monline

Don't take me wrong: I'm all for Ghostery. It's a really great initiative and the functionality seems to be OK. The only problem is with performance.

I've found that in certain cases Firefox can "hang" (wait for something and not respond ) while loading a site after a click. It turns out that another possible issue is with DNS lookups.

On linux you can set protocol handlers (eg. for http and https) to various apps via the network.protocol-handler.expose.* preferences. On Windows Thunderbird does not honor these, so you've to do it a little differently.

The default Firefox cookie management is not very sophisticated. I guess it's OK for users who don't know any better, but people with some knowledge about online security & tracking & enough paranoia to care might want to have a tighter control over which site is allowed to track them and their activities. Cookie Monster is the right tool for the task. It sits in your addon bar and shows you what cookies are set for what domain/site and exactly how the permission for a specific site came to be (from which rules). It gives you easy understanding and access to cookie control.

Bookmarklets are a lot more powerful than the average user would think. There're tons of free bookmarklets on the web, you just have to choose whatever you need.

A few additional links:

• How to add a new PPA source to your list of software repositories
• Firefox PPA
• Thunderbird PPA

I wonder how long will this keep working. There must be a reason for this being the only Fx extension (at least for now) that allows you to download FB albums. I guess FB changes way too fast for most 3rd party apps to keep up in the long term.

Just found out that the reason for the hangs I've been experiencing (for ages) is a 7 year old bug in Firefox. It's even documented in the main "Firefox hangs" Mozilla KB article. Since my PAC file was not too complicated, I can easily live without it. But people seriously depending on a PAC are screwed.

Adobe's Flash Player can eat up quite some CPU power and sometimes the sole reason for the Flash plugin's high CPU usage is badly written embed code. Eg. the wmode=transparent embed parameter is only required if the Flash contains (and uses) transparent sections and it is necessary for correct rendering to utilize transparency. The other performance killer is the quality embed parameter: setting it to best is most of the time an overkill and totally unnecessary. Unfortunately some Flash developers (and website maintainers) lack the knowledge/time/desire to tune their embed code for optimal performance and use these parameters even if they are not needed. Flash Performance Optimizer tries to fix these problems to give you a better user experience.

It seems that nowadays Firefox determines an extension's version compatibility not (solely) based on the install.rdf file that is packaged in the extension (the XPI archive), but some other source (eg. some data from addons.mozilla.org?). I've started going through the install.rdf files of my extensions and found that Nuke Anything Enhanced's install.rdf contains a <em:minVersion>2.0</em:minVersion> and a <em:maxVersion>3.7a1pre</em:maxVersion>. And it works perfectly with my Firefox 4.01. The extension's page at addons.mozilla.org says that it's compatible with Firefox versions ranging from 2.0 to 6.*. If the extension itself does not state this compatibility, then it must come from somewhere else.