It is with a heavy heart I announce my co-author gareon (Gary) recently passed away. I first met Gary online via Delphi Forum GoFirefox! many, many years ago. I even had an opportunity to met him person a few years back while on vacation up in Northern Arizona. He was Linux and Pale Moon fanatic as you could tell by his posts both on the blog and his forums. He joined me on the Firefox Blog back in February 2010. During the past year, he was posting more than I was on the Firefox Blog which helped keep the blog…
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Congratulations Photobucket, you have successfully managed to kill in less than 15-days what was a very successful business for nearly 15-years. For those not familiar with Photobucket it was one of the original photo storing/sharing sites launched in 2003. It was extremely popular for blogs, forums and message boards which had limited or no hosting space for their users to post images. For the most part Photobucket’s service was free with limitations on hosting (storage) space and bandwidth. Before I moved to self hosting my blogs, I was a Photobucket user…a paid one at that too. However, I was paying…
Last night Mozilla announced on The Mozilla Security Blog: Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP. There’s pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web. In recent months, there have been statements from IETF, IAB (even the other IAB), W3C, and the US Governmentcalling for universal use of encryption by Internet applications, which in the case of the web means HTTPS. After a robust discussion on our community mailing list, Mozilla is committing to focus new development efforts on the secure web, and start removing capabilities from the non-secure web. While they don’t specify in details as to “removing capabilities from…
Back in February we mentioned Extension Signing Coming Later in 2015. Recently the Mozilla Add-ons Blog posted a follow up The Case for Extension Signing. There is a lot of interesting information in this article, including this very shocking statistic which puts into prospective just how badly broken the current Mozilla Firefox add-on system is: The Web experienced by tech-savvy developers, however, is not the Web experienced by most people. While only fourteen add-ons hosted on our addons.mozilla.org site have more than a million users, and only two of those have more than 3 million, many tens of millions of users have non-hosted…
This seems to be a common error some people encounter with Firefox. First, XPCOM has nothing to do with Windows XP, rather it is Cross Platform Component Object Model. It is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla (more info at Wikipedia). Not sure what causes this error other than a file or files for XPCOM in the main Firefox uninstall some how get removed or corrupted. However, the fix is fairly simple and painless: re-install Firefox. Uninstalling Firefox will NOT remove your profile folder or settings, it simply removes the Firefox browser from your computer. Once you have removed Firefox, (using another browser)…
This is an oddity I have run into many of times. Open a new Window in Firefox (not tab) and load a Flash Video for the first time and suddenly Firefox jumps the focus back to the previous window. The window with the Flash Video is still open, it just in the background now. This even happens if the new window is a Private Browsing Window. Like I said, I’ve been dealing with this for a long while and just learned to deal with it. Recently though, someone posted about this at Go Firefox! My co-author, Gareon happened to find a solution at…
Awhile back a user in Go Firefox! had posted their Firefox had been modified by Babylon. The translation software had added a bunch of bloatware into Firefox including a toolbar as well as making itself the default home page and search engine. A couple of other users have reported this issue as well. I happened to be checking the Mozilla Support site and saw one of the Hot Topic is How to remove the Babylon toolbar, home page and search engine. This is a very good step-by-step article with lots of screenshots that will help you get rid of Babylon…
Recently a member over at Go Firefox! had an odd and annoying issue where as each time they opened a new window in Firefox, the Error Console window would pop-up. The Error Console (under Developer Tools on the Firefox Button/Menu) normally just sits quietly in the background and collects errors that have occurred when visiting sites. Useful for troubleshooting a misbehaving website. My first thought was may be they were accidentally hitting the keyboard short-cut for the Error Console when doing the keyboard short-cut for new window. However, while the keys are fairly close together, new windows is CTRL+N and Error Console is CTRL+SHIFT+J. Next thought was add-ons. Sure…
I have come to the realization now, that I should except any software I download and install to try and sneak bloatware or Malware on to my system. This can be in the form of a browser toolbar or some type of ‘security software’ or Windows optimizer. Avast! has their WebRep extension that is installed into all the browsers on your system. This is suppose to tell you how reputable a site is when you are doing a Google search. Java is partnering now with McCrappy McAfee. Waterfox now serves up a bunch of stuff from AVG unless you go hunting around the custom install…
ALERT: As of version 15 released on August 29th, Waterfox now comes with bloatware and will attempt to install said bloatware without your knowledge or permission. Read more: Waterfox 15 & AVG. Linux and Mac users have enjoyed having a 64-bit versions of Firefox available to them for nearly the past two years. However, for us Windows users, Mozilla has been teasing us and/or dragging their feet with 64-Bit Firefox. As a point of clarification I should say that there has been since Firefox 4 (may be even further back) 64-bit Windows builds on the Nightly Developmental channel. These are not official releases and have never made…