Archive for category Firefox
Facebook Photo Zoom – Google Chrome extension gallery
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Firefox, Web on May 15th, 2010
I have just started converting to Google Chrome as my main browser. I love Firefox, and have been using it since way back in its Phoenix pre-build days. But Chrome is so fast, and so light-weight. Both browsers are open-source, and both are excellent choices.
One of the best parts of Firefox were extensions. People expanded the functionality of Firefox in ways that were never imagined thanks to the ease of writing extensions for Firefox. Google learned that lesson well, and made Chrome easily extensible, too.
I’ve been looking through the wide range of extensions available for Chrome. There are already thousands, some good, some not so good. The extension that I most miss – Paste Email Plus – doesn’t have an equivalent for Chrome. But I have stumbled across some excellent ones. And some extensions that are surprisingly simple yet elegant. One such extension is great for those of us who use Facebook:
Facebook Photo Zoom is a simple, light-weight extension that integrates directly into Facebook so you can see the larger images of photo albums, profile photos and more whenever you hover over a zoomable image!
Adobe Flash Player 9.0 Linux
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Firefox, Web on October 22nd, 2006
It took friggin’ long enough, but Adobe has finally released a Linux beta of their Flash Player 9.0:
Adobe has (partly) delivered on its promise of supporting Linux by releasing the latest version of Flash player (ver 9.0) for Linux along side that for Windows and Mac OSX platform. The version that is released is still in the beta stage. Neverthless, this is a step in the right direction atleast for Adobe and the multimedia loving Linux users as for the former, it is a good PR exercise and for the latter, it is better access to flash based websites.
Even though this is a beta release, I highly recommend all Linux Flash users upgrade immediately. The last “stable” Flash player from Macromedia – 7.x – sucks ass. 9.0 beta is much more stable than that supposed stable release.
How to Post to Two Separate Del.icio.us Accounts Easily
There’s a post on www.jessirae.com detailing a supposedly easy way to use two Del.icio.us accounts without having to log in and out of Del.icio.us. The solution given was to install two different Firefox extensions, Del.icio.us Buttons and Del.icio.us Complete. However, I disagree with the resolution, because Del.icio.us Complete can handle this by itself. When you open up Complete’s posting window, there’s a drop-down menu allowing you to choose which account to add the bookmark to. What’s easier than that?
Definitely read the article on jessirae.com, then follow my advice, dump Del.icio.us Buttons and stick with Del.icio.us Complete. It’s good stuff!
Firefox and the art of keyword bookmarking
I loveLifehacker, though many of their recommendations/suggestions aren’t applicable. Especially their computer articles, which tend to be Windows/Mac oriented. So when I first read one of their latest Hack Attack articles (Firefox and the art of keyword bookmarking), I assumed that I could just ignore it. Fortunately, I read far enough through the article to get to this bit:
Don’t be shy about adding keyword shortcuts to your favorite bookmarklets. For example, I’m absolutely crazy about the GMailThis! bookmarklet (it was actually the basis of my Bookmarking with Gmail feature). If I’m on a page I want to email to someone, all it takes is Ctrl-L, ‘gmt’, and Enter.
This is an amazingly convenient, time-saving feature. Especially since I have a half-dozen or so bookmarklets that I frequently use (posting to my three blogs, adding links to those blogs, GMail, Del.icio.us). Using the mouse for these bookmarklets is nowhere near as slick nor speedy as typing Ctrl-L, agt, [ENTER].
FreeEnigma – webmail encryption extension for Firefox
Big thanks to to iSpider.pl for pointing me towards FreeEnigma, a Firefox extension which can encrypt/decrypt webmail messages on the fly:
FreeEnigma brings cryptography to webmail, with an ingenious set of free and open browser plug-ins that work with Yahoo, Gmail, and others. The plugins implement a version of GPG (the free/open version of Pretty Good Privacy) and scramble and de-scramble the text in your webmail before you send it and after you receive it, reducing the amount of information that webmail providers have on your communications.
Those who know me know that I am a big proponent of encryption. My reasons are mainly philosophical. Email is normally sent in plain-text, which means anyone between the sender and the recipient can read that email. Add in the fact that our current administration seems to truly believe it is legal to snoop on all communication within and without this country, and you have the possibility for a very bad situation. Encrypting email might make using email a little more difficult, but it is worth it to help enhance one’s privacy.
FreeEnigma is currently doing a roll-out by invitiation. If you are interested, you can sign up for an invite on their website.
Ubuntu Dapper Drake – no sound in Flash
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Firefox on June 24th, 2006
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I have been using Dapper for a few weeks now, and just noticed that I’m effected by bug #29760: “Sound does not work properly in Flash in firefoxâ€?. Don’t ask me how I’ve gone this long without noticing it. Anyway, Ricardo Pérez López posted a fix that worked for me:
I have this problem in my Dapper and my nForce2 audio, but I can solve it putting FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss” in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc, and using the autoaudiosink for gstreamer 0.10. I’m always using the snd_intel8x0 alsa module.
I wonder if the best solution is to put the following by default in any Dapper installation:
1. FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss” in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc (by now it’s set to “alsa09″)
2. The alsa-oss package installed (by now it’s not installed by default)
I didn’t bother changing anything for gstreamer; this was enough to get sound playing in Flash again. It does kinda torque me off that someone just decided, “Eh, let’s configure Firefox so it breaks Flash.” I would have preferred to have been alerted to the problem, and then been asked whether I wanted to live with it, or accept the change. Or better yet, had Firefox configured as Pérez López notes above, which worked without any problems.
Google Browser Sync – good or bad?
I am sure that everyone has heard about Google’s newest Firefox goodness, the Google Browser Sync extension. If you haven’t heard of it, it sounds pretty straight-forward:
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
So the big question is: Is this a good or bad thing? Sure, there’s a major good side to this: having Firefox’s preferences synced among all of your computers in an easy-to-access way. Theoretically, if you ever want to use Firefox, you can also access the ‘net. And if you can access the ‘net, then you can get to Google. So therefore you can always get to your Firefox settings whenever you need them. On the other hand, though, this is a lot of personal information to entrust to Google.
Google Browser Sync does allow you to encrypt anything that it stores. Theoretically, this should mean that only you can access this information. Google itself should not be able to see what you have stored. But how can we verify that this is secure? How can we tell that Google can’t easily get inside the encryption and have access to our cookies, passwords, history and such?
We can’t, of course. But I am feeling fairly brave, so I bit the bullet and installed Browser Sync. Which probably means that I’ll fall victim to either identity thieves or Google data mining. But I’ll take the risk, for now, to see just how well this works.
