Articles about Firefox

Ads are pretty much universally hated; in the list of lovable things in the world, ads rank pretty far down. On TV, in movie theaters, in magazines and online, ads are forced upon us and are impossible to avoid. Except that's not true online. Ad-blocking software can be used to filter out the stuff you don’t want to see, making for a happier web browsing experience.

However, it turns out that installing an ad-blocking tool like, ooh... I dunno... AdBlock Plus... is not enough to prevent the appearance of unwanted advertisements. Some time ago we learned about the whitelist operated by AdBlock Plus and now the Financial Times reports that big companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have paid to be included on the list so their ads are no longer blocked.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 35.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 35.0 due to follow in the coming days.

Firefox 35 extends the Firefox Hello real-time communication client tool with a new rooms-based conversations model, plus adds more features to the new search user interface along with improved preferences. Android users gain improved geolocation tools.

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Firefox is an excellent browser, and its configurability is a major plus. If you don’t like some aspect of the program then there’s probably a tweak which can help.

Keeping your preferred settings can be more of a challenge, though, especially if an extension changes one or more of them without asking. Preferences Monitor is a Firefox addon which can help by monitoring all your about:config changes, warning you of any that seem dubious, and allowing you to undo them with a click.

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When Mozilla announced that Yahoo would be replacing Google as the default search choice in Firefox in the US, there were raised eyebrows everywhere. After all, Google has been baked into Firefox for the past decade, and Yahoo’s days as a top search engine are long gone. Or were long gone at least.

Yahoo’s inclusion in Firefox has given the ailing search engine a major boost, helping it achieve its highest US search share since 2009. Unsurprisingly, this share increase came at the expense of Google.

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It’s happened to us all. You’ve spent an age at a website, deep in thought, working on a lengthy forum post or similar wall of text, when the browser window closes unexpectedly -- and you’ve lost everything.

You could get angry, maybe throw things, before calming down and starting again. But it might be better to install Textarea Cache, a free Firefox addon which saves the contents of text fields locally, as you type, and makes them ready for recovery in seconds.

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You’re at a web page, maybe reading a forum post, looking at a list of links. You’d like to copy them somewhere, maybe share them with someone else. But your browser has no way to work with every link on a page, so you must copy them individually, select all the text and edit it later, maybe just bookmark the site and come back when you’ve more time.

It’s annoying. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Not if you’ve equipped yourself with the Firefox addon, Copy All Links.

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If you’d like to know when your favorite websites are updated then you could monitor their RSS or ATOM feeds, maybe a Twitter account or Facebook page. But if they don’t have any of these -- or checking them all seems like too much effort -- then you’ll probably just keep revisiting the site, again, and again, and again.

Update Scanner is a Firefox addon which saves time by automatically detecting and notifying you about changes to your chosen web pages.

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Two weeks ago Mozilla announced that it would be jettisoning Google as the default search option in Firefox, opting instead to go for Yahoo, the search engine that most right-thinking people stopped using, and caring about, years ago (at least Mozilla didn’t select Ask.com).

Firefox 34 launched at the start of the month, with Yahoo as the default choice for US users, and instantly the newly selected search engine saw a massive increase in usage.

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Apple makes some really great products. Quite frankly, you really can't go wrong with anything it makes. Sure, I prefer Windows and Linux distributions on the desktop, but OS X is a fine operating system too. The true bread and butter for the fruit-logo company, however, is not its desktop operating system, but mobile -- iOS. I own an iPad and enjoy it for what it is, but I find iOS to be a spectacularly terrible operating system, as it is too restrictive and dumb-downed. For some, the designed simplicity is a benefit, but for advanced users like myself, lack of a user-accessible file system is a non-starter.

The truly terrible crime, however, is that Apple does not allow browser engines other than its own. Google chose to offer a neutered version of Chrome for iOS, but Mozilla famously did not bring Firefox. I was rather proud of Mozilla for sticking to its beliefs and refusing to give in to Apple's policies. Yes, it sucks not having Firefox on iOS, but I supported the decision. Today, however, Mozilla concedes as it is bowing down to Apple in an effort to target more users. In other words, Mozilla is biting into a shiny red apple, but I fear that it is poisoned!

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Mozilla has released Firefox 34.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 34.0 due to follow in the coming days.

Firefox 34 rolls out the new Firefox Hello real-time communication client and promises faster and simpler persona switching. It also includes a number of improved features, widens support for HTML5 and unveils a new WebIDE app for developers.

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While I keep the list short this year, it wouldn't be U.S. Thanksgiving without my writing about gratitude, and why some tech company's executives, employees, and partners should prostrate and pray "Thanks".

Let's start off with Google, which continues a great run that started with Larry Page's return as CEO in April 2011. If he's not all smiles this Turkey Day, someone should slap that man aside the head. I could tick off a hundred things for which he should give thanks. For brevity's sake, so you can get back to the big game and bigger bird, I select some things that might not come to mind.

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Google is one of the best search engines, providing relative results with a clean design. There is a problem though -- Google also offers a web browser. Why is that a problem? Well, it is a strange thing for a competing web browser to use the Google search engine. It's like Ford using Chevy parts in its cars -- blasphemy!

A great example of this is Mozilla Firefox. The Chrome web browser is slowly eroding Firefox usage share, so it has felt odd that Mozilla was sticking with Google's search engine for so long. Well, today everything changes, as Mozilla selects Yahoo as the new default search engine in Firefox for both desktop and mobile. Will users applaud or decry the announcement?

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Installed apps are becoming a thing of the past. Microsoft is just one of a raft of technology companies gradually moving to the cloud and the latest display of this is a new beta version of Skype for Web. The messaging tool has been designed to be used in a web browser without the need for plugins, extensions or other software. At least that is the aim. During the beta stages you'll still have to install a small plugin.

Work being carried out by the Internet Explorer developers should bring plugin-free Real-Time Communications (RTC) to browsers in the near future, and Skype for Web will be able to take advantage of this. The beta is not being made available to everyone straight away, so you'll need to check your account to see if you can try it out.

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The web browser is a very under-appreciated program. While the web is not the Internet in its entirety, for many people, the web is all they know. In other words, people live in the web browser, and enjoy it immensely, but don't think about the software that is acting as a portal to their favorite websites.

Mozilla's Firefox is certainly not the first web browser, but it is responsible for many design cues and technologies found in other browsers. Not to mention, Mozilla is on the forefront of fighting for an open web and Firefox shares that ideology -- by using the open-source browser, you are choosing to support a free web. Today, Firefox celebrates its 10th Birthday and to celebrate, I ask you to think of it fondly. Well technically, Firefox's Birthday was yesterday, but who cares, let's party!

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In a surprise move, Mozilla has unveiled Firefox 33.1 FINAL for desktop alongside Firefox for Android 33.1, introducing some major new privacy features in the process.

The update adds a new Forget button for wiping activity over a user-defined period at the click of a button, plus introduces DuckDuckGo searching, which allows users to search without being tracked.

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