Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 12, 2009 by CyberNet.

It’s a common problem among Firefox power users: you’ve been surfing the web for some time and all of a sudden Firefox’s memory footprint goes through the roof. And although Mozilla’s developers do their best to ensure that Firefox is stable, many people play a part in the browser’s memory leaks without knowing it. So how do you get Firefox to run smoothly again?

Do you really need that Firefox extension?
In my opinion, Firefox’s support for add-ons is one of its most valuable features, but there’s a catch: the longer Firefox has been installed on your hard drive, the more extensions you install and the slower Firefox becomes. That’s why it’s not a bad idea to uninstall extensions you don’t use. If you want to keep a certain extension around just in case, disable it to prevent it from being loaded on startup.

Disable all unnecessary plugins
Aside from your extensions, there are some hidden memory eaters in Firefox that you may want to get rid off: plug-ins you didn’t even ask for. Common plug-ins you might want to disable of include Microsoft Silverlight, Java, Google Update, QuickTime, RealPlayer and Adobe Reader. If you disable the latter, you won’t be able to view PDFs in your browser. Instead, you’ll be prompted with the standard download dialog. Unlike extensions, plugins can be disabled/enabled without restarting your browser.

Reboot Firefox with a hotkey while saving your tabs
Rebooting Firefox is one of the most effective ways to lower its memory footprint. Originally intended for use by extension developers, QuickRestart does just that. Just press Ctrl+Alt+R to reboot Firefox while conserving your currently opened tabs.

Use Safe mode
Vista Rewired suggests using Firefox’s Safe mode in situations where you just need the basic browser. In Safe mode, all your extensions are disabled. You can find a shortcut to Firefox’s Safe mode in its Start Menu folder. Alternatively, you can launch it with the -safe-mode parameter. Visit Vista Rewired here for more details.

Hack: save Firefox’s state on your hard drive when minimized
In 2006, Ryan wrote about a way to have Firefox save its state on your hard drive when it’s minimized. This involves creating a setting of the boolean type in Firefox named config.trim_on_minimize with value true. Although this might free up some memory when Firefox is minimized, it may cause a slight delay when you restore Firefox’s main window. If you want to activate this hack, check out the how-to here.

Start with a clean slate
For that extra speed boost, you should consider starting out with a clean Firefox install. To do this, you’ll need to delete your entire profile folder. If you’re not sure where to find this folder, you might want to read Mozilla’s explanation here. Unless you don’t mind your bookmarks being wiped, ensure that they are backed up. Also note that this will not only delete your bookmarks, but also your extensions, your settings, your saved passwords, your history and so on. That’s a lot of data you’re throwing away, but obviously that’s the reason why wiping your profile is so effective.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

It’s no surprise that Opera 9.5 can synchronize your bookmarks with an online server, and can therefore give you access to them anywhere when running Opera 9.5! That is one of Opera 9.5′s most notable features, and the development team just stepped up their game by launching what’s called Opera Link.

With Opera Link you can access your bookmarks and Speed Dial entries from wherever you are via the link.opera.com site. Once logged in you should see an interface similar to that above, where you can add or remove bookmarks. You can’t move bookmarks between folders, or rearrange the folders for that matter, but that might be something they will work on in the future.

From the Opera Link site you can also view all of your Speed Dial entries, and it appears that they will eventually show small thumbnails of each. Right now I just get a “No screenshot available” message for each of my Speed Dial bookmarks.

And Opera didn’t stop there. They realize how popular their Opera Mini browser is becoming, and so they thought that it would be even more convenient if people could manage their bookmarks with that! Hence you can use Opera Mini 4 Beta to synchronize your bookmarks as well.

Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO, said:

We refuse to believe people should compromise their experience when they access the Web from different devices. With Opera Link, we give them a consistent experience uniquely suited to the way they want to use the Web. But as cool as we think Opera Link is now, we are already hard at work making it even more valuable to our users in the future. Opera Link means convergence without compromise.

I think the only thing that Opera Link is missing right now is direct support for the Nintendo Wii browser, and I’m not sure if they have plans to integrate it with that in the future. I’m just grateful for the multiple methods they’ve already implemented with Opera Link.

Instructions for setting up Opera Link on both Opera 9.5 Beta and Opera Mini 4 Beta can be found here.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

The other day Netscape took the plunge and provided a completely reworked version of their browser. The new Netscape 9 is based on the Firefox 2 browser, and therefore has some really nice features such as inline spell checking. It kicks things up a notch by including several features you won’t find in Firefox, well, not by default that is.

Most of the features in Netscape 9 aren’t really innovations, and really only demonstrate how well the Netscape developers are able to integrate existing Firefox extensions into the browser. So it really poses the question “why would you want to install Netscape?” Honestly, I have no idea. By using Firefox you are guaranteed to be among the first to get security patches, the same ones Netscape users may have to wait awhile for until they are ported over.

We didn’t write a review of Netscape 9 because we covered it pretty in-depth when the first Beta was released. Since then there has been hardly any changes, and so we thought this time around it would be better to show where you can download many of Netscape’s best features for Firefox.

Note: All screenshots have been taken in Firefox 2 using the Netscape theme.

–Netscape 9 Theme (Download)–

Inevitably one of the first things that we have to do is grab the Netscape 9 theme. It is available for Firefox as the Netstripe theme, and you’ll quickly see the resemblance. In fact, the theme was actually posted by the Netscape team. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

Click to Enlarge

One of the major differences is that in Netscape the Stop and Reload buttons are combined, but in this theme it just hides the Stop button when it’s not needed. It will show up when a site is loading though, and will appear immediately to the right of the Reload button. We’ll show you how to circumvent this problem later on.

–URL Correction (Download)–

Netscape 9 monitors the URL that you type into the Address Bar with your fat fingers just waiting for you to make a stupid mistake. If you misspell something it will automatically correct it, and if you so desire it can show a confirmation before it does so. This feature was essentially yanked straight from the URL Fixer extension for Firefox.

An example of where this works is if you type in cybernetnews.con into the Address Bar it will automatically change it to cybernetnews.com:

–Link Pad (Download)–

This is one of the more unique features that Netscape 9 does have. It provides a quick way for you to save a link to a website without actually having to store it in your bookmarks. It’s a nice feature, but I have “junk” folder in my bookmarks that serves this very purpose.

There is a Firefox extension, however, that does virtually the same thing as Link Pad plus some. It’s called ScrapBook, and with it you can “bookmark” sites. ScrapBook also lets you add notes to sites.

–Sidebar Mini Browser (Download)–

This feature doesn’t have an exact counterpart, but the Firefox alternative is a little bit better. In Netscape you can show full navigation controls (forward, back, stop, etc…) in the sidebar so that you can truly browse a website from there. In Firefox you can open sites in the sidebar, but navigating around can be a little bit of a pain.

To conquer that issue we turn to the Split Browser extension. With it you can “split” a window as many times as you would like, which can lead to some pretty crazy collages. It also lets you tile tabs, which is one of the reasons I think it is better than Netscape’s offering. And since this doesn’t use the sidebar to display the secondary site you can still have your bookmarks, or other things open there.

–Restart the Browser (Download)–

Ahh, it’s amazing what a difference the simplest things can make. The “Restart Navigator” option that was added to the File Menu in Netscape is really nice because it keeps all of your current tabs intact after a restart, but likewise there is an extension to do it in Firefox.

–Resizeable Textarea (Download)–

Don’t you just hate when you’re commenting on a site or in a forum and it only has a small box to type your reply? That’s one of the reason I added the expand/contract option to our comment box below, but what about sites that don’t have such a feature?

In Netscape 9 all you have to do is grab the corner of a text box and drag it until it’s as big as you want it to be. And Firefox users, yep, there’s an extension for that as well called Resizeable Textarea:

–Tab History (Download)–

Picture this, you’re doing a search on Google and you open one of the search results in a new tab. When you try to hit the back button it does nothing, which is expected because the search result was the first thing to be opened in that tab, so there is no history associated with it.

That’s all in the past now (no pun intended)! The Tab History extension will let you retain the history of any parent tab. In this example screenshot I was on our site, and opened the “Live Search 411″ link in a new tab. You’ll notice that it retained the history of the originating tab:

–OPML Support (Download)–

OPML files are commonly known as the primary way for importing and exporting RSS feeds from a feed reader. Seeing that Firefox supports Livemarks (a.k.a. RSS feeds in your bookmarks) it would only seem natural to be able to import and export items to/from your bookmarks, right?

OPML Support is an extension that will do just that, and it lets you choose whether to just do Livemarks, bookmarks, or both.

–Combined Stop/Reload Button (Download)–

This extension works wonderful with any theme, and is needed if you want to mimic how the Netscape 9 theme works. Once installed the Stop button will only be shown when a website is loading, and the Reload button will show the rest of the time. It works perfectly as you can see here while our site was loading:

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 10, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
I’ve found a lot of great apps thanks to commenters on our site, and credit for this one goes to an anonymous visitor on our article about automatically restarting crashed apps. The program I’m talking about is called Kiwi, and it has some unique monitoring capabilities that aren’t found in many other applications. There are both free and paid versions, but I know that the functionality offered in the free version will appeal to some of you.

Kiwi will monitor any application that you tell it to, and can either report back or take action based on certain events. What do I mean? One good example is that Kiwi can both alert you when an application exceeds a certain amount of memory usage, and if desired it can even close the offending program. That’s just one example of the monitors available in the free version. Here’s a quick list of the other things available:

• You can get alerted when via email:
  • When a program starts
  • When a program ends
  • When it exceeds a specified amount of memory usage
  • When it has been running for a specified amount of time
• You can take the following actions:
  • Close a program after it exceeds a specified amount of memory usage
  • Close a program after it exceeds a specified amount of CPU time
  • Close a program after it has been running for a specified amount of time
  • When a program ends, turn off the computer
  • When a program starts, execute a specified application
  • When a program ends, execute a specified application

The paid version offers a ton of different monitoring options including remaining hard drive space, testing IP/URL availability, checking to see if a file exists, and checking whether an app is inactive or unresponsive. What’s nice is that you can see all of the features that would be available to you by flipping over to the advanced tab. There’s upwards of 75 monitors/actions that you’ll need to upgrade if you want to use them, but that doesn’t detract from the usefulness of the free version.

Kiwi Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Many of you probably have files residing on your computer that haven’t been touched in ages. You may even have documents created years ago that you haven’t found a need to remove, or maybe there are some programs that you never got around to uninstalling. The problem is trying to find these unnecessary files and programs so that you can get around to removing them.

Windows (and many other operating systems) stamps the date and time on a file when it is accessed. Unfortunately, in Windows there is no easy way to sort every file on your computer by the date and time it was last accessed. With the help of a specialized freeware application, we can find this information in a heartbeat.

There is a free program that I came across called Find Unused Files (Download Mirror) and it will scour your hard drive looking for old files. What defines old? You choose what is considered old based upon the number of days that a specific file has not been accessed. By default the program will search for files that haven’t been used in over 100 days and will limit the search to 5000 results, but you can customize both of those options.

Once you change the program’s options you can go ahead and run it. If you decide to have it crawl your whole hard drive, I’m sure it will find a ton of files. I recommend that you choose a specific folder such as the Program Files or My Documents so that the unused system files are not pulled in with the results. After it finishes running, you can click “View the Report” to have it show you the info that it retrieved:

The nice thing about the program is that you can delete files from the window so that you don’t have to open a separate application to hunt down the file(s) it found. Just right-click and select ‘delete’ to remove the program from your computer.

You should obviously be careful when deleting files that you’re not familiar with because they could be important to an application. I recommend only deleting files that you recognize.

While the program is free it does require that you install it. I would have preferred to see this as more of a portable application that I could easily carry around with me to help clean up other people’s computers that I’m working on. This is a program that is nice to keep on your computer and run from time to time so that you can find documents/files to archive on an external hard drive or maybe even programs that you haven’t used in a long time.

Find Unused Files (Download Mirror)

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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