The Mozilla Blog » Tips & Tricks

It’s time to Rock Your Firefox!

Erica Jostedt — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:05:01 +0000

We are excited to launch Rock Your Firefox today as a place where Firefox users can learn how to customize their Web experience and discover cool new add-ons.

The first add-on featured on Rock Your Firefox is Yoono, the most popular social networking add-on that nearly 4 million people use today. Yoono is a cool sidebar that integrates all of your social networks and displays them in one stream. There are thousands of Firefox Add-ons to choose from and hundreds of millions of people worldwide have already downloaded nearly 2 billion add-ons.

Get ready to Rock Your Firefox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to see what Firefox Add-on is featured next!

Take the Mozilla Security Quiz on Facebook!

Melissa Shapiro — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:11:31 +0000

This afternoon, we’re excited to release a brand new Mozilla application on Facebook. The app is a 5 question quiz designed to teach users some quick tips about how to stay safe online. At the end of the quiz, you’ll be prompted to go check out our newly refreshed security page on the Mozilla website.

Facebook applications are notorious for capturing lots of data about the user. That’s simply not how we roll at Mozilla. We took the extra step of hashing the facebook user ID to ensure that if you take the quiz all of your personal data will stay with you. The only thing we’ll know is how quiz-takers (in aggregate) scored on the quiz.

Go take the quiz and find out if you’re a security ninja or a security newbie!

New Firefox 3.5 Videos

Melissa Shapiro — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:58:24 +0000

Firefox 3.5 is the fastest Firefox ever – check out this video of Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner running through the new features. Please note, you can view the video without plug-ins using Firefox 3.5 and get a first-hand look at native audio/video support in the browser. You can download the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate here.

In other Mozilla video news, later today we’ll be releasing the latest in our series of Fastest Firefox videos. Check out the already-posted World’s Fastest clapper and World’s Fastest sport stacker videos.

Firefox 2.0.0.20 users offered a free upgrade

Nicole Loux — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:21:33 +0000

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced a free upgrade for Firefox 2.x users on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 3:03 pm EST. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

Earlier this month, Mozilla offered an update for all Firefox 2.0.0.20 users – a free upgrade to Firefox 3.0.5, the very latest and best browser from Mozilla offering more speed, requiring less memory, and providing the safest and easiest web browsing experience available.

Firefox 2 users last received a “major update” in December, prior to the final release of Firefox 2. As of this point, Mozilla will no longer be actively issuing security and stability updates to Firefox 2. Additionally, Firefox 2 will no longer have Phishing Protection as of January 20.

We strongly recommend that our users upgrade to Firefox 3.

If you’re running Firefox 2.0.0.20, you can select “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu to receive an update right now. This is what the offer will look like:

If you don’t receive an offer for some reason, you can download Firefox 3 from http://getfirefox.com/.

Share Your Knowledge: Firefox Screencast Contest

David Tenser — Wed, 28 May 2008 06:48:25 +0000

Get ready to participate in the Firefox Screencast contest! This is your chance to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create support screencasts for the Firefox Support (SUMO) knowledge base on support.mozilla.com.

We have prepared a list of the top 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them! You can enter as many screencasts as you like. With 100 different articles, anyone can choose whatever article for which they would like to create a screencast.

Mozilla will not be hosting the videos during this contest, so please use a third-party application like Jing to record your screencast and send us the link so we can view it. Ever used Jing? Here’s a great online demo. Click “Video Tour” on the front page to see how to use it…it couldn’t be easier! Just download and begin recording!

All entries will be judged by a team who will look at the submissions and pick the best one for each of the 100 articles. That’s 100 winners!!

What are you waiting for? Go to the Firefox Screencast Contest and start sharing your knowledge!

Any questions? We’ve got the answers.

Star-worthy: Firefox 3 Bookmarks

Mary Colvig — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:56:09 +0000

As promised, we’ll continue to highlight some of the incredibly cool and useful Firefox 3 features you can expect to see. Today’s installment on Firefox 3′s new bookmarking system is brought to you once again by Deb Richardson, the author of the about:mozilla newsletter. Deb provides a clear explanation of the many improvements you’ll see, including:

bookmark stars which allow for one-click bookmarking
tags that allow you to add extra relevant information to a bookmark so it’s easier to find and organize
smart bookmark folders or “saved searches” that automatically update when you add new items matching that search to your bookmarks

Firefox 3′s bookmark dialog box

Take a look at her post for more details, as well as a great how-to. I’ve found that I am using Firefox 3′s bookmarking with renewed gusto thanks to the little star and intuitive organization and search!

A Little Something Awesome about Firefox 3

Mary Colvig — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:43:08 +0000

Deb Richardson, author of the about:mozilla newsletter, wrote one of the better explanations I’ve seen on the “AwesomeBar,” Firefox 3′s revamped URL bar. It’s not the most humble of names, but if you check out Deb’s post you’ll see why it’s earned it.

In Deb’s words, here’s a quick snapshot of what makes Firefox 3′s URL bar just so awesome:

Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

Example: I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular.

Check out Deb’s post for more on the AwesomeBar and check back here for more on the cool things to expect in Firefox 3!

Rock Your Firefox!

Mary Colvig — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 01:08:00 +0000

[SpreadFirefox.com post courtesy of Sarah Arora]

We’re excited to announce the launch of another tool that will allow you to surf your web, your way: Rock Your Firefox!

Rock Your Firefox is an application built on the Facebook® Platform allowing you to personalize, customize, and essentially rock out your browser, and share it with your friends. Browse through more than 2000 add-ons and recommend those you like to your friends – and see what they recommend for you.

Add-ons in your favorites list will appear in your profile and encourage others to rock their Firefox through newsfeed stories. The more add-ons you list as your favorites, the more people will find out about the awesome ways to rock out your Firefox. Through this method, we hope to be able to seed Firefox throughout the Facebook community.

But that’s not all. If you add the application before August 8th, 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), you will be in the running to win one of 20 exclusive Rock Your Firefox t-shirts. Get started now at rockyourfirefox.com!

Firefox support options

jtbatson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:49:54 +0000

We often get letters, voicemails and emails asking, “How do I get help for Firefox?” That’s a good question, so I thought I would share the available and very helpful resources.

Currently, the best ways to get help are to:

1. Search the Knowledge Base at MozillaZine.org, our community-run support and news site, for answers.
2. Search for your problem on the MozillaZine.org user-to-user forums.
3. Post your problem on the MozillaZine.org forum for one of our community volunteers to answer.
4. Review some basic FAQs we have prepared.

Because Firefox is a free product, Mozilla has relied on dedicated volunteers to provide support for users of Firefox. A group of those volunteers and Mozilla employees are currently working to improve support for Firefox. You can check out their recommendations for improvement here.

A few foxy tips

Mary Colvig — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:06:38 +0000

A great deal of Firefox’s popularity is due to the ability to personalize it and add all sorts of functionality via add-ons. But there are some nifty shortcuts and features right in Firefox. I asked around here at Mozilla for favorite Firefox features and time savers. The list was huge, but here are some highlights:

Session Restore: Never feel the pain again of accidentally closing a website! (Editor’s note: can you tell this is my favorite?) You can recover closed tabs and windows, and even text you entered in web forms, by going to the History menu and selecting the “Recently Closed Tabs” option. You also can set Firefox so that it automatically opens the last websites you visited by going to the Tools menu, picking Options and selecting “Show my windows and tabs from last time” under the Startup section. (On Mac OS X: go to the Firefox menu, then pick Preferences)
Crunch numbers within Firefox: You can use Google in the built-in search box (upper right corner) as a calculator. Simply type in the equation (e.g. 243 + 5,234) and the answer appears in the drop down menu of suggested search options (e.g. = 5477).
Set multiple home pages: You don’t have to be limited to one home page with Firefox. In fact, I have it set so that Firefox launches both of my web mail accounts – Gmail and Yahoo! mail – when it opens. Learn Firefox has a great explanation of how to choose your start page in the first place. In the URL field enter the addresses of your preferred pages separated by a pipe or the “|”.
Maximize or Minimize your font size: Using this keyboard shortcut, you can control the size of your browser font — this comes in handy when reading small fonts. Simply press the “Ctrl” and “+” keys together in Windows (or the “Command” and “+” keys on the Mac) and the “Ctrl” and “-” keys to decrease. “Ctrl” and “0″ keys pressed together returns you to the original text size.

What are your favorites? Let us know at blog at mozilla dot com — this will be an ongoing series here and we’d love to hear from you.