Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

Now, this is by no means a REAL fix for the Firefox memory leak, but it certainly does appear to help it quite a bit. This little fix will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized. So far, from my experiences with using this today, when you maximize Firefox it will obviously increase the memory usage. However, it does not seem to go back up to the insane amount that it was at before minimizing it. For example, Firefox was at 180MB of memory usage and then I minimized it and after a few seconds I maximized it. After maximizing it and continuing on my routine business it appeared to only have gone up to 60MB. This seems to be a good solution for me right now since I frequently maximize and minimize Firefox anyways.

Now I know many people will say that Firefox will take longer to maximize since it will be located on the hard drive, but I haven’t noticed ANY delays. It is able to redraw itself just as quickly as if it was located in the ram (in my experience). Okay, now here are the few simple steps:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

See how quick and painless that was? At any rate you can always go back and delete the same setting that you just created if you start to experience any issues. I have also set the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers value to 0 because that will prevent Firefox from caching pages for the back button. This is also supposed to free up some memory that gets stolen.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Both Mozilla and Microsoft will both be releasing their new web browsers in the coming weeks (IE 7 was just released yesterday but won’t be available as an Automatic Update for a few weeks) and the thing we have to prepare for the most is incompatible websites. I have experienced some problematic sites in both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 but there are only a handful from the ones that I visit.

This problem can often be fixed on your end by adjusting the user agent to match a browser that works with the site. It is really easy to adjust the user agent string in Firefox 2 and pretty easy to do in Internet Explorer 7, although IE users will have to download a small utility that Microsoft offers.

–Firefox 2 Users (changing the user agent to Firefox 1.5)–

1. Start Firefox.
2. In the Address Bar type about:config and press Enter.
3. Find the option that is named general.useragent.extra.firefox and double-click on it.
   
4. You will now be prompted with the window to change the value of the user agent. Instead of having it say Firefox/2.0 you might want to change it to Firefox/1.5 or Firefox/1.5.0.7 to make the websites think that you are using a version of Firefox from the 1.5 branch.

   

5. Restart Firefox.

–Internet Explorer 7 Users (changing the user agent to IE 6)–

Microsoft has put together this quick utility that you can download (I provided a direct link with no WGA validation needed) and install which will let you change the user agent in IE 7 to match the one in IE 6. That means any site that you visit will think that you’re still using IE 6 and will render the page accordingly.

After you install the program you will see a shortcut on your desktop and if you execute it you should be prompted with a window similar to this one:

As you can see in the screenshot you’ll be given the choice to only change the settings or to change the settings and email Microsoft about the compatibility problem. They are doing this because they are afraid that webmasters will not be adjusting their sites to ensure that they work properly with IE 7.

–Overview–

I know all of us would rather now have to deal with these hassles but they seem inevitable each time a new browser is released. Many sites that appear not to work actually work just fine but they haven’t been updated to officially support the browser. So probably for the next few months it may not be a terrible idea to use these settings until the webmasters actually realize that a new browser has been released and fix what is necessary.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE’s global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don’t see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.

Update: If you needed more proof of Chrome’s increasing popularity, we got a tip on this report from Softpedia confirming that Chrome is the fastest growing browser of the moment. Firefox is more or less flat and, well, you know all about how IE is faring.

Continue reading Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples

Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Oct 2010 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on March 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There are all kinds of Firefox tips and tricks available on the Web, and when I come across some of the cool ones (many in forums) I jot them down real quick. That way I don’t have to post about just one of the tricks, and instead I can show you a whole compilation of them. Previously I put together lengthy Firefox 2 tweak guide, and none of the tips that I am about to mention below are in that guide.

For starters, I want to mention that a lot of the tweaks below use custom CSS scripts that need to be integrated with Firefox. You can follow these directions on installing those scripts, or you can also use the Stylish extension which makes it a lot easier. When using the extension you just have to open the extension options and select “Write” to create a new script that you want to use:

Now let’s move on to the tips…

—Removing Menu Items—

Sometimes the menu items (File, Edit, etc…) just seem to get in the way and you never seem to use them. I’m sure many people, for instance, never use the Help menu. Or, if you have an extension managing your bookmarks, you might never use the Bookmarks menu. It is really simple to hide certain menu items using the Stylish extension mentioned above. Just create a new script and insert the following code:

#file-menu, #edit-menu, #view-menu, #bookmarks-menu, #go-menu, #tools-menu, #helpMenu{
display: none !important;}

That code will actually remove all of the menu items, so you should take out the items in that list that you still want to display.

—Change the Search Box size—

For some people the Search Box in the upper-right corner of Firefox is just a little too big. Shrinking it down is very simple to do with Stylish:

#search-container, #searchbar {
max-width: 50px !important;
width: 50px !important; }

The “50px” in both lines represents the width (in pixels) that you want the Search Box to be. I would probably use around 200px because 50px is pretty small.

—Block Blinking Text—

It is a sad day when you come across a site that still uses blinking text to try and get the reader’s attention. I still see them from time to time, but with a simple about:config trick we can prevent it from happening. If you’re not familiar with the about:config screen please see this quick tutorial I put together. 

All you have to do is open the about:config screen, find the option browser.blink_allowed and double-click on it so that the value will change to false.

—Make JavaScript HyperLinks Noticeable—

I like to be conscious about the links that I am clicking on for a site, and I’m a even more careful when I see a JavaScript link on a site that I’m not familiar with. For that reason you should think about making the JavaScript links more noticeable, and an easy way to do that is altering the cursor when you hover over them. In this example the cursor will change to a crosshair whenever you hover over a hyperlink that actually contains JavaScript:

a[href^="javascript:"]{ cursor: crosshair; }

The result when hovering over a JavaScript hyperlink would look like this:

There are a ton of different cursors that you can use in place of “crosshair”, and a good listing of them can be found here.

—Find As You Type Tricks—

Find As You Type is one of my favorite features in Firefox. This feature will start searching a page for text as you type it, which makes finding something specific on a page a lot easier.

I like having the Find As You Type automatically begin as soon as I start typing so on every Firefox installation I always go in and change the setting to enable this:

Some of you may not like having it work like that, so there is a way that you can use the “Find As You Type” without setting that option. If you want to initiate a Find As You Type just press the forward slash key (“/”) on the keyboard and begin typing your query. You should see a box popup on the bottom of the browser window that displays the characters that are currently being searched for:

That Quick Find will search all of the text on the page, but what if you’re looking for a link? No problem, instead of typing a forward slash press the apostrophe (‘) key and that will initiate a Quick Find that will only search links. When would this be useful? Sometimes I use it if I have a hard time finding a download link on a site, in which case I’ll do the Quick Find (just searching links) for the word “download.”

—Overview—

Those are the tweaks that I have accumulated over the past few weeks, so I hope that you enjoyed them. One of the things that makes Firefox so great is the customizability that it includes. The deeper you dig, the more tricks you’ll find. Even with everything that I have found up to now, I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface.

In time I’m sure I’ll find more, but if you have any of your own tweaks that you use, make sure you let us know in the comments below!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on November 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Having toolbars in a browser can be both frustrating and convenient. On one hand they can often cram a lot of useful functionality into a small area, but on the other hand they eat up precious space that could be used for viewing websites. After all, we know what your browser can look like when you’ve installed a few too many toolbars.

I’ve managed to find a happy medium by automatically hiding the toolbars so that they only appear when my mouse hovers over any other toolbar (ex. the navigation/address bar), and that’s what we’re going to show you today. First we’ll go ahead and demonstrate how to do this with just the bookmarks toolbar, and then we’ll walk you through the steps needed to apply this to just about any Firefox toolbar such as the Google Toolbar.

–Auto-hide a Toolbar–

1. Make sure you have the Stylish extension installed in Firefox.
2. In the bottom-right corner of the Firefox window you should see the Stylish icon sitting in the Status Bar. Click on the icon, and go to Write Style > Blank Style.
   
3. Provide a description for the toolbar that you’re about to auto-hide, such as “Auto-hide the bookmarks toolbar”. In the code box copy and paste the following:

   #PersonalToolbar{display:none;}
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #PersonalToolbar{display:-moz-box;}

   The “PersonalToolbar” ID refers to the bookmarks toolbar, and when all is said and done your Stylish window should look something like this:
   

4. As soon as you hit Save the changes should take effect immediately. The bookmarks toolbar will be out-of-sight, but it will reappear when you hover over another toolbar (like the address/navigation bar).

–Find the ID of a Toolbar–

Now what about the toolbars who’s ID you don’t know? That’s a little trickier, but it won’t take you long to catch on. The toolbar we’re going to use in this half of the demonstration is the Google Toolbar, and we’ll show you step-by-step how you can find its ID so that you can auto-hide it.

1. If you’re using Firefox 3 you’ll need to go and download the DOM Inspector since it’s no longer included with the browser. It is bundled with versions of Firefox prior to version 3.
2. Once it’s downloaded and installed you need to start it by going to Tools > DOM Inspector. This tool will give us the ability to get the ID of any element in the browser, including toolbars.
3. Go to File > Inspect Chrome Document, and choose the first item in the list (it may say something different than what my screenshot does).
   
4. Now in the DOM Inspector click on the icon in the toolbar that has a mouse cursor pointing to a rounded box. Then switch over to the Firefox window and click on an item on the toolbar you want to auto-hide. You should see a red box appear around it as you’re clicking.
   
5. Now if you switch back to the DOM Inspector it will have highlighted the item that you clicked on. We’re looking for the ID of the toolbar itself, and not the item that you clicked on which was likely a button on the toolbar. If you look a little above the item that you clicked on you should see the ID of the toolbar:
   
6. Now we just need to plug that ID into the Stylish script that we provided above. So auto-hiding the Google Toolbar would look something like this:

   #gtbToolbar{display:none;}
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #gtbToolbar{display:-moz-box;}

That’s all there is to it. It may take a little while for you to get the hang of using the DOM Inspector, but it will be worth it.

–Overview–

Now the power is in your hands to auto-hide as many toolbars as you want. This trick will also work for hiding multiple toolbars simultaneously, and they will all appear at the same time when you hover over the navigation bar.

Also, feel free to leave the ID’s of any toolbars you find in the comments below so that you might save other people a little bit of trouble.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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