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So, the link prefetching that some browsers (or extensions) perform might take you into jail ?

See: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/

Here you go.

This doesn't prompt you (that would be annoying) but prevents any flash from playing until you click an icon to enable it.

#1 best FF extension out there in my opinion.

4. mozdev?

Here's an extension that launches your anti-virus program on downloaded items, and is working with current versions of Firefox, Downloads Scan: http://downloadstatusbar.mozdev.org/downscan/.

What is the point of linking to the Dirty Jobs entry on Wikipedia? What's wrong with the actual Discovery Channel site?

Well, I looked at your link and I see some ads and a big Flash thingy. (I'm using FlashBlock so I have to click to view Flash. Wonderful!) If I load the Flash, I see some fancily designed animated cruft with a bunch of buttons that may or may not lead to actual information. Much of text is at slightly random skewed angles, and there's no obvious place to find basic facts.

When I look a the Wikipedia article, on the other hand, I see no ads, no Flash, and some nicely formatted text, written to give quick answers, laid out in tidy sections, all using a standard format that I'm familiar with from a bunch of previous visits.

Other than that, no reason.

Well Thunderbird already has an extension to use openPGP and digital signatures in email.
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php
And by the time we cut down on fraud and spam in our inboxes, there will probably be another hundred ways of getting this crap. Undoubtedly spam will live forever.

How do I stop Mozilla Firefox from prompting me to install a plugin? (for Windows)

Open about:config, and set plugin.default_plugin_disabled to false. Then delete the file named npnul32.dll from your Mozilla Firefox plugins folder. You may have to enable showing hidden files to do this.

How do I stop Mozilla Firefox from prompting me to install a plugin? (for Linux)

1. Open about:config, and set plugin.default_plugin_disabled to false.
2. Delete the libnullplugin.so from your Mozilla Firefox plugins directory. You may have to do this as root if you do not have write access to your Mozilla Firefox installation from your user account.

Just provide a Petname toolbar. All the anti-phishing you'll ever need, and it doesn't submit your URLs or browsing info to third-party servers, like the Google toolbar and Microsoft's "anti-phishing" extensions do (a technique which will ultimately prove ineffectual IMO).

Oh, that greyed out box with the NoScript logo is a Flash movie?
Glad it got caught by NoScript rather than FlashBlock!
Yet, I wonder. Would AdBlock Plus have caught it if those two were disabled?

http://ebaynegs.mozdev.org/

voila

Just to add to QuantumRiff's sentiments, calling spam "solved" by spam filters is like calling world wide conflicts "solved" by the arms race.

Try this extension with Thunderbird.

Tried Conkeror?

I'm about 20 hours into an encryption client, and I've already got people using it. I initially wanted to use GPG, but realized that most technophobes won't go for a command line application. So I pulled out FLUID (the FLTK design utility) and had a prototype working within hours.

I'm all with you, and would also like to send and receive encrypted e-mails from my friends and family. However, how do you solve these issues:

* How do you decrypt at an Internet cafe running a closed down system, or on your mobile phone browser. How do you get your private key there?

* How do you get most of your friends and family to register and send encrypted e-mails with their Hotmail and Gmail accounts?

There are several GUIs for PGP and GPG, but that still does not solve the problems above: Enigmail for Thunderbird, GpgOL for Outlook and more. However, I have seen none that integrates with browser e-mail. A Greesmonkey plugin or something like that would be nice (although, I don't know if it would be secure).

...in this thread anyway, to recommend the flashblock plugin.

I installed it a couple of weeks ago, and really enjoy it. Banner ads have all but disappeared, and I don't even really notice (except for faster page loads and cleaner page layouts). If I want to see a YouTube video, that's easily accomplished--just click on the "F" icon in the blocked section of the page.

As an added bonus, I'm protected from all of these recent security breaches we've seen for Flash...aren't I?

So you don't mind Yahoo pasting spam into your outgoing emails? Those little ads at the bottom of your emails from Yahoo (and msn) users are rather annoying. It's one thing to pay for the service by viewing ads, but it's another to pay for it by spamming non-users.

Aside from security and open-sourcedness, most Flash is just plain ugly.
On Linux, I never installed the plugin. On Mac, I have flashblock. And I'm happy.
What am I missing? So much Flash content reminds me of the old popup world
It's the advertisers who are unhappy. Recently CNN has retaliated by refusing to show news video clips because I have flashblock. I never liked suffering through its ads anyway.

I'm not sure about the problem, but I'm also using Download Statusbar, which is an extension that is unobtrusive and slick. When downloading something, it'll display a little progressbar in the statusbar, showing info you might be interested in (configurable). I've been using this extension for at least a couple of years now, very nice little thing.

> If I can't find what I'm looking for, I don't care if nobody knows about it.

Agreed. Results are paramount.

I'd rather choose my favourite search engine based on technical merit, then take steps to protect my privacy myself. It means I get the satisfaction of not having to rely on hidden propriety code on someone else's server for my privacy.

To get around the Google big-bad-data-retention, I find that Firefox + CookieCuller + FoxyProxy + TOR works pretty well.

> If I can't find what I'm looking for, I don't care if nobody knows about it.

Agreed. Results are paramount.

I'd rather choose my favourite search engine based on technical merit, then take steps to protect my privacy myself. It means I get the satisfaction of not having to rely on hidden propriety code on someone else's server for my privacy.

To get around the Google big-bad-data-retention, I find that Firefox + CookieCuller + FoxyProxy + TOR works pretty well.

We've discussed this at length. At the present, there is no need to change the name -- there are actually quite a number of projects named Sage.

Accounting software
Browser plugin
... and there's actually another SAGE project at the University of Washington (which I can't find a link for) which does something entirely different.

If any of these present a real problem, we've discussed the name Sage Math -- but there's no reason to change yet.

Yeah.... I believe Flash on Win32 has hooks into the graphics hardware that lets it get away with that.

No such luck on the mac side of things. Although my machine's not terribly powerful compared to some (Core Duo Mac Mini), a 320x240 video should *not* bring the machine to a crawl. Things are even worse on my "old" G4 Powerbook, and some videos won't even play at the full framerate. (And these are machines that don't have a problem doing H.264 *encoding* at close to real-time!)

Flashblock is virtually essential for browsing, so that a full-page Flash ad (or a typical MySpace page) doesn't make the entire browser unresponsive....

Adobe used to give it's Acrobat Reader away for free.

It's no coincidence recent versions have had that ad supported Yahoo button at the top. They get paid for sending you that. And all the Yahoo toolbar installations they have packaged with Acrobat Reader for some years, they get paid for those installations too.

Not what I would call "free". Ad supported, for a few years now.

Adobe is a joke as far as I'm concerned. They have no feedback method for bugs in their "free" reader, I nearly bought the paid version to get support just to make them dance. Pretty sure they couldn't have fixed the printing problem I was having. Acrobat reader crashes on me, often.
Just because they aren't charging for a product they shouldn't ignore the value of a stream of bug reports from users. It makes the system better. But no, it was "free" they told me.

I'm really going to be testing some of the free/GPL alternate PDF readers, essentially to avoid supporting their ad servers.

FWIW, I have used the Firefox Adblock plugin for a number of years now. If you haven't tried that you really should.
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
WWW without ads is a dream. Fortunately an easily realized one!

Or you could install the FX search engine "Wikipedia (3rd party - Google Lucky)" so you don't have to type "wiki" or "wikipedia" at all (it adds site:wikipedia.org to the search and uses the "I'm feeling lucky" search). Very handy, I use it all the time.

While I never actually hit the lucky button, I use it indirectly via the FX address bar all the time. It is very useful and often takes me to the right place. And how come the first post could get moderated to +5 I don't know, I find the first result of a google search is the best one more often than not.

http://myportal.mozdev.org/

Though in practice I still don't use it.

Instead, you may just want to try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1722 which makes your address bar a bit more flexible (searches matching bookmark names in addition to URLs).

Another way... Flashblock http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Also I use MVP Hosts to take care of the "bad" (like Double Click) IP's out there. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

These two simple things alone, make browsing faster and safer.

Seriously, how difficult would it be for you to show me a list of search providers at install time and let me choose the one I prefer?

See the little Google icon in the Firefox search box? Now click it.

Last I checked, the last choice was also sticky and/or you could set the default somewhere...

Don't see the search engines you like? Head here.

I don't use the search box myself because it's, frankly, pretty clumsy. I use keyword searches because it's much more powerful: Just right click on a search box on any web page, select "Add keyword for this search", and now you can search whatever you want by typing the keyword and search terms to the address bar. ("g firefox keywords", bam. "wp Mozilla Firefox", bam.)

We built the search feature into Mozilla in 1999. Google has been an option in that feature since its inception. That was 5 years before there was any revenue associated with it. We made Google the default in 2002 or 2003 to replace the silly "Netscape" default which was simply a Netscape branded Google. This was years before there was any revenue associated with it.

We made these decisions because it was the right thing for users, not because it was a revenue opportunity. If we ever have to decide between doing what's right for users and a revenue opportunity, we'll put the users first every time. The nice thing about the current situation is that it's both the right thing for users and a revenue opportunity.

And this is just about the "defaults" in Firefox. If you don't like Google, switch it to Yahoo. If you don't like Yahoo, you can add any one of more than 13,000 additional search services to the Firefox search toolbar with just a click or two at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

- A

The distracting function of something that moves is exactly what the advertisers want to exploit.
Personally, I've disabled animated gif's and installed Adblock and NoScript.
This helps me avoid almost all web-advertisement and has the added benefit of getting me rid of annoying flash-intros/interfaces and such crap.

Today is the perfect time to discover enigmail!

No problem... let them snoop. Now I'll just be twiddling the "Encrypt and sign all outgoing email" box on my MUA, and finally start using GPG full-time for all of my incoming and outgoing email, instead of with just my friends and close colleagues.

There are plugins for Evolution, pine, mutt, Thunderbird and just about every other Mail User Agent you can find out there.

Another great benefit, is that I can automatically block/quarantine/delete any and all email that does not contain a gpg-signed component (i.e. 99.999% of all email out there, mostly spam). dspam does an amazing job, but being able to just reject it at the MTA level would be great.

And for those that wish to converse with me, please make sure to use my GPG key to do so (also available here with detailed instructions).

MOD PARENT UP

I don't really understand why it doesn't get more attention, but the Mac OS X Adobe Flash player has to easily be one of the worst pieces of software ever written.

CPU spikes up to 100% are common if a flash banner ad loads. Youtube will suck the life out of even a recent Core Duo Intel Mac. Loading a page on MySpace can sometimes render the system useless for a few minutes.

Thank God for FlashBlock.

Come to think of it, most of Adobe's codebase is very poorly supported on the Mac. Even Photoshop is starting to feel quite dated.

Beside the mentioned Webmail extension http://webmail.mozdev.org/ you could also try FreePOPs http://www.freepops.org/ which basically is an easily extendable Webmail scraper delivering the goodies with POP3.

Disclaimer: I never tried any of those.

Thunderbird can access Hotmail and other webmail accounts with the Webmail extension. I'm using it to access my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. Likewise, Exchange is usually configured to support POP and/or IMAP, meaning any decent mail client can pull emails from it. See http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Connecting_POP_And_IMAP_Clients_To_MS_Exchange_Server.html for details. That won't give you access to all the other features, but it will let you get to your mailbox.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

re: http://www.joar.com/certificates/

I read your MAC OSX article/how-to.

What? Not one mention or link to information on GPG http://www.gnupg.com/

and/or PGP???

http://www.pgp.com/

I support and use the former and recommend the latter to my Microsoft locked-in friends.

What about enigmail http://enigmail.mozdev.org/for Thunderbird

or firegpg http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/ for firefox?

Open your mind. .mac is not the end-all and be-all...

P.S. Note that this post is signed with firegpg.
- --
Bill Arlofski
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: 'email gpgpublickey@revpol.com for my public key'

iD8DBQFHFDNKcBKMMWOpTtwRAnvtAKCSio6bcxucHd+pMxemwtkb3hwF1ACg5f0E
wdrDjE0Jh0R9szqcerv0OOQ=
=nlx9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Right. Though I like to have my calendar available from my email application and I personally don't like running a separate calendar app, I agree that they really are separate disparate applications that really have no reason to be merged. This is what extensions are all about. You can add the calendar to Thunderbird via an extension if you really want them integrated into a single app -- the lightning extension adds Sunbird, and ReminderFox (disclosure: I am a dev for this extension) adds a lighter-weight calendaring function.

Go here: http://www.emusic.com/browse/all.html.

You can also click on the "Login" button on eMusic.com and then a search box and all the links are there.

Or install the Firefox search.

Today, FF has morphed in to something which can't be used, with plugins, for more than a couple days max without needing to be reset.

You say that, and you compare it to IE. The only environment where I know people keep a firefox process open for days is on the mac, which doesn't run IE anymore (and btw, safari 2 leaks like a sieve too in my experience). Yes, I have to relaunch ff on my mac every few days. But on windows every time I close my last window, the browser shuts down and all memory is reclaimed. So, on platforms that are not mac, and for "normal" use patterns (i.e. don't leave a browser window with sites open for days), this is a non-issue.

Thiis page may be informative about the issue of memory in firefox: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/memusage.html

IANAAFB (I am not an Apple fanboy), but the 160 GB iPod Classic is sweet, even if the Archos 605 was the first to that memory density. Time to upgrade! I looked at the gallery at Apple.com and there were no pics of the op or bottom of the Classic - is the headphone jack on bottom as the rumors claim?
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There are advertisers on facebook!!?? This is news to me.

Thank heavens for Leet Key, just select, right-click, and select leetkey->text transformers->base64 decode... several times.

nspluginwrapper supports 64-bit firefox with 32-bit plugins.

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux-amd64.html

Here's a quote:
nspluginwrapper allows you to use Netscape compatible (NPAPI) plugins on platforms that they were not built on - in this instance, using 32bit browser plugins with x86_64 browsers. This is beta software, and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

I use flashblock with Firefox. That mostly gives me the advantages of having Flash without the disadvantages (intrusive flash banners etc.) because I get flash but only when I explicitly request it.

Of course browsing sites that make extensive use of flash, particularly in form of several separate flash objects on the same page, are still a pain to use because you may have to click on every one of them in order to get a usable page. Flashblock allows site whitelisting, though, which makes that more bearable.

Yes, I have used Scroogle in the past. The thing I liked about BlackBox is that it retains the Google look and feel when providing results. Here is a screenshot of the first page of results for "compiz-fusion". It should simply act like Google's search results, but the issue with the subsequent pages of results remains.

Anyway, thanks for the link. There is a search plugin available for Scroogle Scraper on Mycroft, too.

No, SM, not big, just cookies that don't expire until 2038 and profiling users might be just a little naughty. An anonymising proxy based search plugin may well be the answer for Firefox users. Those without Firefox can still make use of Blackboxsearch - at least until something a little more ethical (than BlackBox or Google) appears.

FWIW, BlackBox is also slightly naughty. It's using Google's search technology without giving anything back. The disparity between getting a few links and giving up your right not to be profiled makes it the lesser of two evils, though.

Single sign-on is possible, you just have to stop with the bad idea that logging in gives the server enough information to impersonate you. Some sort of public key auth like SSH uses makes much more sense. It has the minor privacy downside that if you use the same key everywhere, then your identities could be linked together for data mining, but that can be trivially worked around by having multiple keys, just like people use multiple usernames to avoid that now.

Man-in-the-middle attacks are a serious concern. Of course, HTTPS handles them, so we are only talking about unencrypted HTTP. As far as I can tell, any HTTP-only auth mechanism existing can be trivially attacked with a man-in-the-middle attack. SSH handles them by showing the user the server fingerprint and leaving it up to the user to confirm it. Realistically for web auth, server keys would have to either be validated the way they are now, by CAs + auth over HTTPS, or via web of trust which could be used for a more flexible auth mechanism.

Two separate projects exist for making OpenPGP based HTTP auth systems: enigform (and mod_auth_openpgp) and gpgAuth.

OpenID is also a good idea because it moves the authentication process away from the server being logged into. Eliminating the entire problem, although likely adding others.

I use flashblock with FF. Flash stuff then shows up as an empty box with an F in it which you click to load.