3 Great Firefox 15 Features You Should Enable Right Now

Mozilla debuted Firefox 15 just a few days ago, and unlike most of the recent releases, version 15 includes some major changes. The most notable among them is an improvement in the way the browser uses and releases memory. Mozilla has been working to fix the memory leak problem that has been plaguing the browser for years, and although I won’t hold my breath, Firefox 15 is showing appreciable improvement. According to the organization, the developers have managed to patch Firefox 15 solving the most common add-on leaks. The best part is that add-on developers don't have to do anything as the fix applies to all add-ons.

While most changes are performance based, there are a few new features that users can benefit from during the day to day use of their browser. You won’t see them because they are disabled by default. And that’s for good reason – they are not ready for prime time as the developers feel there are still a few issues that needs to be ironed out before the new features can be released to the masses. If you are willing to accept the occasional hiccups that you might encounter on the way, here are 3 hidden features that you should enable in Firefox 15 right away.

Native PDF Viewer

Mozilla has been working on PDF rendering functionality since first introducing pdf.js a year ago. Initially available as a separate PDF Viewer add-on for the browser, pdf.js displays PDF files in HTML5 with JavaScript using Canvas and SVG APIs. The PDF viewer functionality is now built-in by default and its user interface was refreshed several times during the development stage.

How to Enable?
Go to about:config, search for "pdfjs.disabled". Double click on it to change the value to "false." Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

Click-to-play Plugins

Click-to-play plugins disable plugins by default, such as embedded Flash player, so videos in YouTube will not autoplay as soon as the page loads; you will have to click the Play button to load the Flash player. This is a good thing as it prevents any Flash content from auto playing.
Both Google Chrome and Opera has had a "click-to-play" plugins for more than a year now. Now Firefox has one as well.

How to Enable?
Go to about:config, search for "plugins.click_to_play". Double click on it to change the value to "true”. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

Options in Tab

Taking a cue from Google Chrome, Mozilla developers have included an option in Firefox 15 that allows users to view the browser’s Options window in a tab instead of in a separate window. Peculiarly, only the Options window is affected by the change; the Downloads, Bookmarks and History still open in their own windows.

How to Enable?
Go to about:config, search for "browser.preferences.InContent". Double click on it to change the value to "true”. You don’t to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

FVD Speed Dial With Online Sync for Firefox and Chrome

All new web browsers utilizes the empty space on a new tab to display a row of thumbnails of your most recently and frequently visited web sites. Opera calls this the Speed Dial, after the speed dial feature found in most phones, while other browsers simply call it the ‘new tab page’. In Firefox and Chrome, the new tab page is not very customizable. The extent of customization that is allowed on the new tab page depends on the browser you are using. In Firefox you can arrange the order in which the thumbnails appear and pin select sites so that they are always available. In Chrome, you can arrange the thumbnails but you cannot pin sites. This is why third-party speed dial/new tab page extensions are very popular among Chrome and Firefox users. However, they still lack the ability synchronize your speed dial across all your computers and devices. Currently, the only speed dial extension that supports this is FVD Speed Dial.

The ability to sync online is just one of the many perks of using FVD Speed Dial. This add-on is highly customizable and supports a range of features like custom backgrounds, custom dials, organized groups, most visited dials and more.




Initially, FVD Speed Dial will display your most visited websites, but you can replace the tiles with your preferred websites. The extension also lets users group sites into multiple speed dial pages and quickly switch from one page to another. For instance, you can create groups for social networking sites, blogs, news and whatever you find useful. Also available is a list of most visited sites, a list of recently closed tabs and a recover session button that lets you recover your last browsing session, that is, the pages that were open when you closed Firefox the last time.

Options for customizing the appearance of the speed dial page are plenty. You can set everything from dial size, dial opacity, background colors, background images, fonts, font size, and even minute things like whether or not to show the URL below each speed dials.

FVD Speed Dial for Firefox

FVD Speed Dial for Chrome

Other Features

• Block by URL or Domain. This feature allows you to exclude unwanted URLs from appearing in your most visited Speed Dial group.
• Background templates (similar to wallpapers in Windows) in browser window.
• Mouse gestures for switching between sped dials and various viewing modes.
• Four thumbnail sizes: Big, Medium, Small, List (just a list for those who prefer a compact view)
• Several modes for setting the background image: Fill, Fit, Stretch, Tile, Center same as in Windows.
• Activate or deactivate Flash, Silverlight and Java Script when creating a screenshot for the Dial.
• Customizable page opening mode in the Speed Dial: in the current tab, in a new tab (Hotkey: Ctrl+Click), in a background tab (Hotkey:Ctrl+Shift+Click).
• Customizable number of rows in the Speed Dial. Auto mode available.

Comodo IceDragon: New Browser Based on Firefox with Enhanced Security

Popular security software developer Comodo has developed a Firefox re-mix with focus on improving the default security features offered on Mozilla’s creation. Called Comodo IceDragon, the new browser is named similar to Comodo Dragon, their implementation of the Chromium browser with potentially privacy-compromising features removed. Comodo IceDragon is built on the Mozilla browser core and combines the basic functionalities of the original code with Comodo’s security features.

In this first release, the browser includes just two basic security features - Comodo Secure DNS and Site Inspector. Comodo Secure DNS is a DNS lookup service that employs malware detection and cloud-based scanning aimed to prevent malicious, harmful and scam sites from loading in your browser. The Site inspector is a malware scanning and blacklist monitoring service for websites. The Site inspector tool integrated into Comodo IceDragon is, however, a demand only scanning service. It doesn’t proactively protect the user from visiting malicious websites even if the website URL is blacklisted under Comodo Site Inspector.

Comodo IceDragon also includes a social sharing button that allows users to quickly share links on different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The social sharing button is readily visible in the toolbar next to the Site Inspector button. Thankfully, there is an option to hide both the buttons.

Aside from the black and blue hues and some visual differences, Comodo IceDragon’s interface is identical to Mozilla Firefox. Users can enjoy the same sort of flexibility and customization as in Firefox, thanks to the support for Firefox add-ons. But users who take advantage of Firefox Sync to synchronize their data across multiple Firefox installation will have to sacrifice this functionality as Firefox Sync is absent in Comodo IceDragon.

Currently, there’s not much to write about Comodo IceDragon and the so called “security features” aren’t impressive enough to lure users from the massively popular Firefox browser. These features can be easily replicated in your current browser, no matter what, using system wide Comodo Secure DNS and any website blacklisting/malware scanning service. Firefox also doesn’t suffer from inherent privacy issues like Google Chrome does, which is one of the major selling point for Google Chrome clones such as Comodo Dragon and SRWare Iron.

The only selling point for Comodo IceDragon is security, but I see no reason why Firefox cannot be made more secure by third-party extensions.

How to Secure or Password Protect your Firefox

How to Password Protect Firefox

Firefox has an option to set a Master password to protect sensitive information in your Firefox profile. However, this is limited to only protecting unauthorized users from viewing your saved passwords on websites. The master password doesn’t prevent users from launching Firefox or opening pages or accessing your bookmarks. It also doesn’t prevent users from accessing sites the browser is already logged in to. If you are looking to protect your entire Firefox profile or the browser itself and not just your passwords, we have two add-ons for the purpose.

Before you can use these add-ons, you have to setup a master password. For this, click on the Tools menu and then click on Options. In the Options window, click on the Security icon. Check the box “Use a master password” and then define your password.

StartupMaster

StartupMaster is a simple add-on for Firefox that asks for the master password at launch. Every time you start Firefox, you will get a password prompt as shown below, before the main window is displayed. If there is no master password set, the extension does nothing.



StartupMaster also fixes the annoying multiple password prompt issue. Once you are logged in with the master password, Firefox won’t bother you with password prompts when you attempt to view your saved passwords.

Master Password+

Master Password+ greatly enhances the security feature of the master password by allowing owners to completely lockdown the browser, set browsing time limits, boot out inactive users, and more.
What Master Password+ can do:

• Ask for master password on Firefox startup
• Exit Firefox when a number of wrong password attempts are made
• Automatically lock browser when user is inactive for a certain period of time
• Automatically lock browser after a certain time has elapsed even if the user is active. This is useful to enforce browsing time limits on the user
• Block multiple password prompts when the user is already logged in
• Use keyboard hotkeys to lock the browser, lock the active window or lock all windows

PictuTools: Add Several Online Image Editing Tools to Context Menu [Firefox]

PictuTools: Add Several Online Image Editing Tools to Context Menu [Firefox]

There are lot of online resources that lets you change, resize, crop and enhance images without having to learn to use heavy weights like Adobe Photoshop. Judging by the sheer number of such tools available, and the interest in acquiring them by the likes of Google it can be assumed that they are immensely popular. If you happen to use them often and have these sites tucked away in your bookmarks, and if you also use Firefox, you’ll find PictuTools pretty useful.

This add-on implements a context-menu which gives you quick access to several online services providing image manipulation tools such as Pixlr, BeFunky, SumoEditing, LunaPic and some more. You can convert images to a number of different formats including EPS, GIF, ICO, TIFF, PDF, TGA and WebP, perform reverse image search, view EXIF data, identify fonts and generate QRCodes among a few. It also offers a couple of image hosting sites to upload images for re-sharing, and an option to share images on Facebook and Twitter.

When you want to edit an image you found online, simply right click on the image and choose the service which you want to use. This will take you to the service provider’s website with the image automatically uploaded and ready to work upon. At the moment the add-on only works on web images and not on local files on your hard disk.
The full list of supported services are given below.
Edit

• BeFunky: BeFunky lets you apply photo effects, enhance, edit pictures and photos online. Cartoon, sketch, painting, pop art and more...
• DrPic: Crop, Resize, Add Text, Special Effects, and Host your pictures online for free (with ads, in HTML/JS)
• FotoFlexer: FotoFlexer lets you remove blemishes, change skin/hair color, morph photos and more! 100% free (with ads)
• Iaza: Provides several conversion and effect tools by just clicking links
• LunaPic: Edit Your Pictures with this basic but powerful online editor (ads, HTML)
• Phixr: Online photo editor with no Flash required
• Pixenate: Edit photos online, fast and easily - No plugins required.
• PixLR: Flash-based online image editor.
• PixLR (express): Flash-based online image editor, express/basic version
• PixLR (o-matic): Flash-based online image editor which lets you apply different effects easily
• SumoPainting: With SumoPaint you can Create, Share and Remix your Images.
• Zygomatic: HTML-based editor. Resize, filters, sepia, crop, rotate, flip, effects
• DeMotivational Poster: Meme Generator
• pomf.me: Captioning tool
• Ancient Look: Makes the image look like very old photographs
• DynamicDrive Optimizer: Lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site.
• SmushIt Optimizer: Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a "lossless" tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality.

Host

• ImageShack: Host on ImageShack
• Imgur: Host on imgur.com image hosting
• OverPic: Host on overpic.het image hosting
• PostImage: Host on postimage.org

Information

• Exif viewer: View EXIF information for the image
• MetaPicZ: Metadata and exif viewer
• HTTP Viewer: See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser

Share

• AddThis: Share to any of the supported websites by AddThis
• Facebook: Share on Facebook
• Twitter: Tweet this image
• QR Code: Obtain a QR code which point to this image.

Similar

• Baidu: Reverse image search using the Japanesse Baidu Service
• Cydral: Reverse image search using Cydral
• Google: Reverse image search using Google Images
• TinEye: Reverse image search using TinEye
• Yandex: Reverse image search using the Russian Yandex Service

Misc

• Decode QR Code: Lets you decode a 1D or 2D barcode
• i2OCR: Free online OCR that converts images into editable text.
• WhatFontIs: Send the image to whatfontis.com to identify the font used.
• WhatTheFont: Find what the type of font is used on the image
• WhatsItsColor: Find the complementary and primary color of the image
• ZoomIt: Converts your image to the Deep Zoom format, which lets you smoothly and efficiently explore the whole image, no matter how large.

Create Firefox Desktop Shortcuts for Specific Profiles

Firefox stores a user's preferences and data such as installed add-ons, saved passwords, history, bookmarks and others in a unique profile. The first time you start Firefox, it automatically creates a default profile and stores all settings associated with the profile within a special profile folder on your computer. Your profile folder is kept in a separate place from the Firefox program so that if something ever goes wrong with Firefox your information will still be there. It also means you can uninstall Firefox without losing your settings and you don't have to reinstall Firefox to clear your information or troubleshoot a problem.

It’s also possible to have multiple Firefox profiles, each containing a separate set of user information. Different profiles doesn’t necessarily mean different users. The same user can have more than one profile. For instance, you can have a profile for work and another for home. Each profile can have different sets of extensions and bookmarks and customization.

Previously I showed how to create and manage profiles in Firefox using the Profile Manager. Typically, you launch the Profile Manager by using the “–p” switch. That means, you launch Firefox by typing “firefox –p” in the Run dialog box.

Make sure that Firefox is not running. If it is open, exit it before running this command.

This will launch the Firefox Profile Manager.

From here you can create new profiles or choose an existing profile to start Firefox with. Now clearly, this involves too many extra steps. So here is a nifty trick.

Create a new shortcut of Firefox on your desktop or start menu. Right-click on the shortcut and then click on Properties.

Now on the Target filed, add “-p <profile-name>” at the end of the path. It should look something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p test

This shortcut will open Firefox loaded with the profile named “test”. No need to go through the Profile Manager. You can do this for every profile you have created.

If you want to launch a different profile while one Firefox instance is already running, Firefox will just open a new window of the active profile. To fix this issue, add the parameter “-no-remote” to each shortcut’s Target field.

In our example, the Target field becomes:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p -no-remote test

This trick fixes another annoying issue. When you try to open the private browsing mode, Firefox closes the current session. This is totally undesirable. But with the “-no-remote” parameter in place, you will be able to open Firefox private browsing mode and normal browsing together at the same time.

[via SumTips]

Tab Stacking Comes to Firefox, Brings Better Tabs Overflow Handling

Firefox has a peculiar way of handling tabs overflow that occurs when users open too many tabs for the tab bar to display properly. By default, Firefox pushes the extra tabs off the screen as new ones get spawned; the tab bar acting as a conveyor belt of sort. Arrows appear on both edges of the tab bar that allows the user to horizontally scroll the tab bar and access the out-of-screen tabs. Personally, I find this behavior disorienting.

It seems the accepted rule for handling tabs overflow, as followed by Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and the majority of browsers, is to resize them to accommodate new tabs. So I use the Noverflow add-on (now called Prevent Tab Overflow) to get this behavior in Firefox. This might not be the best way to handle tabs overflow but definitely better than the way Firefox does.

Another way to tackle tabs overflow is to use stacks, the concept introduced by Opera in version 11, where you manually drag and drop tabs over each other to create stacks. Chrome followed suit and added an experimental automatic tab stacking feature. Now tab stacking is available in Firefox through the Tab Stacking add-on.

Tab Stacking automatically stacks tabs on top of each other when the tab bar in Firefox becomes crowded. The add-on does this dynamically by stacking tabs on either far side of the active tab. The tabs goes in and out of the stack as the user changes focus from one tab to the next. There is no permanent stack of tabs. The image below will give you an idea of how this tab stacking works.

The active tab and the three tabs around it are in an expanded state. The tabs immediately next to them are collapsed in a stack. As you can see, there are two stacks on both end of the tab bar. When you change focus to a new tab, the stack changes.

The user can control the minimum width, which is the width of the active tabs and those immediately around it, and the width of the stacked tabs. There is another option to set the maximum width of the stacked tabs.

Tab Stacking is a proof-of-concept add-on in alpha version and may contain several bugs.

Related: 10 Best Tab Management Extensions for Chrome

Get Now Playing Notifications for YouTube Videos on Desktop [Firefox and Chrome]

Some media players show pop-up notification on the desktop whenever the track changes even if the media player is minimized or not in focus. I’m not particularly fond of those, but if you are, you will love the Now Playing notification for videos playing in YouTube. If you are wondering why one should need notification when they can see for themself which video is playing, you are forgetting that YouTube is the most popular destination for listening to music.

Most users will load a video album playlist, click the play button and minimize the browser or otherwise carry on surfing. With YouTube notification, these users get the same functionality they get from their desktop media player. And here is the interesting part: these notifications are displayed on the desktop, out of the browser.

 

Now Playing YouTube Notification in Chrome (left) and Firefox (right).

Whenever a new video loads from the playlist, a small window pops open near the notification tray displaying the title of the song. The notifications stays just long enough for you to notice and disappears on it’s own.

Want these notifications? Get them for Firefox and Chrome.

Related: How to Download All YouTube Videos in a Playlist

Set Maximum Number of Tabs to Open in Firefox

Max Tabs is an add-on for Firefox that allows users to set the maximum number of tabs that could be opened in any Firefox window. If you are asking “Why?”, the answer is simple: to bring order into tab madness. If you have the habit of forever opening new tabs without closing the ones already open (something that happens to me often when reading Wikipedia articles) you will agree that it’s a good idea to have someone monitoring over you.

Another reason why you may want to limit the number of tabs is if memory is scarce. By limiting the number of pages you open, you limit the amount of memory Firefox consumes which makes the browser less prone to crashes and improves responsiveness.

By default Max Tabs the maximum number of tabs opened in a window is set to 10. The extension keeps count of the number of opened tabs on the lower-right on the addon bar. If you try to go over the limit, Max Tabs displays a message “You’ve decided not to open more than x number of tabs” and promptly closes the new tab.

If you decide you really need to open the extra tab, you have to disable Max Tabs. Thankfully, this is easy as Max Tabs is a restartless add-on. You can swiftly enable or disable the add-on without restarting Firefox.

Also read how to Load Tabs Progressively in Firefox

Turn Bookmarklets into Pretty Firefox Buttons

If you use a lot of bookmarklets, you probably have them cramped inside your bookmarks bar. Some users suggest using folders to organize bookmarklets, just like you organize your bookmarks. But if you want to get them out of your bookmarks bar (which serve a totally different purpose) and into the toolbar where they should logically reside, here is nice trick.

Install the Custom Buttons add-on. Restart Firefox and enable the Menu Bar. From the View menu click on 'Add new button...'. You can get to this option by right clicking on the toolbar too. This way, you won’t have to enable the Menu bar.

Enter a Name for the button, but leave the Button URL empty. The add-on comes with a few colored stars, but we will use 16x16 favicon for the service. Grab the favicons of the services whose bookmarklet you wish to use by going to getfavicon.org and entering the URL of the service. Save the favicons somewhere on your hard drive and then load them into the button creator.

Under the Code tab, add the JavaScript of the bookmarklet and wrap it like this:

loadURI("BOOKMARKLET-GOES-HERE");

You can get the JavaScript of your existing bookmarklet by simply coping the URL from the bookmarklet button.

Once your button is created, click View > Toolbars > Customize, and then drag the buttons from there onto any part of your browser toolbar.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Move Firefox Add-on Icons Inside the Address Bar

Firefox allows you to freely shuffle the browser’s buttons and icons added by extensions around on the interface. With the exception of the Menu bar, you can place icons on different toolbars - the Navigation bar, bookmarks bar, the add-on bar (which is specially created for putting all your icons) and even on the far right on the Tab bar. That should be choices enough for the user. But ever fancy putting your icons inside the address bar? Yeah, that is possible too.

url-addon-bar is an an add-on for Firefox that moves all icons in the Add-on bar inside the address bar field. The visibility of the icons can be controlled by enabling or disabling the Add-on bar. Once url-addon-bar is installed, the Add-on bar is no longer available at the bottom of the Firefox window.

You customize the icons inside the address bar the same way you customize Firefox’s interface – by drag and drop. During the customization process, the Add-on bar temporarily appears at the right place, i.e. at the bottom. After you have dragged icons in and out of the Add-on bar, click Done and the icons will once again appear inside the address bar.

The only problem with url-addon-bar is that the icons disappear in fullscreen mode.

Visualize How Old Your Passwords Are in Firefox

A commonly recommended “good practice” for security is that we should change our passwords regularly. There is some debate regarding how frequently it should be. The period usually ranges from 14 days (a strict policy) to 90 days (a liberal one), while some security experts say 25 years should be fine. Technically, there is no point in changing your passwords unless your password is compromised or you have reasons to believe it may be compromised. Some systems, such as banks, force password change upon their users every few weeks. In addition to being annoying, such policies have a detrimental effect on security, according to one blogger.

The downside of changing passwords is that it makes them harder to remember. And if you force people to change their passwords regularly, they're more likely to choose easy-to-remember -- and easy-to-guess -- passwords than they are if they can use the same passwords for many years.

The primary reason to give a password an expiration date is to limit the amount of time a lost or stolen password can be used by someone else. If a hacker gets your password either by guessing or stealing it, he can access your network as long as your password is valid. If you update your password every 90 days, the most he can get is a quarter of a year’s worth of benefit out of it, assuming the attacker is a passive one who simply eavesdrop over time without alerting you that he's there. Practically, that doesn’t happen. An attacker who gets the password to your bank is going to empty out your bank account, and 14 days is more than enough time to do it.

Anyways, the purpose of this article is not to discuss the merits of changing password regularly but to bring to light a new tool released by Mozilla Labs.

Password Age Visualizer is an add-on for Firefox using which you can see how long you've been using your passwords and which ones are due for a change. You'll see all of the passwords you use listed, with the ones over 200 days old highlighted in red. As you continue to change to new passwords and update your password manager, the bars will change back to blue.

Underneath each password is its age in days, and the bar that extends to the right represents how many days have passed since its first use. If the bar is red in color, that password is over 200 days old and should be changed. Additionally, each bar has black "ticks" on it, which represent a point in time that password was used on a new website. Hover over a tick to see the site's name.

The add-on works only if you use Firefox’s password manager to store your passwords. Since I don’t, I wasn’t able to test it. Personally, I prefer using a password generator that generates passwords on-the-fly based on a master password and the domain name of the website. That way I only have to remember one password and none of my bazillion passwords are written down or saved anywhere on my computer. I feel more secure that way.

Coming back to changing passwords, it’s far more important to choose a good password in the first place than to change it later.

Tab Notifier: Get Notification When Title of a Browser Tab Changes

People who access their email accounts or social networking and instant messaging application from the web browser, often miss real-time notification of incoming messages and notification about activities from their friends. The only indication of new messages received is a flashing tab icon, which can be easily missed if the tab is not in focus and not seen at all if the browser is minimized. The person at the other end will wait and wonder whether you are still at your desk. Half an hour later she will have logged out because you were too busy with an Excel sheet or some YouTube video perhaps to notice the tiny flashes.

There isn’t a good notification system for browser based applications, which is one of the reasons why some people prefer to use dedicated programs for email or social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. An email program has many more features than what Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo offers, and you are able to do things on a Twitter or Facebook client that you can’t on a web browser. This is nice if you are on your personal computer. In an office computer, however, you are usually not allowed to have these programs installed. The browser is your only window to the web.

The problem of missed notification can be quickly fixed with the Tab Notifier extension available on Firefox and Chrome.

This extension shows a desktop notification when the title of a tab changes while the tab is not in focus. A desktop notification is an alert window that appears outside the browser window, in a corner of your screen. Click on it to open the tab that triggered it. Tab Notifier works with any website that changes the tab title to indicate new messages, which includes Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and tons of other websites.

Tab Notifier for Firefox offers more control on which websites are allowed to display notification, than Tab Notifier for Chrome. In Chrome you can suppress notification from certain websites by setting up a list of websites to ignore. In Firefox, aside from an “Ignore list” you can also configure a “Watched list” which is the exact opposite of an ignore list, and optionally make Tab Notifier watch for a specific phrase in the title and notify you only when the browser tab displays that phrase.

To add websites to the ignore or watch list, open the website in question, right-click on an empty space and use the ‘Configure tab notifier for site’ action from the context menu.

From the window that opens you can configure each website individually.

Hate Icons? Get Text Buttons on New Gmail Interface

One of the many problems with Gmail’s new design is the lack of text on the buttons. A black & white icon on a black & white button conveys nothing. Does a square box with a downward pointing arrow say ‘Archive’ to you? Looks more like ‘Download’ to me. Does an octagon with an exclamation mean some kind of a warning? No. It is just spam.

“Well, I am a literate person and it is easier for me to recognize the ‘Answer’ or ‘Archive’ and ‘Delete’ button with texts than trying to recognize and remember arrows and a great host of other stupid unrecognizable icons.” complained one user in Gmail’s support forum. He isn’t alone. Millions are enraged over the changes. If you are one of them, here are a few solutions, based on the browser you use.

Google Chrome

Gmelius is an extension for Chrome that does a lot more than add text button to the new interface. It makes Gmail’s new interface more usable by adding custom colored subtle row highlights, makes header auto-expandable, adds a scroll to top functionality, removes the "People Widget" and use the space left to read/write your emails, removes advertisements, removes chat box, and of course, inserts text into the iconized buttons.

All changes are optional so you get to choose the changes you want.

Firefox

If you use Firefox install the Stylish add-on and then install this userstyle. You can also install this as plain CSS or user JS. Aside from restoring text to the buttons, this userstyle will also colorize the icons on the buttons. So cool.

This userstyle is actually a combination of two different userstyles – one that adds text to the buttons and one that colorizes the icons. If you wish not to have the icons colorized, you can install this userstyle.

Opera

Opera users just needs to install the GMail-TextButtons extension and get this result.

FoxE9: Internet Explorer 9 Skin for Firefox

FoxE9 is an add-on for Firefox that skins the browser and makes it look like Internet Explorer 9 in appearance. There are two perfectly legitimate reasons why anybody would want to do that.

1. Unlike its predecessors, IE9 has an attractive interface. It’s understandable if one wishes to have the same interface on Firefox.

2. You want your parents to embrace Firefox and all its open source goodness but they are resilient to change. You can secretly change Firefox’s appearance to resemble IE9, replace IE9’s shortcut with Firefox and your parents will never know.

FoxE9 turns this

into this

For comparison, here is how the actual IE9 interface looks like.

Pretty good, huh?

Add-on Sync and Chrome to Firefox Data Migration Coming to Firefox 11

Firefox 11 Beta, which is now available for download and testing, comes with some big changes, the biggest of which is add-on sync. Firefox Sync, introduced in Firefox 4, allows users to synchronize bookmarks, browsing history, preferences, passwords, and even opened tabs across multiple computers. Users who desired add-on synchronization had to use third party services like Siphon. With Firefox 11, this will be no longer necessary.

The preference and bookmarks migration tool that brings data from Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari now supports Chrome. In Firefox 11 Beta users will be able to import their favorite bookmarks, history, cookies and profiles from Google Chrome to Firefox.

The silent update process in Firefox has also been improved allowing for seamless browsing experience without any interruption to the regular use of the browser. Until now, Firefox automatically downloads the update but doesn’t install it until the browser is restarted. This results in a delay during the next startup, and the user has to wait more than a couple of seconds.

On Firefox 12 Aurora that will land shortly, Firefox will install the updates while the browser is running. A restart of the browser is still required but Firefox will launch with no delay as the update procedure has already taken place. The update process will be totally seamless with Mozilla getting rid of the Windows UAC prompts that appears before each update. The UAC will prompt you just once, when the first update is downloaded. Subsequent updates of Firefox will no longer require any user interaction.

The new beta also includes support for Google's SPDY protocol, designed as a successor to HTTP, for faster site loading. The Tilt view website visualization tool is now a part of the Page Inspector developer's tool. This 3D visualization is particularly useful when searching through problems in the HTML structure. It’s kind of cool too.

Get Firefox Beta from here.

6 Cool Things You Can Do By Double Clicking in Firefox

The double-click mouse action was introduced by Apple Computers when they created the first Macintosh computer in 1984. The original Mac came with a single button mouse, but since not much could be done with one button, a second action was attached to the button by the way of double click. When Windows came out with support for two-button mouse, it became possible to make three unique actions with the device. Today, a typical mouse has three buttons with a clickable scroll wheel acting as the middle button, and some modern mice have even more buttons on the side.

On the web, the extra mouse buttons are a waste and your motor skills put to rest. Here it’s mostly single-click affairs, which keeps things less complicated even if that means underutilizing the full potential of the modern mouse. If the lack of double click on the web is keeping you awake at nights, here are six therapies to cure your double click addiction.

Double Click to Save Picture

When I use Firefox or Chrome or IE, it always bugs me that I cannot save pictures by clicking on it while holding down the CTRL key like I do in Opera. The DoubleClick Save Picture add-on for Firefox fixes this by putting the unused double click action to good use. As the name says, just double click on pictures to open the ‘Save As…’ dialog box. It’s even possible to automatically save pictures to a pre-configured location without prompting.

Double Click to Open in New Tab

The DblClicker add-on for Firefox also emulates the CTRL+click feature, but this time on hyperlinks. It opens links on webpages and links on your bookmarks and history to in new tab.

Double Click to Duplicate Tab

This function can be implemented using the DblClicker add-on mentioned above. Aside from opening links in new tab, this add-on can be configured to either duplicate or close tab when double clicked on the tab.

Double Click to Open Context Menu

The DoubleClick ContextMenu add-on emulates another Opera feature, and that is to open the context menu when double clicked on any text on the page. This add-on will select the text you double click on and also open the context menu for you to choose an action, such as search or copy

Double Click to Close Tab

Double Click Closes Tab is an add-on that does exactly as it says. Simply double click anywhere on the page to close it. No need to hunt for the micro ‘x’ button.

Double Click to Reload Tab

If instead of closing the page, you would like to refresh it try Reload Tab On Double-Click. Unlike the Double Click Closes Tab add-on, you will have to execute the double click on the tab and not on the page.

So there you are, plenty of double click actions. Did I miss anything?

Firefox to Get Reset Feature for Easy Profile Repair

Mozilla is planning to add a reset feature to Firefox that will enable users to repair their Firefox install or revert to a default state, while also retaining bookmarks, history and other data. The proposed feature will allow users to solve problems such as startup crashes and corrupted user profile without resorting to drastic measures like complete reinstall.

The Reset Firefox feature will provide a way for users to automatically fix Firefox by creating a new profile and migrating their data including bookmarks, history, passwords, and so on to the new one. There are a number of serious Firefox issues - not starting, crashing, unexpected behavior, lost toolbars and more - that can be solved by creating a new profile. The problem is, creating a new profile is not enough. A user will almost always want to also migrate their data to the new profile which is an incredibly strenuous task. As such, many users end up preforming a clean reinstall and lose all their profile data in the process.

The goal of the Reset feature is to take a difficult and confusing repair process that most people never discover and turn it into an easy and discoverable operation that can be done by most users without guidance.

Mozilla plans to provide three ways by which the Reset Firefox feature can be accessed:

1. During installation the user will tell the installer that this is a repair attempt. That information will then be passed on to Firefox which will start the Reset Firefox process.
2. A third consecutive startup crash will trigger Firefox to offer to start in safe mode or to reset Firefox.
3. A user can start this process by clicking a "Reset Firefox" button on the Troubleshooting Information page.

The Reset Firefox feature is still under development and no clear Firefox version target has been set, so it may be a while before you see it.

Below are some mockups showing how the Reset Firefox feature might look when implemented.

[via Softpedia]