View Wikipedia Offline Via Gearsmonkey

If you are a Wikipedia fan then you are going to love this amazing trick to read Wikipedia Offline. All you need is a bit of Gearsmonkey magic, ala a combination of Google Gears, Greasemonkey and Firefox. By using Gearsmonkey you can take your favorite website offline using Google Gears.. Well here is what the developer had to say :

Sites with a lot of static information — Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email — would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you’re a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn’t do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there’s altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don’t wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters’ precious bandwidth/server power!

Here’s the Greasemonkey script for Wikipedia (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey + Gears). For each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on “cache page” and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

Read More About the project on Google Code
[Via Ajaxian->dailyApps]

Reveal your saved Passwords in Firefox

Many users save their passwords in Firefox so that they do not have to enter it again when visiting the website it was saved for again. Firefox remembers the password and enters it automatically if the user selected this option on his first visit. This is great for us lazy users but poses the problem that we sometimes can’t remember the password when we need it again.

A classic example would be a Gmail user who has been using the Gmail website so far now trying to get the POP3 access running. So, what is this user going to do ? He actually has several options to reveal the password in Firefox. The first that comes to my mind is the ability to go into the security tab of the options. You do find a show passwords button there that displays all passwords, usernames and site urls.

I have written about this before and want to concentrate on other possibilities. Please note that a master password has to be entered for all the following methods if one has been set.

1. Greasemonkey Scripts:

If you are using the excellent Greasemonkey extension you can choose from a wide variety of scripts that reveal the passwords:

Show Password on Click - displays the password if you click the password form.

Show Password onMouseOver - reveals the password if you hover the mouse over the password field.

Unpassword - changes the type of the password form to text which always displays the passwords as text.

2. Javascript Code

Paste the following line of code into the address bar and hit enter to reveal the password on this website.

javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = ""; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j<F.length; ++j) { f = F[j]; for (i=0; i<f.length; ++i) { if (f[i].type.toLowerCase() == "password") s += f[i].value + "\n"; } } if (s) alert("Passwords in forms on this page:\n\n" + s); else alert("There are no passwords in forms on this page.");})();

3. Firefox extension

Unhide Passwords - this extension does basically the same as the Unpassword Greasemonkey script.

[via gHacks]

Guide on How to reduce the memory usage in Firefox?

Firefox 2.0 since its release had the niggling memory leak and no matter how many updates have been out to address this issue it still has that retard issue. A standard Firefox install without any extensions consumes around 80MB but soon after you add a few extensions you can see a noticeable drop in the performance. There are many guides out over the internet but i have made my own version that seems to work. It gono be a pretty comprehensive guide so you have a stick a little longer to learn the tricks.

First of all make sure you have the latest version of Firefox, presently 2.0.0.7. If you don’t have which i doubt. You can download using the link below, if you are kind enough grab my referral link.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

1. Extension and themes the main cause of memory leaks.

A standard install of Firefox doesn’t seems to show any memory leak issues. But after installing few extensions it seems to show the memory leak issues. Basically this issue occurs due to buggy, bloatware extensions. Also if you overloaded your Firefox with extensions, you can expect high memory usage. Same goes for themes, don’t install too many themes. To minimizes memory issues try testing each plugin one by one for few hours and check over their memory signature. As a result you can always find out the buggy ones and help yourself minimizing the high memory usage. You can even check this comprehensive list of buggy extensions and find out if one of your extension belongs here. Always keep your extensions updated this is another way to cope with the issue.

2) Start Firefox in Safe Mode

If one of your extensions is not in that list, boot Firefox into Safe Mode to disable all extensions and themes. You can do this by going to Start > Run, and entering:

firefox -safe-mode

A similiar looking box will appear .Now check Disable all add-ons
now click on Continue in Safe Mode. Now fire up your Windows task manager and compare the memory usage before and after disabling the extensions. Normally disabling extensions only drops of couples of MB of ram. But if you find some memory spikes this surely indicates some problems of either of the extensions or themes installed.

3) Plugins:

Another memory hogger are the plugins that are needed for open special media or application within Firefox, like Java chat, PDF reader, WMV, Quicktime etc. Here are some links from MozillaZine that offers some basic solutions to plugin related issues.

• Reducing Adobe Reader memory usage
• Shockwave memory usage
• Flash memory usage
• Java memory usage

4) Clear your Download History

[via thinktechno]

(Read here the full guide)

Firefox Coming To Your Phone

Get ready to throw out that WAP browser on your mobile phone (if you haven’t already). The iPhone, with its fully-functioning Safari browser, showed us that mobile browsing need not be a compromise. Now, the folks at Mozilla are working on a mobile version of Firefox.

A Firefox Web browser already exists for the Nokia N800, but this effort will expand Firefox’s mobile reach to many more handsets, especially as they come standard with more memory. (64 MB of DRAM seems to be the minimum that will be required). Mobile Firefox won’t be available until next year, at the earliest. But just as on the desktop, it will be an open platform on top of which anyone can build add-on applications. And that’s good news for mobile computing.

The decision to throw Firefox into the mobile ring is just one more piece of evidence for something that is becoming increasingly clear: The phone is the computer.

As a Mac laptop user, I used Safari for years, until I switched to Firefox. At a certain point, it just eclipsed what I could do on Safari (primarily because of all the add-on applications that became available and the greater flexibility of the core browser). I expect the same thing will happen eventually in the mobile space—if Steve Jobs allows Firefox on the iPhone, that is.

But my guess is that he will have to because it will be available on other phones, and the iPhone will never be able to afford to be seen as lagging in the mobile browsing arena. Of course, this assumes that Firefox quickly will get to the point where it can provide a better mobile browsing experience than the mobile version of Safari. But judging by history, I think it will.

[via Techcrunch]

Update di sicurezza per Firefox

Mountain View (USA) - Ieri Mozilla Foundation ha rilasciato un update di sicurezza per Firefox, il 2.0.0.5, che sistema 8 vulnerabilità, tre delle quali classificate con il massimo livello di pericolosità.

Tra le falle "critiche" corrette da Firefox 2.0.0.5 c'è anche quella scoperta di recente e relativa alla gestione degli URI FirefoxURL://, che può essere sfruttata richiamando il browser open source da Internet Explorer.

La seconda debolezza in ordine di gravità può consentire ad un aggressore di richiamare un event handler che gli consenta di eseguire del codice a propria scelta con privilegi elevati. La terza falla critica riguarda la possibilità di eseguire Javascript maligni con gli stessi privilegi dell'utente locale.

Tra gli altri problemi risolti dall'aggiornamento vi sono bug di tipo cross-site scripting, frame spoofing e accesso non autorizzato ai documenti wyciwyg://. I dettagli delle vulnerabilità si trovano in questa pagina.

"Raccomandiamo caldamente a tutti gli utenti di Firefox di aggiornarsi all'ultima release", si legge in un comunicato di Mozilla.

Chi dispone di Firefox 2.0.0.x dovrebbe aver già ricevuto una notifica di aggiornamento: se così non fosse, è possibile avviare manualmente la ricerca degli aggiornamenti attraverso l'apposito comando (in Linux e Mac Os X si trova nel menu Guida, in Windows nel menu ?) oppure scaricare Firefox 2.0.0.5 da GetFirefox.com o MozillaItalia.it.

Come usuale, nei prossimi giorni sarà rilasciato un analogo aggiornamento per il client di posta elettronica Thunderbird.

http://punto-informatico.it

Firefox update fixes compatibility snags

Mozilla pushed out a minor update to its Firefox web browser on Wednesday, chiefly designed to address glitches with a more significant security update issued late last month.

The latest update - Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Firefox 1.5.0.11 - also addresses a low-risk file transfer protocol (FTP) port-scanning security bug, as explained in an advisory from the Mozilla Foundation here.

In related news, the Mozilla Foundation announced that no further security or stability updates will be made for Firefox 1.5 users after 24 April. Users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 2 before this date

C the register