn/bc/REVISION_NUMBER right after the repository root and before the directory or file path.

Going back to our example:

• http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/!svn/bc/100000/stats/

  shows the stats directory exactly as it was at revision 100,000 and

• http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/!svn/bc/100000/stats/trunk/readme.txt

  shows our readme.txt at 100,000.

And that's how you do it, folks. Happy revisioning!

Update: this post is now sponsored by Wirefly Learn where you can find cell phone news and reviews, as well as comparisons and videos.

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It's always important to know for developers what browsers they are developing for, who dominates the market, and what the current trends are.

I have gotten my hands on the Plaxo.com visitors' browser stats for December of 2009.

This information is valuable because Plaxo has a relatively general demographics, as it's not a site only geeks or only moms visit, and the statistics tends to not be skewed. Therefore, as you can see, Firefox doesn't occupy the same share as you might see on a techy site (on this site, more than 50% of users visit in Firefox).

Also, since Plaxo has a couple million monthly visitors and therefore a couple million data points, statistically speaking these numbers are relatively accurate.

Without further ado, here is the data, with some spiffy charts.

Overall Browser Breakdown For December 2009

Internet Explorer Version Breakdown For December 2009

Some numbers here have a value of 0.00% which means they've been rounded down and have really low numbers. The order is still correct though.

Firefox Version Breakdown For December 2009

Thoughts

• Internet Explorer is doing remarkably well – it is still most definitely the primary browser, so testing it should be planned accordingly.
• Internet Explorer 7 is by far the most popular version with 65.9% of all IE versions, followed by IE6 at 17.2% (wtf??), and only then IE8 at 16.9%. This definitely came as a surprise to me – both in how popular IE7 still is and how pathetic Microsoft's efforts to upgrade Windows users up from IE6 have been.
• Safari and Chrome are neck and neck at 6.20% and 4.6% respectively, with Chrome gaining rapidly.
• Opera is doing undeservedly badly – 0.6%. That makes me sad.
• IE 999.1? Interesting. I wonder if it's some sort of an uber hacked version.
• And, instead of conclusion: damn you, IE6! Why can't you die already?

• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• [Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard
• Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]
• Modern-Day Frame Busting With X-FRAME-OPTIONS And "This content cannot be displayed in a frame" Warnings
• Converting from CVS to SVN: Developer's Notes And Why SVN Is Better

Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make it more relevant to my followers.

Here is what clicking on the Retweet button used to do after you installed the Twitter script:

Twitter's Own Retweet

After Twitter rolled out their own Retweet, it simply took over the Retweet button that Troy's script added and everyone was happy. Right?

Wrong. Many users, including myself, were left craving the old functionality back.

The Newest Version Of Troy's Twitter Script

About an hour ago, Troy announced version 10.9 of his script which brings back the old functionality in the form of the "Comment" button. Here it is pictured below:

which yet again gives me the opportunity to edit the retweet:

Now we can have the best of both worlds – the new Comment button lets you retweet and edit while the Retweet button remains the same Twitter's own one-click Retweet.

Download Troy's Twitter Script

Again, here are the simple installation instructions to get Troy's Twitter script:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Credit

As before, all credit goes to the awesome Troy.

Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
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• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

Here's where Firebug comes in with its JavaScript debugger. I'm used to using a debugger in every language I deal with, so using Firebug is a no brainer. Since it supports breakpoints, stopping execution and inspecting local variables and the rest of the scope generally beats alerts and console.logs for me.

Here's what a typical breakpoint looks like in Firebug:

It's easy to set breakpoints in static scripts – just open the Scripts tab, select a JavaScript file from the dropdown menu, and click to the left of the wanted line number.

Then, when the page is reloaded, if your breakpoints are triggered, Firebug will pause script execution and transfer the control to you.

In most cases, the method above is the only method of setting breakpoints you will ever need to use.

The Problem With Dynamic JavaScript

However, what if the JavaScript file where you need to set breakpoints is not static but instead dynamic (generated on the fly). If you set a breakpoint in this case and reload the page, the breakpoint will most likely disappear, especially if the JavaScript url is generated uniquely every time.

The Solution

If you have access to the source, the solution comes in the form of the

debugger;

keyword. Just add it to your dynamic JavaScript generator or into any JavaScript file you have access to exactly where you want Firebug to break, and voila – it does.

More so, this method also works in Google Chrome and IE (if you have Microsoft Script Debugger). Here is a screenshot of my Chrome Beta 4.0.266.0 triggering:

I consider this feature relatively unpublished and therefore awesome because:

• it's hard to search for this specific meaning of the keyword "debugger" when Firebug itself is a debugger and it's a very popular word
• nobody really reads documentation for Firebug, and even if they do, I haven't actually seen the debugger keyword mentioned
• I didn't know about it until recently, even though I've been using Firebug for years

Of course, you need access to the code for this to work, so it's not going to work if you're trying to debug someone else's JavaScript.

And finally, don't forget to remove any traces of 'debugger' from your code when you go live or your users will rightfully hunt you down.

Credits And References:

• suggested by a co-worker from Plaxo – Russ. Thanks Russ!
• some more interesting info at StackOverflow and Infragistics.

Happy debugging!

(*) – if your project works 100% on the first pass, you must be either a magician or Jon Skeet (Jon Skeet Facts – a-la Chuck Norris, a must read).

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Today, however, we know a lot more. Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, is coming next month (see More Info below) and looks very promising.

Here is a recent video of the Firefox's mobile and design teams discussing and showing the features of Mobile Firefox:

Feature Highlights

For the busy folks, here are the highlights from the video:

• Mobile Firefox uses as much screen real estate as possible to show the page
• swipe screen left to see the open tab list
• swipe right to see navigation buttons
• awesome bar knows what you're looking for as you start typing, just like in your desktop Firefox
• sync using Mozilla Weave – seamless sync desktop and mobile, including history and open tabs
• location based browsing – allows sharing your location with websites automatically (obviously, with your approval only – excellent!)
• security and privacy are the #1 priority
• mobile add-ons – they're trying to create the same development platform that the desktop Firefox already uses. Yup, that means AdBlock is coming.
• HTML 5 support

And some more from Mozilla and GigaOM's interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly:

• support for Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video, and audio
• based on Firefox 3.6 engine which is not even available for desktops yet
• Firefox for Mobile will initially support Windows Mobile and Maemo, followed by Android and Symbian
• surely, iPhone owners are out of luck as Apple will never allow a competing browser app on their market. Great – another reason to switch to Android
• Blackberry users are also out of luck as BB uses Java
• Android also uses Java and initially Mozilla ignored it. However, later the Android NDK came out, which allows building of applications in C/C++ and this fact changed everything
• the first public releases should be available in December 2009, according to this article.

Some useful linkage:

• Mozilla's own Mobile wiki page
• Mobile features
• Supported platforms (looks slightly out of date)
• GigaOM: On Mobile Phones, Firefox’s Big Bet Is Nokia & Android
• Firefox Headed to Android Phones

Conclusion

Firefox for Mobile is going to be a serious contender in the mobile web space – we know how serious these guys can get, don't we? After all, they've turned a barely known browser into a #2 in the last few years (soon to be #1, right?). Surely, they can do it again, this time in mobile.

I will be trying out Mobile Firefox (for Android) as soon as I get my hands on it, so expect a detailed review then. I have little doubt that it will replace my plain mobile browser.

What do you guys think?

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• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals

Introduction

Dear Skype,

you are great. You have the convenience of a nearby, well, convenience store and the UI that is acceptable to even an Apple fanboy (I'm not one, I'm just saying).

Skype also has a Firefox extension which finds all pieces of text that resemble phone numbers on web pages you are visiting and converts them into clickable Skype buttons . One click and you're dialing the number. The premise is great but the execution… When it comes to your Firefox extension, Skype – you suck. You really suck.

The Problem Bullshit

So what makes me say these mean things? Is it the fact that when simply searching Google for "skype firefox", one finds mostly blog posts and references to major fail? Or is it the fact that MozillaZine's Problematic Extensions page lists Skype as one of the buggiest?

Well, yes. Those are great, aren't they? However, what really prompted me to write this post is my own experience with this extension.

As I am getting into Android development nowadays, I read the Android dev guide quite a lot. Thus, it was no surprise that yesterday I was happily reading the page about Handling UI Events. What was a surprise, however, is that when I clicked over to the View API reference page (in case that page ever changes for documentation reasons, I also saved it here), my Firefox went into a painful agony and exploded in a few minutes.

What the fudgemonkeys? Let's do this again and watch the Process Explorer. 

This is what we call a memory leak – a prime example at that. In the screenshot above, the CPU usage spikes to 100% (shown as 50% because it's a dual core CPU), Firefox's memory usage jumps to around 2GB from 100MB, in 500MB/s increments. Finally, at 5GB total system memory consumption, either the OS kicks in or some major swapping starts to occur – I'm not sure which of the two is happening exactly but you can see it when the green CPU marker gets overtaken by the red one.

As I have a large number of extensions installed, I was dreading the next step: disabling them until the culprit was found. Ugh…

Sure enough, after about half an hour of starting Firefox, observing the memory leak, killing, and restarting it, I narrowed it down to the Skype extension. Somebody at Skype needs to fess up. And here's the kicker – it only exposes the memory leak in the following configuration:

If you turn number highlighting on – it's fine. If you turn name highlighting off – it's fine. But if you turn number highlighting off but leave name highlighting on – major fail.

The Conclusion

So where am I going with all this? Here is the summary:

• somebody at Skype doesn't know how to program
• this is the worst memory leak in a Firefox extension I've ever seen
• this extension is notorious for its crashes, bugs, and memory leaks
• keep using this extension if you're
  • a masochist
  • need to perform burn-in tests for your CPU or RAM

Have you had problems with the Skype extension? If so, share in the comments.

• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]
• A Detailed Depiction Of The Job Interview Process At Google (by Peteris Krumins)
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

I was working with a site that was using frames. Suddenly, one of the frames (which was hosted on a domain that differed from the one it was embedded in) displayed the following message (in Firefox 3.5.4):

This content cannot be displayed in a frame
 
To protect your security, the publisher of this content does
not allow it to be displayed in a frame.
 
Click here to open this content in a new window

Notice how this is a native Firefox window and not a web page rendering. Quite stumped, I started looking at the frame response and finally found that it included this little header:

X-FRAME-OPTIONS: DENY

Turns out that modern browsers like Firefox 3.5 (turns out it's the NoScript addon that does this and not Firefox itself) and IE8 treat this header as a precautionary measure and display a generic "warning" to the user instead of the page content in certain conditions described below. This effort, led, surprisingly, by Microsoft, was really to protect users from clickjacking (I wrote about clickjacking here earlier) but can be viewed as an alternative to framebusting.

Microsoft introduced the new X-FRAME-OPTIONS header with the following possible values:

• DENY – prevents the page from being rendered if it is contained in a frame
• SAMEORIGIN – same as above, unless the page belongs to the same domain as the top-level frameset holder.

Firefox adopted this technique a few months later (again, I was wrong here – it was NoScript that did it), and I expect other browsers to follow.

So what does it mean to you, the developer?

• setting such a header will essentially render frame busting code unnecessary in modern browsers
• but it has a downside of displaying a relatively ugly warning to the user
• no automatic redirect is done as your page (including any framebusting code) is not loaded
• thus requiring an extra click
• and popping up a new tab or window
• it will work even if the user has Javascript disabled, which is more secure

Some useful discussion on the issue can also be found in this post on Hackademix.net.

So is it good practice to use this new X-FRAME-OPTIONS header instead of the traditional framebusting code? I definitely think so, especially if Firefox and other browsers start supporting it. What do you say?

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Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no going back.

Download Statusbar

Download Statusbar is a handy extension that will show your downloads on a dedicated bar right above the status bar. It also adds a much needed “Delete from system” option to each download (why, Firefox, would you not give me an option to delete my downloads at all?). The Download Statusbar only shows up if there’s at least one download not dismissed yet. Double clicking on a finished file will both launch and remove it from the bar.

OpenDownload

Running downloaded files without saving them is probably the only Internet Explorer feature I actually missed, until I found OpenDownload that is. This extension will give you an option to launch a download upon completion in addition to just saving it. I don’t have to worry about finding and deleting it from my system later as it goes to Firefox’s temporary folder.

Tab Mix Plus

This extension is very powerful and versatile. It controls various aspects of the browser tabs, windows, session, and mouse. Here are the settings I find useful:

• open links that open in a new window in a new tab instead
• open all javascript popups in tabs (I hate popups)
• in fact, I enable the single window mode, in which all attempts to open a new window – by webpages or by you, including starting a new Firefox – will be redirected to a new tab
• highlight unread tabs, which would italicize the tab titles of pages that had something new loaded since you last opened them
• show progress meter on tabs
• close tab button on all tabs (instead of a single one on the right side)
• hide the new tab button that occupies extra space
• customize the tab menu options

Here are some option screens:

Google Toolbar

The google toolbar is historically sort of a must for me. It adds a couple of nice features on top of the default search box and frees the latter, so that I can set it to another search engine (IMDB in my case). With the amount of searching one does on google daily, the sheer number of clicks and keystrokes saved will be in the thousands. Daily. I search a lot, OK?

In addition to providing an always present search bar, the toolbar carries a number of useful features, such as live search suggest, instant PageRank (unneeded if you install SEO Toolbar or SearchStatus), search Gmail and News buttons (and many others), clickable search terms good for in-page search, highlighting of the said terms, a simple autofill (though I use an irreplaceable AI Roboform instead), spell check (Firefox has one built-in now), translate (I use the gTranslate extension instead). All in all, one can do without google toolbar, depending on the needed functionality.

Linkification

Linkification is a really pragmatic extension. It hyperlinks any url-looking strings that aren’t already hyperlinked. Take a look.

Linkification off:

Linkification on:

The extension has a variety of options to satisfy even savvy users but I found that defaults work really well. If for some reason you want to momentarily turn off linkification, just tap the button in the tray and the page will revert to its original form. By the way, if you really want to put it to the test, install it and head over to the comprehensive test case list.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Still not clear what these can do? Let me list some that I use and their brief functionality:

• Digg Top 10 Direct – automatically rewrites the digg’s top 10 links to go straight to the articles, instead of the digg comment page. Clicking on the digg icon still goes to the comments page though, and I think this is the ideal functionality.
• Google Image Relinker – rewrites google image search urls to go directly to the corresponding images rather than the page they were found on.
• YousableTubeFix – adds a small smart menu that dynamically shows which qualities a given youtube video is available in and automatically picks the best one, adds download links to the each quality (FLV and MP4), resizes the player to your liking, and a few other things. It is also quite customizable.

• The now world famous Troy's Twitter Script that I reviewed a few week ago – it does everything Twitter currently doesn't, including Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, and more.
• AideRSS Google Reader Integration – adds AideRSS feed rank to each entry in Google Reader, which allows eyeballing more important articles within a few seconds of seeing a feed. Also available as a separate extension for those not using Greasemonkey.

Show MyIP

Show MyIP does exactly what it says: it displays your current IP. What I like about it is that it queries for it on demand, after you left or right click the icon. This approach avoids unnecessary queries going around.

-> ->

What I don’t like about it is that there seems to be no way to copy this IP to clipboard. Ideally, a right click option would work great (that’s the way the next extension ShowIP does it). I left a comment about this fact on the extension’s page, so hopefully the author will implement it shortly.

Also, if an error occurs, be prepared for some good old German cursing:

ShowIP

ShowIP, in contrast to Show MyIP, actually displays the IP(s) of the website I’m currently on. It then allows me to copy it (or all of them) into clipboard and provides quick information links, such as whois, ip2country, and traceroute.

ShowIP is useful for both developers who want to know which dev server they’re currently working on as well as regular users who are interested in the location or whois of a site they’re visiting.

iimmgg.com Tools

iimmgg.com is a picture hosting site similar to tinypic.com and photobucket.com. Generally, it allows quick picture uploading with thumbnail creation. This extension makes this process insanely simple, I can’t say enough praise how good my user experience was with this extension. Check this out.

The extension has 2 modes:

1. If you right click on a picture, there’s a single option to upload it to iimmgg.com:

As soon as you click Upload, you are almost immediately redirected to a page on iimmgg.com with your picture and thumbnails already generated. Swoosh, that was fast. Internally, the extension sends the user to something like http://www.iimmgg.com/upload.php?u=http%3A//beerpla.net/wp-content/uploads/BenefitsofMUNI_1E7D/image.png&r=about:blank&s=1&t=, which then redirects to the final picture.

2. If you right click anywhere else on the page, there are now 3 ways to capture an image to iimmgg.com:

Select either of the 3 options: Visible Page, Full Page, or Select Area. Let’s say I select Select Area. A resizable overlay that I can drag it around to select the area I want shows up. Brilliant.

After I figure out what I want to capture, I click on the Capture Selected Area button in a bar that just showed up (btw, the styling of both the bar and the selector are very reminiscent of the Web Developer extension):

The next and final prompt shows up with the Image Format selection (PNG – High Quality, JPEG – High Quality, JPEG – Medium Quality, and JPEG – Low Quality), SFW selection, and capture name:

Click Capture and upload (or save to disk, which is not as fun but also useful):

Voila – the picture is ready for sharing.

Remove Cookie(s) for Site

Remove Cookie(s) for Site does exactly what it says – removes all cookies that belong to a domain and all subdomains of the site you’re currently on. Right click anywhere on the page, click Remove Cookie(s) for Site and the taskbar will update with the number of cookies removed.

->

You can also pull out a nice little button to a location of your choosing, like so:

Oftentimes I don’t even bother looking for a logout button – deleting all cookies is a lot faster.

Signature

Signature, as you probably guessed, inserts a signature into a text form. It supports as many signatures as you want. The uses can be versatile, here are just some:

• the obvious “first and last name” signature
• a full signature with your site link which can help in site promotion. Mine, for example, is
  Artem
  http://beerpla.net
  http://twitter.com/ArtemR
• disclaimers
• coined replies to emails
• various addresses
• repetitive urls
• any other frequently used set of strings that you have to continuously copy-paste

QuickRestart

QuickRestart adds a Restart Firefox option to the File menu. This is quite handy, especially when you have a lot of extensions and it may take Firefox 30 seconds to shut down.

The only downside of this is that it seems to lose the protected and locked tab properties set by Tab Mix Plus. Shutting down Firefox and starting it manually does not lose such properties. This is no longer a problem in the latest Tab Mix Plus version.

Resizeable Textarea

Ever seen a comment box this big and got annoyed by the idiot who designed it?

Fear not, as Resizeable Textarea adds resize capabilities to any text area. Move the cursor to the bottom or right borders, or the bottom-right corner, and drag all you want:

TryAgain

TryAgain is a great and very simple extension. It retries loading a failed page up to 5 times instead of just sitting there. This screenshot explains everything:

View Cookies

View Cookies is a simple extension that adds a Cookies tab to the VIew Page Info box. The tab allows viewing, removing, and copying cookie info for the site you’re currently visiting. There is a number of extensions that do similar things, like Firebug and Remove Cookie(s) for Site, but I install View Cookies anyway because its functionality makes sense.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a very useful extension, and it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it does. Think of it as simply a secure local cache (developed by Google). Quite a few popular websites support Gears, and I think it is best to just give a few examples of actual usage.

• gmail.com – gmail rolled out offline email support quite recently, which is the most useful implementation of Gears to date.
• wordpress – if you host a wordpress blog, you can opt in to cache a few hundred files in Gears that will speed up the wordpress admin interface. WordPress calls this Turbo mode.
• rememberthemilk.com – RTM, the most advanced and functional TODO list site, offers an excellent implementation of Gears. If you lose your connection, you are free to create, modify, and delete any tasks you want – all the changes will be synchronized when you go back online.
• google reader – the reader can download feed items for offline viewing but the implementation is not very good – you have to explicitly go offline by clicking a button, at which point Gears will download 2000 items.

Installing Gears on its own will technically not do anything for you. You will need to enable support for each site individually. For example, Offline gmail is available from the gmail Labs by clicking on in the top right corner.

From a technical standpoint, Gears uses a local SQLite database for storage. The Gears security model is described here.

gTranslate

GTranslate translates selected text into a language of your choice. It can be set to autodetect the source language or forced to a specific one. I must say so far it worked very well and detected the source language automatically without flaw.

Once the translation is received, gTranslate shows it and links to the google translate page:

Additionally, if the selected text is in an editable field, gTranslate will offer an option to replace the selection with its translation:

SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a useful and relatively simple SEO extension. It shows a quick roundup of page rankings for the current page from Google (PageRank), Alexa, and Compete. This lets me quickly check how popular [or lame] the site I’m on is and keep tabs on my own online properties. Right clicking each metric grants access to a few useful shortcuts and for the lazy pragmatic, right clicking the little symbol has such links as Show Whois, Show robots.txt, Show sitemap.xml, and others.

Another not so obvious but useful feature of this extension is the ability to mark rel=’nofollow’ links. You rightfully obsessed SEO junkies can quickly see which parts of your site leak the valuable link juice and which ones don’t. Take a look at these nofollow links that SearchStatus marked with light red background:

SEO Toolbar

This toolbar is probably going to be useful for relatively hardcore SEO fiends as most people would do just fine with the above SearchStatus extension. The toolbar seems a bit bulky and slow but has a ton of SEO related functionality. It is, of course, free. It shows Google PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo page links, DMOZ directory, Yahoo directory, Best of the web directory, Archive.org, Compete uniques, and SEMRush traffic value:

It also links to a bunch of tools, like quantcast analysis, google trends, and alexa:

For a quick, more in-depth, exportable overview, press the info button :

However, the 2 most useful to me features are probably the Rank Checker :

and Compare Sites :

End of Part 2

This marks the end of part 2 in the series. I expect this page to update pretty often, whenever I find new extensions, so bookmark it using your favorite method by clicking the button below.

The next part in the series (available soon) will describe a number of useful web development extensions.

• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Thoughts on Google Chrome

I use a lot of extensions. A LOT. They slow down my Firefox while giving something useful in return. Most of them are harmless and do not affect the speed too much but there are select few that are just CPU, memory, and performance hogs.

Until Firefox gets an extension manager that can show what the impact from each extension on time/CPU/memory is, one can resort to guessing, disabling, testing, and looking for clues to find these conniving little bastards.

Anyway, so where was I? Recently, my Firefox became increasingly unresponsive, especially when switching tabs. After some time, it was a pain to switch tabs altogether, so I had to resort to restarting the browser, only to find the same problem coming back again and again. Today, I finally got a clue – a bunch of such messages came on mentioning this unresponsive sript and prompting me to stop it:

Firecookie (0.8 at the time of this writing). Arrr!

Quickly, I googled the problem and sure enough – other people are suffering from the same problem.

Firecookie adds support for managing cookies directly from within Firebug and is quite handy. However, not handy enough to kill my browser on a daily basis, even with cookie handling turned off within Firebug itself.

The Result

I am pleased to report that after uninstalling Firecookie, my Firefox is noticeably faster switching tabs, does not hang, and does not use as much CPU. I do not know what the developer of Firecookie is going to do about it as he does not seem to be able to reproduce the issue. Until then, goodbye frustration and hello… whatever other extensions handle cookies.

• Latest 100% Firefox Bug (Seen on Digg and Fatwallet) Caused By ImageZoom Extension
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals
• [Web Dev] Browser Breakdown Stats+Charts From Plaxo.com For December 2009 And Thoughts
• [Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard

In this article I’m going to discuss a number of useful Firefox extensions and tips. This list is not a “COMPLETE GUIDE TO FIREFOX!!!111!” but a collection of some, albeit many, extensions and techniques I find useful, with detailed descriptions and illustrations. I try to make my reviews as personal as possible and express my own points of view, so I will not be using any boring official descriptions altogether. Short, concise, and useful – that is my goal.

Right now I use 53 extensions in total. If you think that’s a lot, you might be right. However, because Firefox is so mature and new extensions come out every day, it is not as crazy of a number as it was 2 years ago. Firefox gets faster, I download more extensions, and the end result is I’m happier as a user because Firefox suddenly provides me with a lot more features at approximately the same running speed. I plan on continuing to increase this number.

Here’s a quick slightly obsolete screenshot of the extensions I’m using:

Firefox Tips

Before describing extensions, I wanted to mention a few tips about Firefox itself. If you are interested in extensions, proceed to part 2 right away, however I urge you to read these too.

Using the bookmarks bar and shortened names

You can fit a lot of quick bookmarks on the little bookmark bar if you shorten the names to 1 or 2 characters.

Using keywords for bookmarks

A little less known trick is to use the keywords property of your bookmarks. For example, here I assign a keyword ‘d’ to my digg.com bookmark. Then I can just go to the url bar, type in ‘d’, Enter and voila – digg starts loading.

Protecting and locking tabs

Protect a tab will prevent you from closing it.

I use this functionality on my most frequently visited sites – so frequently that I never want to close them. They include the iGoogle homepage, Google calendar, Remember The Milk TODO list, my Trac tickets at work, and a few other things.

These protected states are saved even if you close and open Firefox (but unfortunately, not if you use QuickRestart described in part 2). Protected windows are marked by a symbol.

Locking a tab is similar, but instead of not being able to close it, you are not able to change the url. Any url change attempts will produce a new tab. I personally never use this feature but some may find it handy. Locked windows are marked by a symbol.

Note that you need the Tab Mix Plus extension (described in part 2) for these tricks.

Restoring sessions

While Firefox 3 now has a built-in session restore feature, it’s not very robust. That is why I still use the Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2) session restore feature set. TMP’s session manager remembers protect and lock statuses, tab history, selected tab, and everything else about the session. I will describe TMP in more detail later.

Using keyboard shortcuts

In my experience, keyboard shortcuts are primarily used by power users, while the rest of the population uses a mouse. However, shortcuts are immensely effective time savers and, if you mouse a lot, will provide a relief for your wrist. Let’s take a look at a few easy and important ones.

Ctrl-L and TABs

Ctrl-L will put the focus on the url bar, no matter where you are on the page. It is equivalent to F6 in IE, except it’s actually robust. So, when I’m ready to type in the name of the site, my fingers are already on the keyboard. Ctrl-L doesn’t even require extra movements.

TAB (the key, not the Firefox tab) once after you’ve pressed Ctrl-L and you’re in the Firefox search bar (the one I set to imdb a bit later in the article). TAB twice and you’re in the Google toolbar, if you have it installed.

Ctrl-Enter and Shift-Enter

Ctrl-Enter is a tremendous time saver. It appends “.com” to whatever you have in the url bar and prepends “http://www.”. Type in “google”, press Ctrl-Enter, and voila, you’re at www.google.com. Similarly, Shift-Enter, appends “.net”.

Ctrl-T

Ctrl-T opens a new tab.

Ctrl-Shift-T

Ctrl-Shift-T opens the last closed tab(s), in the order they were closed.

Ctrl-Alt-T

Ctrl-Alt-T duplicates the current tab. Yet again, this is a feature of Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2). Oh how much I love you, TMP.

Ctrl-TAB, Ctrl-Shift-TAB

Ctrl-TAB is probably the most frequently used key combination. It cycles between tabs forward while Ctrl-Shift-TAB does it backwards.

Ctrl-W

Ctrl-W closes the current tab.

Space

Pressing space is a quick way to scroll down one page. It’s a lot of times more convenient than finding the small PgDn button, especially if you have fat fingers.

Setting the Firefox search bar to IMDB

Because I already use the Google Toolbar (one of the most useful toolbars out there) there is little point keeping Firefox’s default search box set to Google. I prefer IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) myself but you can easily set it to another search engine.

End of Part 1

This marks the end of part 1 in the series. Proceed to part 2.

• Delicious.com [Quietly] Rolls Out Domain And Url Searching/Filtering. Finally!
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• Some Useful vim Commands – My vim Cheatsheet
• Thoughts on Google Chrome

Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function (credit: Wikipedia).

Clickjacking is hard to combat. From a technical standpoint, the attack is executed using a combination of CSS and iFrames, which are both harmless web technologies, and relies mostly on tricking users by means of social engineering. Additionally, the only server side technique against clickjacking known to me is “frame breaking”, which would cause a legitemate site to break out of any iFrames it may be embedded in. This is not always the desired behavior and is generally frowned upon.

Generic Example

In laymen’s terms, clickjacking means that it is quite possible for websites to trick you into, for example, clicking a button to show a cute kitty while in reality prompting a deletion of all your hotmail email. A malicious site uses an iFrame (which essentially allows embedding sites within other sites) with hotmail loaded inside and hidden using CSS (which is a web language for styling HTML elements). A button named “Show Me The Next Awwww Kitty” is then placed by the malicious site and positioned below the iFrame layer (manipulated by CSS, yet again). However, because the iFrame is hidden, it looks like the “Aww” button is all you’re clicking. Wrong!

Latest Example: Twitter

This morning a new, though harmless, epidemic hit twitter. Hundreds and thousands of messages saying “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6” started showing up. Clicking the link shows a simple page with 1 button:

Clicking (which I of course did) uses clickjacking to repost the message to your own twitter account. Take a look yourself: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=don%27t+click.

All of these are a result of an experiment by some French guys to mess around with twitter and show the effects of clickjacking. Thank you for that, French guys. Creating awareness via the most social platform on the web is the best thing they could do for us.

Fight Clickjacking

James Padolsey recently wrote an excellent blog post about clickjacking and mentioned Twitter specifically. Because clickjacking relies mostly on social hacking (i.e. tricking people into clicking malicious links and buttons), Twitter is nothing but a perfect platform. James gives some nice background info and code examples. He correctly highlights, as I did earlier, that clickjacking is not a software bug – it’s a malicious technique exploiting harmless technologies.

So how does one fight clickjacking?

At this point the most reliable way is to use Firefox and the NoScript extension. NoScript provides a simple, yet amazingly effective feature, called ClearClick. From their site:

“…it's enabled by default, protecting NoScript users from Clickjacking everywhere: it even remains active if you switch NoScript in the less safe Allow scripts globally mode. How does it work? Clickjacking hides or displaces or partially covers something you wouldn't want to click, if you could see it in its original context. ClearClick does the opposite: whenever you click a plugin object or a framed page, it takes a screenshot of it alone and opaque (i.e. an image of it with no transparencies and no overlaying objects), then compares it with a screenshot of the parent page as you can see it. If the two images differ, a clickjacking attack is probably happening and NoScript raises a "ClearClick warning", showing you the contextualized and "clear" object you were about to click, so you can evaluate by yourself if that was really something you wanted to do.”

Did ClearClick work in the earlier twitter attack? Sure did! After I clicked the “Don’t click” button Noscript promptly popped up a warning showing the hidden iFrame (since the original malicious page has been removed, I found another similar page from the same author for screenshot purposes).

So, even if you don’t want to enable NoScript globally, install it anyway, just for ClearClick.

That about covers what I had to say about clickjacking. Stay safe, folks!

• Modern-Day Frame Busting With X-FRAME-OPTIONS And "This content cannot be displayed in a frame" Warnings
• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• How *Not* To Implement A Web Application That Handles External Authentication, Using BeTwittered.com As An Example
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, And Others [Collection Of Incredibly Useful Lists]

• Fast – Chrome loads extremely fast, blazing even. Granted, my Firefox would probably load fast if I didn't have any addons as well. Sites like Amazon or Digg load very fast. New tabs open instantly.
• Slow – http://www.blinkx.com/videos/channel:itn, seems like the combination of flash and html (or JS) on one page makes scrolling and redrawing quite slow.
• Very fluid design – I love how the tabs flow around when you drag them or make them pop in or out, I love how fluid animation and resizing is.
• Internal task manager – an absolutely brilliant idea. Since each tab and plugin get their own process, they don't affect each other. Any freezes are isolated to the process itself, so the days of hung browsers because of some buggy javascript should be gone gone (I'll actually have to see how well it works first).

• Great Google search integration and overall Firefox3-like url bar behavior.
• The word search functionality is amazing – best out of all browsers. It's incredibly fast, even on large pages, highlights all the matches, with the current one in orange, and more importantly, gives count (finally!). The search popup complements the fluidity perfectly.

• History – looks great and has a timeline style. It's like reading a journal.

• View Source – again, best in class. Highlighting and line numbers by default. Url access style: view-source:http://digg.com. Search spread highlighting on the right. It's close to perfect, without using any plugins.

• My bookmarks, where art though? Where's the bookmarks menu? I know the homepage has them, and there's a pretty hidden way to make the bookmarks bar appear all the time (right click on it while on the home page and check 'Always show bookmarks bar' but that's not what I want. I like placing many-many bookmarks named with 1 or 2 letters onto the bookmarks bar (I found a way to emulate the behavior in the screenshot below). How can I create duplicates of the same bookmark in different places? It seems you can only bookmark in one. The interface to get around managing the bookmarks isn't well thought out, you can get to certain places only the certain way. How do you export/import bookmarks after the initial installation (I chose to skip mine)? Edit: Apparently, you can't yet.

• The homepage button is missing (though it can be enabled by Options->Show Home button on the toolbar). Why is it not on by default?

• I also enabled the following option right away (the main reason I use TabMix Plus for Firefox):

• Scrolling is very choppy and goes in huge jumps on my laptop (not the case in Firefox).
• Status bar – why do you disappear automatically when I get close to you? You can be so useful and display so much useful info? Stop disappearing!
• What with the Vista-style buttons? I have Win2k menus, which I find a lot simpler and easier on the eye. Why not inherit the window style?

• No Linux support. Hopefully coming soon.

• No addons supported or announced yet.

In conclusion, I understand the browser is very new and will probably go through many facelifts, UI changes, bug fixes, and enhancements but it has a lot to cover and if it's going to try to rival the giants, it better fix some things fast. I personally won't start using it until some addons start showing up, like the AI Roboform (AI Roboform has actually responded to this guy about such addon possibility) and Adblock Plus ones. However, for occasional browsing, it's great. Give it a spin.

• Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]
• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Modern-Day Frame Busting With X-FRAME-OPTIONS And "This content cannot be displayed in a frame" Warnings
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More