Artiss.co.uk » Firefox

Why I still don’t like Chrome

David Artiss — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:51:37 +0000

Last year I made an attempt to move from Firefox to Chrome – as much as I love Firefox, Chrome is a lot quicker in use. However, after living with Chrome for a few days, I’ve moved back to Firefox again.

There was always the issue over searching. I love having a little search box in the corner so that I can do a quick Wikipedia or IMDB lookup. The Chrome equivalent is not as convenient.

However, that would never be make-or-break.

I like the fact that Chrome, when synchronising bookmarks, now looks up the favicons and populates them (it doesn’t synchronise them as Xmarks does, though).

No, what finished off Chrome for me is the total lack of control or visibility with synchronising. Chrome has synchronisation of bookmarks, etc, built in. I therefore imported them from Firefox on one PC to allow it to transfer over to my other installations Sadly, after a number of days it had only made a vague attempt to synchronise a few bookmarks and not much else. All Google offer is a line on your profile settings page to show how many it’s synchronising. No control. Nothing else. Why weren’t my bookmarks moving across? I’ll never know. The thing is, on each machine I could have imported them from Firefox. BUT how can I trust Chrome to correctly then keep them in sync with each other after that? Simply put, I can’t.

I also don’t like the fact that Chrome has no way of displaying separators in bookmark lists.

Maybe I’ll try again later next year. Until then, Firefox remains my browser of choice.

Xmarks is closing For quite a few years now I’ve happily used Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as my de-facto bookmarks synchroniser. However, they’ve now announced that within the next...

Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive

David Artiss — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:58:54 +0000

Microsoft, always ready to introduce their own program naming, have introduced the concept of the “Platform Preview” for Internet Explorer 7, which you can download and try.

Basically, it’s IE but without the ability to change the URL or move backwards through pages – they want you to try it out, but without thinking this is anything like the end product. It can installed alongside your current IE version, however.

What it does do, though, is allow you to test “under the hood” changes – particularly around HTML 5, JavaScript enhancements and (snigger) standards improvements.

A Beta version of the full browser was available a while ago, though, but it was soon replaced with further Platform Previews.

They’re very pleased with their Acid3 score of 95% (compared to 100% for Webkit based browsers, although a lot better than IE’s current 20% rating) and their quick (but extremely dodgy) JavaScript benchmark. Time will tell how it pans out…

One thing that IE9 does add is the ability for sites to create their own jump lists in Windows 7. Here’s an excellent article on how to achieve this. Google Chrome already supports jump lists, and it looks like Firefox will have it after 3.7 is released.

Asus EEE PC 701 – Updating Firefox & Flash

David Artiss — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:40:41 +0000

My wife has had her Asus EEE PC 701 for a good few years now and still uses it on a daily basis – pretty much only for internet access, though.

However, she’s now found that she can’t access Google Calendar as it’s no longer compatible with Firefox 2, which the EEE PC has. Asus have never provided updates to Firefox, hence why it’s such an old version – and the option within Firefox to upgrade is disabled.

So, last night, I set about to find a solution.

The excellent EeeUser provides the solution – a script that can be run to install Firefox 3 plus the additional code required for it to work on the EEE PC. This was simple to perform and worked – the version of Firefox 3 installed is not the latest, so make sure you perform all available updates.

Visiting YouTube, as a tester, it complained about Flash not being up-to-date. Again, EeeUser had the answer and was a single line to run.

Unfortunately, their workaround for adding a time server is out of date and the repositories mentioned no longer exist. Shame, as this my wife’s one remaining bug bear – the clock goes out regularly.

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Xmarks is closing

David Artiss — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:34:52 +0000

For quite a few years now I’ve happily used Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as my de-facto bookmarks synchroniser. However, they’ve now announced that within the next 90 days, Xmarks will be closing down.

It’s mentioned on their blog, but not their site front page (and I probably wouldn’t have realised if I hadn’t seen the news elsewhere). It would appear that their inability to “moneterise” Xmarks has been the problem. They had made steps recently to move Xmarks towards a newer audience, with the display of site ratings both in search results and in the browser toolbar. However, they’ve done this whilst not keeping up-to-date with the sync applications available elsewhere – they’ve recently added tab syncing, but they still lag behind the sync features of many of their competition.

Many of those commenting on the blog have suggested that they try charging $10 a year for the service – many are saying they would and it does seem strange that Xmarks hasn’t tried a subscription service before giving up.

For us end users, it leaves us wondering where to go now. Personally, I’ve now installed Firefox Sync, which is from Mozilla. This will be included by default in the next major Firefox release – it doesn’t have the bells and whistles which I never used, but does synchronise, well, pretty much everything.

Why I still don’t like Chrome Last year I made an attempt to move from Firefox to Chrome – as much as I love Firefox, Chrome is a lot quicker in...

PC security for the new user

David Artiss — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:37:48 +0000

I’ve always been a believer that new computer users should get themselves a good manual or enrol on a course – just ask the resident family “computer expert” how many times they’ve had to bail out a family member who’s badly infected their PC through not knowing what they were doing – “But it said I’d won an iPod?”.

And forums, often providing a a potential solution to the c0mputer user having problems, can just makes worse. On one such forum, it is often visited by professional and amateurs alike. One of their most striking (and annoying to me) recommendations is for people to ditch commercial anti-virus products for the free equivalents and to generally make the amateur PC user feel worried that their security is at constant risk.

Lets cover that anti-virus recommendation first of all. It’s rubbish. The free equivalents are not as good as the full price equivalents – if you can afford the commercial version, buy it. The free one should be reserved for those poor enough that they can’t afford anything else.

And making them feel paranoid about security means that many talk about turning off cookies and JavaScript, expecting either to be introducing vulnerabilities to their computer. And the result? Well, one user had problems after installing the latest updates to Firefox. In their response they said…

I try very hard to follow advice on this board so far as anti-virus and stuff goes. Norton and McAfee are no-nos.
I run SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, Security essentials, CrapCleaner, Spyware Blaster and Sunbelt personal firewall.

So, Norton and McAfee are “no-nos”. Great.

And, then, look at that list of software – yep, they’re running a full security program (Microsoft Security Essentials) along with an additional firewall (Sunbelt Personal Firewall) and 3 additional Antispyware products. Wow. But, hey, they’re all free.

And it took a few replies before anybody suggested that maybe, just maybe, it was this combination of clashing software that might have been causing the Firefox problems (which they promptly rejected, uninstalled Firefox, installed Opera and then complained that didn’t work either).

My recommendation – one, commercial, complete security solution (spyware, anti-virus, firewall). Don’t listen to those who say “Don’t buy Norton, your system will grind to a halt”. Yep, old message – the latest versions are much better at keeping resources low.

In fact, Norton Internet Security 2010 is the package I’d recommend. You can get a 1 PC licence for under £11 and £28 for user on 3 computers – hardly a bank breaker.

Changing the location of Firefox bookmarks

David Artiss — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:01:06 +0000

If you wish Firefox to look elsewhere for the bookmark file

Type about:config in the URL bar
Right click within the window and add a new string entry
The entry name should be browser.bookmarks.file
Set its value to the new location (eg F:\bookmarks.html)

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Xmarks and star ratings!

David Artiss — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:22:26 +0000

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…

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

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

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

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How to get incompatible Firefox add-ons to work

David Artiss — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:53:39 +0000

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

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Vacuum Firefox for improved performance

David Artiss — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:19:26 +0000

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.

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Mozilla Weave

David Artiss — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:59:02 +0000

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.

although I have noticed that this has got better recently

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