BetterPrivacy

A FireFox plugin for protecting your privacy.
Learn more at this link.
Ever wondered why you are still tracked though you tried everything to prevent it?
BetterPrivacy is a safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO's on Google, YouTube, Ebay...
Better Privacy serves to protect against not deletable longterm cookies, a new generation of 'Super-Cookie', which silently conquered the internet. This new cookie generation offers unlimited user tracking to industry and market research. Concerning privacy Flash- and DOM Storage objects are most critical.
This addon was made to make users aware of those hidden, never expiring objects and to offer an easy way to get rid of them - since browsers are unable to do that for you.

Myths about Firefox

This article (link) contains details about various myths about Firefox and clearing of these misconceptions:

# Features

1. Firefox is fully standards compliant
2. Firefox often displays webpages incorrectly
3. Microsoft sets the standards (or should)
4. Firefox was the first browser with tabs
5. New versions of Firefox break extensions and themes

# Security

1. Firefox is completely secure
2. Secunia lists an extremely critical Firefox vulnerability
3. Firefox had more known vulnerabilities than IE at some point
4. Two speakers at the ToorCon 2006 hacker conference found serious Firefox vulnerabilities

# Performance

1. Firefox is faster than Internet Explorer
2. Firefox 1.5 leaks more memory than previous versions

# Miscellaneous

1. Firefox is a relatively young browser
2. Firefox achieved 10% market share in its first year
3. Firefox 2.0 won't support Windows 9x and ME

Firefly - Firefox extension

# Four different view types for the file browser (details,list,tiles,thumbnails).
# Ability to split the view as many times as you like.
# Ability to expand the selected view for more confortable work.
# Integrated Mozilla and IE engines (requires IETab to be installed).
# Integrated Audio/Video, Document, PDF, Image preview (requires VLC,OpenOffice, Acrobat reader plugins to be installed).
# Audio/Video, Image preview in the tooltip (again VLC plugin is required).
# Filter current view - you can use regular expressions or just plain wildcards (changed in preferences).
# Search in the current folder and subfolders.
# Copy/Paste,Cut/Paste files and folders (currently Cut is doing the same as Copy - as soon as i receive enough user input that everything is working 100% correct i'll fix Cut to really do cut).
# Delete files and folders (delete asks only once if you are sure - after that you can't stop it - so be carefull).
# Transferring files allows to pause/cancel/resume the transfer. If the files exists in the destination you will be asked if you want to resume(file size must be smaller), overwrite or rename the file.
# Keyboard navigation in the views and between views.
# Multiple languages (currently en,bg available).
# Tree can be set up to show only what you like and the order in which you like to see it.
# "Send to" and "Open with" menus are customizable too.
# External editor setup - configure which text exitor to use in the preferences and just press F3 (or use the contex menu) and the currently selected file will be opened in that editor.

Available at this link.

How to write an extension for Firefox

Suppose you are techie minded, and are a big fan of Firefox, and want to add to the amount of functionality available for Firefox, one good way to contribute is to write a specific plugin / addon for Firefox that will add some cool new functionality.
But how does one do such a thing ? You will need to know a lot more detail about the process of doing so, and it helps to have a good tutorial available that will help. One location where such a tutorial is located is at this link.
You need to have a basic understanding of JavaScript, and an understanding of XUL, and that should be enough. The tutorial shows you how to do 'Hello World'.

Firefox memory consumption

If you are using Firefox on a regular basis on Windows, and leave Firefox open all the time, then you might find that Firefox is using up a lot of RAM, occupying a tremendous amount of memory (gone upto 500 MB in some cases). A lot of people consider this a big memory bug in Firefox, but it is actually a feature to help you browse quicker.
This €˜feature€™ is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment. To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 40% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It'€™s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web. This is good when you are navigating, but this memory remains used as long as Firefox remains open, which can cause a degradation of performance of the machine. It's does not matter even if you have closed all tabs except for 1, the cache is retained, only going when Firefox is closed.
If you want to improve the performance and change this setting so a lower amount of memory is consumed, it is possible to change the configuration:
1. Type about:config in an empty Firefox window
2. Find the variable 'browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer'
3. Set the value to 0
4. Once you restart, memory consumption will be way reduced

How to get better performance out of Firefox

There are a number of people who prefer using Firefox to Internet Explorer as their default browser. Firefox is a pretty fast browser, and very customizable. So here's a top on how to configure some more settings that should speed up things for Firefox users. This refers the complete article available at Computer World:

The closest analogy to how Firefox manages its internal settings is the Windows Registry. Each setting, or preference, is given a name and stored as a string (text), integer (number) or Boolean (true/false) value. However, Firefox doesn't keep its settings in the registry, but in a file called prefs.js. You can edit prefs.js directly, but it's often easier to change the settings through the browser window.
Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter, and you'll see all the settings currently enumerated in prefs.js, listed in alphabetical order. To narrow down the hundreds of configuration preferences to just the few you need, type a search term into the Filter: bar. (Click the Show All button or just clear the Filter: bar to get the full list back again.)
Here are a few caveats to keep in mind as you explore and tweak:
Not everyone will get the same benefits by enabling these tweaks. This is especially true for changing the network settings. If you habitually visit sites that don't allow a large number of connections per client, for instance, you won't see much benefit from raising the number of connections per server.
Keep a log of everything you change, or make backups. If you tweak something now and notice bizarre activity in a week, you'll want to be able to track back to what was altered and undo it. Firefox does show which about:config changes have been set manually, but this isn't always the most accurate way to find out what you changed.

So, if you want to experiment to see what can be tweaked on your Firefox installation, this is a good way to do it. Be careful, and remember that these changes are happening at your own risk.
Some of the changes that are possible with this approach are:
- Speeding up page display
- Controlling the tabbed browsing
- Change the user interface
- Stop memory hogging

Getting Internet Explorer functionality in FireFox

Say you are a fan of using Firefox as your browser, and really do not prefer to use Internet Explorer for your browsing purposes. Now you come across a site or a plugin that works only in Internet Explorer. What are your options: You can not go to this site, or you can launch Internet Explorer if the site is important to you.
There is actually another option that is available to you. There is a concept supported in Firefox about launching an Internet Explorer tab within Firefox, so you can actually continue using Firefox, just elect to use the Internet Explorer tab for this purpose.
Not making sense still, well the easier way is to explore for yourself. You can actually install a Firefox add-on that gives you an Internet Explorer tab. Instalt the add-on, restart Firefox and then the right-click options on a URL will have additional options for launching an Internet Explorer tab. The add-on is available here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/