Prevent Websites From Appearing In The Firefox Address Bar/Awesome Bar

The Firefox Address bar or the awesome bar is the most used and one of the most useful features that the Firefox has. It will popup the related websites as soon as we type in there. Firefox goes through the tags, web history and book marks to show the related websites. Of course the Awesome bar (address bar)in Firefox is very useful for us but some times there may be occasions where we need to adjust the awesome bar or the address bar of firefox so that only the required websites are displayed. Unfortunately Mozilla Firefox doesn't have an option to exclude or prevent specific websites from the search in the Address Bar of FireFox.

There may be many reasons to prevent specific urls or websites from appearing in the address bar (awesome bar) of firefox. Let the reason be any thing here comes Not Awesome addon for Firefox that will help you prevent certain website or url from appearing in the address bar (awesome bar) of firefox as you type. NotAwesome will prevent those websites from appearing in the address bar which have been bookmarked and tagged with notawesome. Any website having the notawesome tag will be excluded from the search in address bar.


If you have websites bookmarked earlier which you want to prevent from being displayed in the address bar of firefox just edit those bookmarks and add the notawesome tag. It will be prevented from being displayed again. via [ghacks]

After you install the notawesome addon in firefox, then each time when you bookmark a website in Firefox, an option will be displayed to prevent or exclude the website from being displayed in the address bar.

Download NotAwesome Bar Addon For Firefox

How to Browse as Google Bot / Switch User Agent to Google Bot to Access Blocked Forums, Websites etc

Most of the websites allows the google bot to access their forums, content etc. Some websites prompt us to register in their forum in order to view a certain post or content. This becomes trouble some. These websites or forums will allow google bot to access their content (to get them indexed in google). So if we can browse as Google bot and visit those forums we could easily access the blocked content or bypass the register screens easily.
According to Wikipedia

Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.

We can easily browse as Google bot by changing the user agent to Google bot. Here are two Firefox Addons that can help us to easily switch the user agent to Google bot or other.

1) Configuration Mania

Configuaration Mania is a great addon for Firefox that will help you to change the user agent to IE, Opera, Safari, iPhone etc on the fly.


After installing Configuration Mania Addon for firefox just go to the Tools > Configuration Mania and on the browser tab select the user agent you want.

Download Configuration Mania

2) User Agent Switcher

User Agent Switcher is another similar extention for firefox that will help to change the user agent quickly. User Agent Switcher extention will automatically add a menubar and a toolbar to Firefox for changing the user agent.



Download User Agent Switcher

Speed Up Firefox 3 - Make Firefox 3 Super Fast

When it comes to Speed Firefox tops. The World's Most Popular browser Mozilla Firefox is certainly speedy. Browsing with it is a great experience what's more the addons power up it really well. These days most of the users use a high speed broad band connection. So they wont get the full utility from firefox 3 because Firefox is configured to work on slow (dial-up) connections by default. Applying certain tweaks optimize Firefox 3 for Fast for broadband connections. Dial Up users wont get much benefit from this but certainly broad band users will.
Here are some tweaks that could speed up Firefox 3 by optimizing it for fast broad band connections.
Pipelining is a technology used to speed up firefox 3 really well. This technology will allow FireFox to load all the page elements simultaneously instead of loading them one by one. This will make Firefox really fast. Here's how to speed up Firefox 3 to the maximum.

1. Enter about:config in the address bar of Firefox 3. You can see lot of options displayed.
2. Type network.http in the Filter box.
3. You will see an option called network.http.pipelining double click the entry to make it true and do the same for network.http.proxy.pipelining. This is done to Enable Firefox to do multiple requests to a server at a time. So if you have a high speed connection you will be benefited.
4. Now for the entry network.http.pipelining.maxrequests set its value to 30.

This number 30 means that Firefox will make 30 requests to a server at a time.
For an Extra Speed boost right click in a blank space in the above window and select NEW> Integer from the right click menu.Give its name as nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it's value as 0. This is the amount of time Firefox waits before processing any information it received.

If you want to Speed Up Firefox 3 Even More then create these values

• network.dns.disableIPv6 set its value to False


• content.notify.backoffcount value as 5


• plugin.expose_full_path value as true”.


• ui.submenuDelay and value as 0

Make Firefox 3 Use Less Ram For Its Cache

This isn't really a speed boost but will be helpful for people with less ram.For this firefox tweak type about:config in the address bar. And search for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer and double click it and set its value to 0. (If you dont see it create one as a boolean value by right clicking and New -> Boolean)Thats it Firefox wont now eat up more memory for its cache.

Now just restart you browser and see the speed increase in Firefox 3. If you have any suggestions and tweaks comment it. I will include them in the post.

How to Update Firefox Portable Version Easily

You might already know what the advantage of a portable Firefox version is. We can carry it on our pendrive and use in any pc. But you might have been got into trouble while updating Firefox Portable. Either your addons or themes might have been lost or your settings have been lost. Actually we can update firefox portable very easily.
In this tutorial before starting with i assume that you have already the portable firefox version from “ Portableappz.com “. If you don't have portable firefox make sure you have the portable firefox version from Portableappz.com  before starting with.

If you dont have the portable firefox version download it from http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable.

The process is very simple.

Download the Latest Firefox version from Mozilla.com

Start the firefox installation as normal by double clicking the downloaded exe file from Mozilla.

Click on “Next” in the first window.

After that in the next window click on “ Browse “ and select the folder called “Firefox” seen under the folder named “App”. Click “OK”.

Now “C:\Program Files\Portable Firefox\App\Firefox\” is in your destination path and proceed with the installation by De-selecting the three options that appear next (Set Up shortcuts) window.

There you go now you have a fully updated Mozilla Firefox Version  with all your settings as such! Happy Browsing.

Take Complete Screen Shots of WebPages Easily

You might have experienced a trouble when taking the screen shots of websites in your browser that you don't get the complete  screen shot of that website. Only the part you see on the screen could be captured. The olden days of taking screen shots using the Print Screen key and pasting it in an image editing software is over. You can now easily take the complete screen shot of a webpage if you have Mozilla Firefox Browser and the Screengrab Addon.

Screengrab is an excellent Firefox add-on that will help you to take the complete screen shots of a website or webpage with ease.

How to Use Screengrab to take the complete screen shot of a webpage

All you need to do is to open the Website which you want in Mozilla Firefox and right click and hover your mouse pointer  Screengrab option in the right click context menu and select the location in your PC to save the screen shot of the webpage. Its that easy.

Complete Screen Shot of My Website

You can customize screengrab to suit your requirements. Screengrab have the options to take only a part of website’s screen shot, Take the Full Screen Shot of  a Webpage, Save the Visible Portion of Webpage to Clipboard, Save only current frame of the website etc. If you don't want to directly save those images you can also direclt copy the screen shot of the complete webpage to the windows cipboard too.

Download Screengrab Addon for Mozilla Firefox

How To Easily Access Blocked Websites,UnBlock,Bypass Blocked Sites Easily

I will show you how to Unblock blocked websites, Access, Bypass any blocked websites easily.

You might have come across many news about blocking certain websites in some countries. So the citizens of that countries are not allowed to access those websites. Orkut website blocked in China, Saudi Arabia is a good example for it.

Apart from the government’s tactics, some of the schools, offices etc. too block or restrict the access to certain websites.

Social Networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut etc. are the ones which are mostly blocked.

Government blocks some websites for their safety but some of these websites may be useful to the people too.Even if restrictions are put on some websites there are many methods we can use to access blocked websites .

1. Using IP Address in Place of URL : This method is easy but has a less success rate than others. Type the direct IP address in place of typing the blocked websites domain name. For example instead of typing www.Orkut.com type the IP address of it in your browsers address bar to access Orkut . Host2ip can help you to find the IP address of that blocked websites. If the blocking software can track the IP address send to the web server the website could not be unblocked or accessed by using this method.



2. Using Anonymous website surfing sites : There are many websites around the net enabling you to surf the internet anonymously. Some of the websites provides options for encrypting the url’s of the websites. These proxy websites will hide our actual ip address and will show another IP address this could prevent the website being blocked, making it easy for us to access them.
   
   Here is a list of some of the proxy servers that can help you to unblock the blocked websites 

   http://www.anonymizer.com	http://www.dailybestlinks.com/
   http://anonymouse.org/	http://www.spysurfing.com
   http://proxify.com/	http://alienproxy.com
   http://www.bumsk.com/proxy	http://indianproxy.com

   
   



3. Online Translation Services : Actually here we can do is that, these Translation services can be used as a web proxy. Google Translate, Yahoo Babelfish . Use them to translate the website into the same language it self. If the website is in English you can give the output as English itself. This could help you to access almost any blocked websites.



4. Using Google Mobile Search : Using Google's mobile search services will make the webpage's to appear in pure HTML. So you wont get the experience which you get while browsing those sites using your normal web browser. However it could help you to access,bypass blocked websites.



5. Receiving Websites as Email : Websites such as web2mail will deliver the websites as email. However you wont be able to access very large blocked websites. At least it could unblock some of the websites and you could read its content.



6. Using Google’s Cache : Google’s Cache will keep the stored versions of websites. Just search the desired website (blocked) to be accessed in Google and you will see a link to the cache page very near to the right of the result displayed. Since the blocked website is not being actually accessed from its server using this method can be a success some times.



7. Short URL Redirection Method : The website you are about access might be banned or blocked by the government or office, by using this url shortening services  there is a chance to get access to those websites which are being blocked or banned. tinyurl, , MooURL, snipurl are good URL shortening redirection services.



8. Wayback Machine Service : Wayback machine is an internet service that periodically saves the copy of a website from the time it has started. So it caches the most nearest version of the webpage's. This service can be put to use to access the blocked, banned websites.



9. Torpark : Torpark is combination of TOR and Mozilla Firefox. It works like a browser with Mozilla Firefox engine as its base. ITs advantage is that all the data sent from our PC is encrypted. As a result i becomes very hard to block the websites we visit. The website filtering software used by our ISP wont be able to find it out some times (But don’t use it for online banking etc.) It is worth trying it as it could help you some times to unblock or access the blocked websites. It is also available in Portable from and is free.



10.  Creating Private SSL Proxy : Psiphon is a service that help you to create private SSL proxies. It can prevent the ISP’s from sleuthing on the content as well. So chances are more for you to get access to the blocked websites easily. Check it out at psiphon.civisec.org to know  more about the program. 



11. Tunnel Your Connection - More chances of success to access blocked sites : Tunneling your Internet connection will help you to get access to blocked sites more easily. Tunneling your internet connection is a tiresome task. A sleek utility called Toonel will help you to do this tedious job with ease.
    I will show you how to tunnel your internet connection using toonel and access blocked sites easily.
    
    
    
    
    • First Download Toonel. You also need to have the java run time installed on your system. Only then Toonelworks properly.
    
    
    • After downloading Toonel you will seee a file with .jar extention. All you have to do is to just run that file.
    
    
    • Open your browser (If you use Internet Explorer, Go to Tools > Internet Options >Connections > Lan Settings) and from connections set the Proxy address to 127.0.0.1 and the port to 8080. The procedure is some what similar for other browsers too.
      Thats it you have successfully tunneled your internet connection. It will be more easier for you to access blocked sites easily.
    
    
12. Yauba :Yauba is a web service. Yauba claims to be the first Privacy Safe search engine in the world. While using Yauba the website traffic is directed through their webservers instead of ours. So the website blocking softwares used in our company find it hard to trace out us accessing blocked websites.



13. Screen-Resolution.com :Screen Resolution Checker is a website that will allow us to see how a website looks under different resolutions. Since the website is accessed through their servers it is certainly one of the Best ways to Access blocked Sites Easily. When the website is displayed in the windows we can also navigate through the website by clicking the links in the website as we browse normally.

Also Check Out : How to Browse as Google Bot / Switch User Agent to Google Bot to Access Blocked Forums, Websites etc

How to Open Favorite Websites using Keyboard Shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox

Most often you open up your favorite website using the bookmarks toolbar, menu or by typing it on the address bar in Mozilla Firefox. The first two are some what quick. But how about opening your favorite websites Extremely Faster than any other methods you have seen. Yes this is possible if you use Keyboard shortcuts. Don't you use keyboard short cuts in Windows for Cut, copy operations etc, which really speed things up ?. Now let me show you how to open you favorite websites as fast as possible i.e. by using keyboard shortcuts........
You may have never seen a browser with the functionality to open your favorite websites using keyboard shortcuts. A Free Addon called Site Launcher will add these function in Mozilla Firefox easily. Site Launcher addon is a super-quick way to open your favorite websites in a jiffy.



The Default Shortcut to call up Site Launcher in Firefox is Ctrl+Space ( Ctrl+Alt for Mac users).

Here is What Site Launcher Offers

1. Since every site key is shown in the Launcher, there won't arise a problem to remember all the shortcuts for your favorite websites. All you need to remember is just one and only one shortcut key.
2. 
   The Default can be changed as per your needs.
   You can add as many sites as you wish to Site Launcher.
3. 
   You are not confined to keys from a-z or 0-9, a wide variety of shortcuts can be used.
5. 
   The interface is completely customizable. You can make the program suit your needs.
6. 
   There are many elective visual effects - rounded corners, transparency and gradients.
7. 
   You can make the site shortcuts to be arranged automatically or to be manually arranged in the way you want them to be shown in the Launcher.
8. 
   You can make Set Launcher to open the sites in a newtab or in the current tab.
9. 
   What's more you can also make Site Launcher to be shown on startup in lieu of your homepage.
   

Site Launcher works with Firefox 2.0 to 3.6 a1pre.

Download Site Launcher

Addon to Skip the UnWanted Windows in Popular File Download Sites

Almost every active internet user should have faced difficulties while downloading files in popular file sharing sites such as RapidShare, MegaUpload, MediaFire etc. You need to get through many unwanted screens or wait for countdowns to get to the download destination. Most probably these will asking to upgrade the plan to get better download speed, more download limit etc. So, if you download files frequently or let it be occasionally from these file sharing sites, these will be a sure nuisance to you. So here is a nice addon for Mozilla Firefox to get rid of all such unwanted windows or countdowns and quickly proceed to the download page........

SkipScreen is one nice addon for Mozilla Firefox users that will quickly take you to the download page by passing through the unwanted windows or countdowns in major files sharing sites.

Here are the list of the site supported by SkipScreen.

• Rapidshare.com
• zShare.net
• Megaupload.com (no captcha action... yet)
• MediaFire.com
  
• Sharebee.com
• Depositfiles.com
• Sendspace.com
• Divshare.com
• inkbucks.com
  

The developers of this nice addon says that they will be improving the functionality of this addon. So more site will e added to the addon.

SkipScreen works with Mozilla Firefox 2.0 - 3.16a1pre.

Download SkipScreen Now

Clear the Browsing History for a Specific Site With Just a Click in Firefox

Well, you may have seen so many addons for clearing the browsing history in Firefox. There are many software also for clearing you browsing history. All these will delete or clear out all the complete data. But i am sure that you may have thought of one that can clear the browsing history just for one website or two. Yes thi has now become possible..........

Close'n Forget is a very handy addon for Mozilla Firefox users that can Clear out all the Tracks of a Particular website. This is really a very helpful addon if you do some private browsing in between.

All you need to do is to just download Close'n Forget and configure it correctly. Lets see.

Got to Tools > Addons and now select the Close'n Forget addon from the list. Click the Options.

You will get some thing similar to the screen shot below. A bunch of options will be presented.



Configure the options as per your need.

Right Click you Firefox Tool bar and select " Customize " option and drag the small Close'n Forget icon to the toolbar.

And when you open a website you can click the Close'n Forget icon in the toolbar to Clear the History and Traces of that particular website. Yes its that easy.

Download Close'n Forget now

How to Set Many Home Page's in Firefox

In browsers like Internet Explorer we have the option to Set many number of home pages. This will save a lot of time as there is no need to type the address of our favorite sites again in the browser. In Mozilla Firefox no such option is provided to Set Multiple Home Pages. One one Home page can be set by default. So here is s simple trick to set as many Home Pages in Mozilla Firefox.........

The Trick to get Multiple home pages in Firefox is so simple. Here are the steps.

In Firefox Go to Tools > Options.

You will be shown the " Main Tab" with a box to enter the Home Pages address.

Now Enter one URL and Enter the next one after putting the " | "character (without quotes).

Repeat this and Enter as many URL's to set as your Home Page.

Here is a example to clear your doubts if you have.

http://www.computingunleashed.com|http://millionclues.com

So Setting any number of Home Pages in Mozilla Firefox won't be a problem for you.

Resize the Tabs in Firefox to its Favicon's size / Enjoy Clutter free Tabs

Tabbed browsing feature is one of the best part of Mozilla Firefox . But when we open a lot of websites the browser will get cluttered. Tabs will really help to avoid opening a new website in a tab with in the same windows instead of opening the website in a new window. But all the space will be used up when we open five tabs. So how about resizing the Tab's to the size of the favicon. A Firefox addon will do this job nicely. Here are the steps to do it.....


First download the Faviconize Tab plugin.

Install the plugin and now restart the Firefox browser.

Now navigate to 'Tools' >> Addons. Look for the Faviconize plugin inside it.



Now select the 'option' from the Faviconize plugin.

Under the options you can customize the way to resize the tabs. There are options such as Alt + Click, Ctrl + Click, Shift + Click and Double click.

Select your preferred option from there. Selecting the " Double Click " option is more comfortable while browsing.

There is an option to AutoFaviconize also. It will allow you to enter the website url's which will be automatically Faviconized without any action.

If you selected the " Double Click " option go open a new tab and double click on it. You will see the tab size decreases to the favicons size.

~~~~~Happy Browsing~~~~~~

Firefox Foxmarks Addon now available for Internet Explorer and Safari Download now!!!!

Every body who have used the Foxmarks addon for firefox will really wish to get them in Other browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari. Let me tell you what is Foxmarks addon in Firefox. Foxmarks addon will synchronize the bookmarks we have saved with foxmarks servers. This will enable us to use recover the bookmarks if it is lost or even we can acess our favorite bookmarks from any where in the world. In short this is a must have tool for all internet users.



Before this tool was only available to Mozilla Firefox users. Now the developers of the foxmarks addon for firefox have released new versions that can be used in Internet Explorer and in Safari too. Yes this newly released version of the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer plugin now supports Windows XP, Vista and the new Windows 7 too.








Download Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

How to Get the Google's New Favicon in Firefox search box

Google has updated its old Favicon to the new one but even though it has been changed it is not updates or changed in firefox google search toolbar. You can do some simple step to get the new google icon in Firefox. Here is how to do it.



Get the latest Google search plugin From here .
Now replace the old google plugin with the new one for that Copy the newly downloaded google plugin(Google.xml) to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins and just replace the old one with the new.
Now press Ctrl + Shift + Del in Firefox and tick only the Cache box(you can check others as your wish) and press Clear Private Data Now button.
From now on Firefox will be updated with Google's new Favicon.

Recovering Deleted Bookmarks in Firefox/ Reconstructing Deleted Bookmarks

The " Most frequently visited " Folder in the Bookmarks toolbar will help you to search through your favorite site's faster. What will you do if you have accidentally deleted them or overwrote them during backup of your computer and you are in need of them to find one of your favorite site.

This is really a problem in Firefox. No option is provided with it to get back the deleted bookmarks once it is gone!. This is so because the bookmark library is a very small database and you need to define a query for that.Here is a solution to recover them.

1. Right click on the bookmark symbol bar and select " New bookmark ".
2. Give " Most frequently visited websites " as the" Name ".
3. Now type this query in the address field " place:queryType=1&sort 8&maxResults=20 ". Type this carefully.
4. Confirm by clicking " Add ".
5. Done!

Now i will saw how this works. You ask to pull the results from the browser history with " queryType=0 " and sort them in decreasing order of visiting frequency with " sort=8 " and maxResults=20 will decide how much entries should be displayed. It can be given as you wish it can be 20 or 30 or 40.

Deleting Individual or Specific Search Terms/Items from the Auto Complete list

Automatic completion of text fields is a great help while doing online searches , filling online forms etc. This really help in saving a lot of time making our work faster. But unfortunately it also saves the terms entered incorrectly and every time it appears again and we again selects it by mistake. This creates a hindrance to our work.


So we need to clear out the incorrect or wrongly typed terms.In the browser, you can delete the form data through Delete in the Browser history section of the Internet options, found under "Tools>Internet options" > click " Delete Forms". the problem is that when you does so the entire list will get deleted.

To delete an individual item do as follows.

1. Open a website which has input fields.
2. Now position the cursor in the text field and start typing a term and the browser suggests some entries.
3. Now select the term you want to delete by using the arrow keys and press [Del] button.
4. That's it.
   

Optimize Adblock Plus in Firefox and Filter junk ads Faster than ever

There may be hardly few Firefox users who don't know about the Adblock plus extension. Adblock Plus is used as the online ad filter by many users. But using a large number of self defined filters in Firefox can make it really sluggish. Long self defined filter lists makes Firefox sluggish because every page that is loaded is checked against the filters each and every time. However we can solve this problem to a great extend by optimizing the filter lists.

1. To start with first you have to save your filter list.
2. Then go to 'Tools'>'Adblock Plus'.
3. From settings dialogue box open 'Filters'> 'Export Filters'.
4. Open Windows Explorer and open the text file with an editor like Notepad.
5. Now select the entire content of the file by pressing [Ctrl] + [A] and copy tit to clipboard by pressing [Ctrl] + [A].
6. Now go to the website http://adblock.free.fr/optimize/index.php?lang=en and paste the list there by pressing [Ctrl] + [V].
7. Now check the options that are set. Please check that the 'Optimize URLs' and 'Remove Filters matched by others' options are active.
8. If you are already using an optimized list the 'Optimize including pre-existing RegExes' option must be activated. This will insert new filter list to the already optimized ones.
9. Now click 'Optimize'.
10. A dialog box showing the compressed list will show up.
11. Select the optimized list and copy it to a new blank text file and save it.
12. Now in Adblock settings dialog box, Open 'Filters'> 'Import Filters' and now navigate to the new text file and click on 'Open'.
13. It will ask whether to replace it. Now click on 'Overwrite' if not Firefox will add the new one together with the existing one .
14. Confirm it by clicking 'OK'. Done !

Now Firefox will filter ads faster than before. Make sure you do this at least once in a month.

Restore the Accidently/Previosly Closed TAB in Firefox or Opera

Hi here is a handy trick that can help you in reopening the recently closed tabs..Suppose you have closed an opened tab accidentally and you don't remember the link address to open the closed item.This trick is applicable to users having Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

• Press Ctrl + Shift + T to open the recently closed tab.

Pressing this key combination again will open the second tab that you have closed recently.This trick can be repeated to open the previously closed tabs.