In the past week or two, I’ve seen a shocking increase in popups on Firefox.
And the tweak I published a few months ago to get rid of them does no good.
The funny thing is, anyone who advertises via popups goes, immediately, on my never-buy-anything-from-these-assholes list.
Want to live dangerously? Then download Firefox 1.5 Beta 1. I tried it out this morning and uninstalled it within 5 minutes. No, there’s nothing obviously wrong with the software itself. Download was fast, installation was smooth, pages loaded with impressive speed…
But 5 out of 7 Firefox extensions on this system are incompatible with this beta version, including several that are indispensable in my daily use. It appears that the new release is going to require a rewrite of lots and lots of extensions, which means big headaches to upgraders.
I was able to uninstall the beta code and reinstall the current version (1.0.6) in minutes, without losing any of my settings.
This is interesting. According to SiteMeter, the excellent service I use to monitor my Web traffic, 31.8% of all visitors to this site are now using Firefox. That’s up from 24.76% last October. While the Firefox share grew 7%, the share for Internet Explorer 6.X dropped almost exactly the same amount, slipping from 64.88 to 57.37%.
Another curious stat jumped out of this chart, however: Internet Explorer 7.X has gone from 0 to 2.51% market share since Beta 1 was released just over a week ago. That’s much higher than I would have expected.
Of course, these numbers are for a site that is aimed at techies and bleeding-edge types. Out in the mainstream, the numbers are very different, I bet.
Your hands are on the keyboard and you want to quickly return to the previous page you were viewing in your browser window. Don’t move your hand to the mouse – just press the Backspace key, which has the same effect as clicking the Back button on your browser’s toolbar. (This tip works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.)
I’m on a crusade to encourage every Windows user to remove the Print button from the Internet Explorer toolbar. Why? Because more often than not, clicking the Print button causes you to waste paper by printing at least one more page than you really need. (Invariably, you’ll get a blank page – or one containing just a single line of text – when you click Print.)
The solution? Preview before you print. By adding a preview, you can see at a glance whether you’re about to waste a page and then use the Print dialog box to specify that you only want to print the current page.
In Internet Explorer you can replace the Print button with the Print Preview button. (Firefox doesn’t provide this option.) Right-click the toolbar and choose Customize from the shortcut menu. Find the Print button in the Current Toolbar Buttons list on the right, select it, and then click Remove. In the Available toolbar buttons list, select the Print Preview button and click Add. Click Close to make the change effective.
Get in the habit of using the Print Preview option. To print Web pages from the Preview window, click the Print button, which in turn opens the Print Options dialog box, where you can choose which pages you want to print.
Sometimes you want to print just part of a Web page, but clicking the Print button spits out page after page of information you don’t want or need. Here’s an easy solution that works the same in Internet Explorer and Firefox:
If the Selection option is grayed out, you forgot to make a selection. Click Cancel and try again.
This list of top ten Firefox browser annoyances is perhaps the lamest thing I’ve read all year, even using the how-low-can-you-go bar that I assign to anything published in the Inquirer. No splash screen? No IM client? The Thunderbird e-mail client needs a new name? These are “some of the key problems … in Firefox”? It’s truly a shame that American English doesn’t have a word that’s equivalent to wanker. It would really come in handy here.
(Via Prof. Froomkin)
In the comments to my previous post, Ryan Walters notes that he’s running Firefox 1.0 and doesn’t see any update icon. That’s not good.
Here’s what the generic icon looks like:
When you click the green icon, it checks for updates. After it completes the check it displays this dialog box:
The dialog box tells you there’s a Critical Update, and you should install it immediately. At that point it even turns the update icon red. But none of that information appears until you specifically click that oh-so-subtle icon.
So why didn’t Ryan see that icon? I don’t have a copy of Firefox 1.0 installed, so I can’t say. It’s possible that the Auto Update option isn’t enabled on his computer. (Click Tools, Options, click the Advanced icon, and select the Firefox check box under the Periodically check for updates heading.)
Update: As I was writing this, a pop-up notice (“Updates available”) appeared in the tray area at the lower right side of the screen. Windows developers call this sort of notice “toast.” Unfortunately, it went away almost immediately.
Like I said earlier, this isn’t an acceptable update mechanism for software that is intended for use by a broad-based, non-technical audience. If Firefox wants to preserve its reputation as the secure alternative to IE, it has to protect every single user from exploits that can install unwanted software.
F-Secure reports:
Proof-of-concept exploits for the popular Mozilla and Firefox web browsers have been posted on public mailing lists. They target the following vulnerabilities:
– Code execution through favicons link
– Arbitrary code execution from Firefox sidebar panelThese exploits allow the attacker to run arbitrary commands on Firefox before version 1.0.3 and Mozilla before version 1.7.7.
We advice all Mozilla and Firefox users to immediately patch their browsers. Otherwise you might get nasty stuff happen on your computer just by surfing to the wrong site.
For those who know what this means, it’s blood-curdling news. A proof of concept is code that exploits a vulnerability. From that code, it’s a short step to actually creating a hostile exploit that installs a virus or Trojan horse on an unpatched computer. (Oh, and forgive the grammatical errors in the F-Secure announcement. They’re based in Finland and English is obviously a second language. Their expertise in combatting viruses is, however, second to none.)
There’s a little tiny icon in the upper right corner of the Firefox window, just below the Minimize / Maximize / Close buttons, that is supposed to alert you when an upgrade is available. The most current version is 1.0.3, and the little icon has been visible now for a couple of days, with no additional warning of any kind. In my opinion, the Firefox alert icon is way too subtle. How many people had Firefox 1.0 installed on their computer by a friend or family member over the holidays and don’t realize there have been three critical updates since then?
Curiously, the Mozilla Security Center includes no mention of the two most recent updates. As of today, the announcement at the top of the page reads:
Mozilla Foundation Announces Update to Firefox (February 24, 2005) All users should upgrade to Firefox 1.0.1, a security update to Firefox 1.0. …
And yet… The Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page, which is linked from the Security Center, lists both Firefox 1.02 (released March 23), which fixes one critical security issue, and Firefox 1.03 (released April 15), which fixes three separate critical security issues, including the two that now have exploit code in the wild.
There’s no question that the Mozilla/Firefox team is taking their responsibility seriously, but the update mechanism is not working properly for a software program that is intended for use by the masses.
Here are four handy shortcuts that work identically in Internet Explorer and Firefox:
Save a favorite Web site
To add the current page to your list of Favorites (Internet Explorer) or bookmarks (Firefox), press Ctrl+D. You can move on to other pages, knowing that the location is saved for future reference. To recall the page, use the Favorites (IE) or Bookmarks (Firefox) menu.
Switch to full-screen view
Menus, toolbars, and other screen clutter can get in the way of some pages. Press F11 to turn on full-screen view, which hides everything except the toolbar and status bar. Press F11 again to restore the normal view. (You can also click the Restore icon in the top right corner of the screen to return to normal view.)
Change your home page
What’s your home page? If you don’t specify a preference, Microsoft sends you to its home portal, MSN. Firefox sends you to a custom Google page. But you can change your start page anytime. The slow way is to go through dialog boxes. Here’s the faster alternative: First, go to the Web site you want to use as your home page. Then click the icon in the Address bar, just to the left of the site’s URL, and drag that icon onto the Home button.
Move back to the last page
Your hands are on the keyboard and you want to quickly return to the previous page you were viewing in your browser window. Don’t move your hand to the mouse; instead, press the Backspace key, which has the same effect as the Back button on your browser’s toolbar.
Ed Bott 