Tag Archives: firefox

turn off grid preview of visited websites in firefox new tab page

Leave a reply

If you like me want to have a clean browser, and want to start from a the blank page without any content before you take any action, you can do this since firefox 13:
set the about:config item browser.newtabpage.enabled to false.
I learned it from another website after try a couple of search and finally know that it even has a name new tab page, for details please visit: http://techdows.com/2012/05/disable-firefox-13s-new-tab-page.html

Features like this is pretty annoy, and finally one day, you make a decision to deal with it. And glad there is a good solution to turn it off. The problem comes from that firefox gets auto updated once in a while, and these unwanted features just slipped in.
Aslo remember the last evil feature is it changed the convenient shortcut key ctrl+e used to set keyboard input focus to the search box. And fortunately it changed back after a few releases.

firefox doesn’t allow access to websites with cert problem

Leave a reply

Firefox doesn’t allow you access to a website with problem of the http certificate.
This is good to avoid man in the middle attack, someone in the middle tap in the communication between you and the server.
But if you just want to visit the site, not so care of the security issues, you have to add it’s certificate into your trusted certificate store, this actually compromises the security.
Although internet explorer has been criticized of all the bad of don’t comply with the web standards, it does a good job on the same scenario, it will simply display a warning message and allows you to click on a link to visit the site anyway. User get proper warned and still able to visit the site without the need to add the certificate under question.

Firefox has been identified with the issue to the current version I am using: 13.0.1, screenshot:

Useful firefox shortcut key – firefox cheat sheet

Leave a reply

Here are a few useful shortcut keys in firefox, once you’ve started, you will never get rid of:

  • Open a new tab: CTRL+T
  • close a tab: CTRL+W
  • move to the next tab: CTRL+TAB
  • restore previously closed tab: CTRL+SHIFT+T
  • go to search box: CTRL+E for firefox 3.6 or before, CTRL+K for firefox 4 or later.
  • open a link in new tab: CTRL+CLICK

Among them, this one is especially sweet, save you from an error action:
restore previously closed tab: CTRL+SHIFT+T

If you know some other cool keys missing here, feel free to leave a comment.

Tunnel web/dns traffic through ssh with putty

2 Replies

This post will guide you through on how to tunnel web/dns traffic though ssh with putty (setup a ssh based proxy for firefox or any program that supports a socks proxy)

1. download putty here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

2. create a shortcut to putty.exe on your desktop

3. right click and open the property dialog box of the shutcut

4. Add the content below to the target box of the dialog, replace username, password, servername with your real value, this shutcut will create a socks proxy on your local computer on port 8080, you can change to other port number if you like.

“path to putty.exe” -D 8080 -l username -pw “password” servername

5. Config firefox to parse dns through your ssh tunnel. Open firefox, type “about:config“, enter the blow text into the filter, and set the value to true

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

6. Config firefox to use the socks proxy, follow the menu: tools>options->advanced->connection settings to open a dialog box, fill localhost in the socks host, and set port to 8080 as you have done in step 4 above.

7. Double click the shortcut you’ve created in step 4 to start the ssh tunnel, you have your web/dns traffic tunnel through secure ssh now.

Run firefox with multiple settings (profiles)

Leave a reply

To run firefox in multiple settings (profiles) like different users concept in windows, follow a few steps below:

1. Open Run program box, press WIN + R (win is windows key on your keyboard) to start the run box on windows

2. Create a profile, type:
firefox -P "profile2"
in the textbox, you will launch the firefox profile chooser and able to create a new profile there.

firefox create profile

This default command will try to run the firefox in the current process, which is not what we want if you already have firefox opened, to have our other profile setting run on a different process, use the -no-remote option as below:
firefox -no-remote -P "profile2"

3. Create a shortcut to make it easily switch to our newly create profile, make sure you add the options: -no-remote -P "profile2" at the end of the target box.

firefox profile shortcut

Ctrl+E shortcut is still missing in firefox 6

Leave a reply

Surprised to find out that Firefox has jump 3 major versions in this year 2011, but since firefox 4, ctrl+E to focus your keyboard input to the search engine box is missing. This is the main reason hold me back from upgrade into the newer versions.

Have knowing that Firefox 6 coming out, so I download and checkout, still doesn’t work. I don’t know the judgment to remove this useful shortcut, but it really ruins the experience of using firefox.

Firefox version 3.6.22 seems to be unstable

1 Reply

Firefox seems have a quick update habit, currently it automatically update to 3.6.22. While using it for a few days, I find it will freeze all of the firefox windows periodically. Especially when it takes some time to open a new url, it will freeze all the windows, not just the window where the tab is in. And I am not sure if it’s from firefox, I find if I am downloading large files over 100MB, the download process is very easy to fail. My system is: windows 2003 sp2. Not sure if it’s a common issue, maybe they are hurry to move to newer firefox 6.0, so older version is simply not being taken care of. Anyway, I think maybe I should try firefox 6.0 soon.