John Hesch

There has been a security hole identified in Firefox and all users should install the patch .

For the daring, Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is available for download.

The new Firefox features improved popup blocking, drag-and-drop tab shuffling, SVG support, improved Mac OS X support, more prominent update notifications, a feature that will delete private data with a keyboard shortcut, a “Report a broken Web site wizard,” faster Back/Forward action, and more. Also included are lots of bugfixes and security updates.

Thanks Download Squad.

If you use the Adsense Notifier extension to watch your Adsense stats in Firefox you probably noticed it’s broken. Google has updated their pages which breaks the extension. Mincus has an update which fixes the extension.

Here’s a GreaseMonkey script that will prevent accidental clicks on your own AdSense ads. I’ve clicked on my own ads by accident before which in doing so could get me kicked off the program.

There is a severe security threat with versions of GreaseMonkey prior to 0.3.5. If you’re running the popular Firefox extension, update now.

Tomorrow (Thursday) Google will release Google Toolbar For Firefox which will include everything available now for IE users.

Google will also be releasing two new Firefox extensions:

• Google Suggest: Will allow you to utilize Google Suggest directly from the toolbar. So, as you enter your query into the toolbar, you’ll see suggested search terms.
• Google Send To Phone: Will allow you to quickly send the text from any web page to a mobile phone as a text message. The service is free but make sure to check with your mobile phone provider to determine the charges (if any) to receive text messages.

Found via SearchEngineWatch

Ok, I might be a little slow on this but I recently downloaded and installed GreaseMonkey for Firefox. GreaseMonkey is an extension that allows you to run user scripts on particular web sites.

There are over 200 user scripts available. For example, I like to use Titan TV to check out what’s on the tube, but they have a really annoying advertisement that runs the length of the page. It must use some sort of JavaScript because it causes Firefox to jam sometimes. But there is a user script that I installed into GreaseMonkey that removes that banner every time I visit Titan TV.

I like to use Del.icio.us to save my bookmarks. One of the issues I have with Del.icio.us is that on my list of bookmarks there is an edit link but not a delete link. It takes me another click to get to the Del.icio.us provided delete link. Conveniently, there is a GreaseMonkey script that adds a delete link right next to the edit link by each of my bookmarks.

I use Bloglines to read my RSS feeds. They have a clipping feature which allows me to save a particular entry to go back later and read. With this GreaseMonkey script I can clip entries to Del.icio.us instead. That’s more convenient for me.

Good stuff!

April 2005 browser market share survey by Janco Associates shows Firefox Web browser increasing its share to 10.28%. Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the leader with 83.07%.

From IT Facts.

By the end of February 2005, Firefox accounted for 6.17% of browsers, up from 5.59% in January 2005, according to NetApplications. During the same period, Microsoft’s browser fell from 90.31% to 89.04%.

Some webmasters mistakingly add a target attribute to a download link and so if you’re using Firefox you’ll get an empty tab. This extension Disable Targets For Downloads.

New Firefox update. Upgrade to Firefox 1.0.1 with the latest security updates.

Html Validator for Firefox

HTML Validator is an Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation to Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

The extension is based on Tidy. This program, Tidy, was originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. And now extended and improved by a lot of persons.

Tidy is a helpful program that tries to help people to correct their HTML errors. It finds HTML errors and classifies them in 2 categories:

* warnings: HTML errors that Tidy can fix automatically
* errors: HTML errors that Tidy cannot fix or understand.

If you have only Warnings, press on the “Clean up” button and Tidy will do his best to propose you a cleaned version of your page.

Google Maps was just released today and already there is a Firefox search bar plugin.

From Secunia:

Eric Johanson has reported a security issue in multiple browsers, which can be exploited by a malicious web site to spoof the URL displayed in the address bar, SSL certificate, and status bar.

You can test your browser for this vulnerability at the Secunia site. Firefox does get spoofed and until Mozilla comes out with a fix be careful clicking on links to websites with sensitive information like Paypal or your bank’s website.

BetterSearch is an extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results. Works great on del.icio.us and Google. I have been using the Google Preview extension but this one is much better.