The latest version of Xmarks for Firefox has added a new feature where, in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window, there are 5 stars, allowing you to easily rate websites that you visit. Unfortunately, they’re a bit of an “estate” hog and can only be turned off along with the Xmarks icon (which is useful for quick synchronisation). However, there is a way to turn off just the rating stars…

1. Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar
2. Right click in the main screen area
3. Select New -> Boolean
4. Type extensions.xmarks.hideStatusBarStars and press Enter
5. Select the value true

This will forever banish the stars. If you want to bring them back…

1. Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar
2. Find the value extensions.xmarks.hideStatusBarStars
3. Set it to false

Firefox 3.6 has been released and that means, once again, that you might find some of your add-ons don’t work. Now, this isn’t Firefox just wanting to cause problems for us all, but for genuine security and stability reasons.

None-the-less, if you need to get an add-on working, then there is a (relatively) simple way to do it.

• Download the .XPI add-on file
• Change the file extension from .XPI to .ZIP (because that is what they really are)
• Double click the .ZIP and you should see a file called install.rdf
• Drag this file out of the zip, to your folder or desktop
• Open the .RDF file with Notepad
• Find the line that contains maxVersion and change the 3.5 to the current version of Firefox
• Save and close the .RDF
• Drag the edited file back into the .ZIP
• Close the .ZIP and rename it back to .XPI
• Double click the .XPI and it should offer to install to Firefox

Since Firefox 3.0 bookmarks, history and most storage is kept in SQLite databases and, ass with any other database, SQLite databases become fragmented over time. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these eventually result in a performance hit.

So, a good way to improve startup and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases.

• Open the Error Console: Tools menu/Error Console
• In the Code text box paste this (it’s a single line):

  Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

• Press Evaluate. Firefox will freeze for a few seconds while the databases are “VACUUMed”.

Thanks to PC Pro and Mozilla Links for this information.

Alternatively there are a couple of Firefox plugins available to do just this – Vacuum Places and PlacesCleaner.

I’ve been a fan for sometime of Xmarks (aka Foxmarks), which allows you to synchronise your bookmarks and, more recently, your passwords across different computers. I use it exclusively on Firefox but it is also compatible with other browsers as well.

However, I’m a little bit excited by Mozilla Weave – this is Mozilla’s version of, well, the same idea. It’s Open Source though and currently available as a Beta release. For this reason I haven’t replaced XMarks with it, but after a “quick go” with it, I’m more than a little impressed.

Weave will run silently in the background synchronising much more than Xmarks does and, more importantly, it does it without affecting your browser session. I have such automatic updates switched off with Xmarks because it causes my Firefox to grind to a halt. This might have something to do with my thousands of bookmarks. Even a manual sync takes some time¹. Weave, in comparison, was unnoticeable and, when running it’s initial sync, you can continue browsing without any issues.

The one thing that Xmarks has over Weave is the ability to view bookmarks online but, to be honest, that’s not a facility I use. More recently they’ve been adding more and more features, away from the basic synchronising, probably to differentiate between itself and Weave (which was announced some time ago). However, none of these have been of interest, so I’ve simply switched them off.

If it continues to impress as it has already, I’m looking forward to the first non-beta release. Sorry, XMarks.

1. although I have noticed that this has got better recently [↩]

Just had a problem with Firefox crashing out everytime I tried to insert an image into the post. It’s a bit weird as it was working only the other day.

Anyway, a search found that the fault lies with Google Gears. Disabling it fixes the problem.