Yesterday on 27^th April 2012 Mozilla launched Firefox 13 Beta version into the market. Firefox 13 is a faster and much secure web browser when compared to its predecessors or the other products currently in the market.

Let’s peep into History:

Firefox was one of the first browsers that shook the world with its features when people were just happily browsing the internet with Internet explorer. It gave them a better web browsing experience. Meanwhile the stock/default web browser bundled with Windows OS never looked to outshine Mozilla Firefox. It was no match to the features of Mozilla Firefox. So, Firefox became the market leader in a short time.

But the kingship of Firefox was short lived and the Internet’s Big “G” launched its Chrome browser in the market and from there onwards both these browsers are fighting really hard to bring the best. And for becoming the best they roll out updates every second day to outshine one another.

Features of Firefox 13 Beta:

The new feature that Firefox 13 Beta incorporates is “SPDY”. This protocol is intended to become the successor of HTTP. SPDY protocol reduces the amount of time it takes to load a webpage.

According to Mozilla “SPDY encrypts the communications with SSL, which makes the browsing more secure”. It also makes the chances of a hacker to overhear your web communications thinner. Although in today’s time the websites that supports SPDY protocol are very few in numbers and hence the users will only see the difference in the sites that support SPDY Networking.

Firefox 13 Beta also has an upgraded homepage design which provides easy access to the bookmarks, settings, history, add-ons and downloads etc. The browsing tabs are also redesigned to match the Chromes looks. New feature “Quick Links” is also added to the browser that can be customized at a single click.

What’s new for Software Developers?

The beta version of Firefox 13 also has some updates for the Software Developers, the tools like page inspector now also allow you to gaze into the CSS pseudo classes and the Style editor has the capability to save the CSS files via file:// URLs. This makes the life easier as it doesn’t prompt you to make workflows for experimenting with CSS files.

You can download Firefox 13 Beta version form the official Firefox site at:
Mozilla Firefox Beta’s Website.

Now we just have to see that whether Google Chrome has any answer to Firefox 13 or not.
Feel free to share your ideas and feedback in the comments section below.

Although I am not a big time fan of Firefox but still sometimes I do use Firefox because of its add-on support. Few days back while browsing on Firefox, I noticed that it is occupying a big chunk of memory on my machine. I tried to reduce its memory usage by closing out some tabs but it didn’t worked, latter I surfed this on internet and came to know that it is a very strange behaviour of Firefox generally called as Firefox memory leak. The main cause of the memory leak is that may be Firefox is not able to release the free memory properly and hence goes on taking up the memory without any limit.

Fixing memory leaks in Firefox by using Firemin:

Firemin is a third party application that can check and optimize the memory usage of Firefox. It is also called Firefox Plumber. Firemin ideally sits in the background and manages Firefox memory from there.

Simply install Firemin and it will automatically take care of the Firefox memory leak. You can also set Firefox to launch whenever you run Firemin. You can download Firemin here [Fix for Firefox memory leak]

To install simply unzip the downloaded “fireman.zip” file, run the Fireman.exe and it will do the Firefox babysitting for you

Reduce Memory Leak issue in Firefox by changing configuration:

If you don’t want to install any third party application to fix Firefox memory leak then you can do certain changes in the Firefox configuration although these changes won’t fix the leaks completely but still they are quite helpful in reducing them.

• Open the Firefox browser and in the URL bar enter “about:config”.

• Now you will find a page where all the Firefox configurations are enlisted.

• Right click on the configuration page and choose New > Integer and name it as “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. Set it to 16384 (means 15 MB).

• Again right click on the configuration page and create another Integer named as “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. Set it to 15000.

• Now create another attribute this time a Boolean one. Right click select New > Boolean and name it as “config.trim_on_minimize”. Set it to true. This means that whenever you minimize Firefox it will try to free up memory on its own.

After doing these changes restart the Firefox and you will notice that the memory leak issue in Firefox will be significantly reduced.

If you want to speed up your Firefox then you should read this post: [Speed up Firefox]

Epub files are the open publication structure eBooks, that have an ePub extension. ePub files are the one of the most popular eBook formats. ePub stands for Electronic publishing. Today in this post I will be guiding you on “how to read ePub files”.

Read ePub files on Firefox:

The most simple and economical way to read ePub files is reading them on your Firefox browser. For this you need to equip your Firefox browser with “EPubReader” add-on. Actually an ePub eBook is a kind of archive file containing text and images. The add-on simply does the job of decompressing the ePub archive and then it opens the file in the browser window.

Reading ePub files on Chrome:

If you are using Google Chrome then you can try the Magic Scroll eBook Reader. The add-on is a minimalist eBook reader. It can also work without internet connection.

Read ePub eBooks online:

Bookworm is a free online platform for storing and reading ePub eBooks. The best part about this service is that you don’t need to install anything to read the eBooks. All you need to do is to sign up for a free account with bookworm. Once you have an account you can add books to your library and read them from anywhere you want.

Read ePub eBooks on Windows and Mac:

Stanza is a third party desktop application that you can use to open and read ePub files on Mac or Windows. It is simple, light-weight software that also lets you save the ePub eBooks into different formats (like pdf, text, rtf and word), apart from reading them.

Read ePub eBooks on Windows via Mobi Pocket Reader:

Mobi Pocket Readeris a complete eBook reader for Windows, as it supports many eBooks formats like pdf, ePub and office formats. If you have a habit of reading eBooks on your desktop then you should go for this app.

So, this was all about reading ePub files on your desktop.

Firefox is probably one of the best internet browser these days. It is so much popular among users because of its features and its extremely light interface that does not consume much system resources. But if you are a power internet user and have used Firefox to extremes then you will feel that it is okay for normal users but for a power user it is not the best choice. For instance if you have around 20-25 tabs opened then it will make your browsing experience slow by hogging the system resources. So, today in this guide I will be highlighting some points by which you can know how to speed up Firefox.

How to Speed Up Firefox - General Tips :

Actually there are some general tweaks that you can find anywhere on the internet to speed up Firefox. So, before I do anything else I will be reminding you about these general tweaks.

1. Firstly check the add-ons that you are using on Firefox. If you find some add-ons that you are not using now, then it’s a good practice to remove them. Actually the more add-ons you have the less stable your Firefox becomes. Here I would like to make one thing very clear that there is a difference between disabling an add-on and removing an add-on completely. Disabling an add-on means that the add-on is inactive but still it will use your system resources on the other hand removing an add-on completely means that you have uninstalled that add-on and it is no longer in your system.

2. Secondly you need to check the plug-ins installed in Firefox and remove the plug-ins that are of no use to you. Actually there are certain software’s that install some promotional plug-ins on your browser and these annoying plug-ins consume your bandwidth and also keep hogging your system resources, so it’s a good practice to keep checking plug-ins installed on your Firefox and remove the waste ones regularly.

3. If you feel that your Firefox is running dead slow then you should also try clearing you browser history and cookies.

How to Speed Up Firefox by changing Firefox configuration file:

This part is a bit tricky and before going further ahead I would suggest you to take a backup of the Firefox configuration file, so that in case anything goes wrong you can revert back to your previous settings.

The configuration file is named as “prefs.js” and it can be found at following locations on your system.

Windows Xp:

<system drive>\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile ID>.default\

Windows 7 or Windows Vista:

<system drive>\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile ID>.default\

Generally the file is hidden so you may need to select the “show hidden files” option and then copy the “pref.js” file to some other location.

Basics of tweaking the Firefox configurations:

Firefox offers a specialized way to change the configuration settings, you don’t need to conventionally open the files in a text editor and then change its values but Firefox allows you do do the changes in a more sophisticated way. All you have to do is to open your preference file on Firefox for this simply type: “about:config” (without quotes) in your Firefox url bar. After opening this file firefox will prompt you with a warning, click the button “I’ll be careful I Promise”. Now Firefox will display you a long list of preferences that you can change, but do not change any value without knowing about it as it may result in making your browser unstable.

• To change any Boolean parameters simply double click the parameter and the parameter value will get toggled. By toggling I mean that if the value is initially “true” then it will turn to “false” and vice versa.

• In case on your Firefox you don’t have any preference that needs to be changed than you can add the preference by right clicking on the preference page in the about:config window and choose New > String, Integer or Boolean depending on the data type of the preference.

• According to my experience to find a relevant parameter among all the listed parameters is quiet tough so in order to make this process easy, use the filter bar above the window. In the filter bar you can type in the parameter name and all the related parameters will be listed accordingly.

Preferences to be changed for improving Firefox speed:

Here I have mentioned a list of all the parameters that can be changed to improve your Firefox speed. If any parameter that I have mentioned is not on your preference list then you can add the parameter as told above. If any of your parameter is already set to a value mentioned then you can simply skip that parameter and move on.

browser.tabs.animate: false

By default this setting is true, this parameter is responsible for enabling or disabling tab animations (e.g. when you open a new tab). This parameter can make your Firefox plain and dull but it can drastically improve your speed.

browser.display.show_image_placeholders: false

By default this is set to true, this parameter is responsible to display the image placeholders before images are loaded.

network.prefetch-next: true

This setting is responsible for fetching the contents of a page that are linked to a page that you are viewing. This makes your internet experience faster.

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 8

This setting increases the maximum number of persistent connections per server which can help to speed up loading of multimedia rich sites. Default value is 6

network.http.pipelining: true

If this setting is set to true then your browser can send multiple requests to the server at a time. One thing I would like to bring to your notice that this is not supported by all the servers and some servers can send incorrect response to the request and this can cause unexpected behavior.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 8

This can specify the number of requests that can be pipelined together to be sent to the server.

network.dns.disableIPv6: true

It disables IPv6 DNS lookups to prevent a significant delay with poorly configured IPv6 servers. By default this value is set to False

At last you need to add a parameter named “nglayout.initialpaint.delay”. Do it as follows right click anywhere on the “about:config”page and select the “New” > “Integer” option and Name it as “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” (without quotes) and set its value to “0″(without quotes). This parameter specifies the time the browser waits before it acts on the requests that it receives.

So, these were all the tweaks that I have personally used and they worked fine on my machine. These tweaks have made my Firefox quiet fast and have improved the overall browsing experience. But if anything goes wrong for you then you can simple replace the “pref.js” file that you have backed up initially.

Happy Browsing

In this article I am going to guide you on Search Preview Firefox Extension. As you could already guess from the name of this Firefox Extension, Search Preview is an extension for Firefox which can make your internet surfing experience better by allowing you to see the website snapshot thumbnails while performing search with the Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine.

Benefits:

I would like to highlight the benefits of using Search Preview Firefox Extension.

• Search Preview can be helpful in saving your time and internet bandwidth. As you could easily guess from the thumbnail if the website is worth a visit and is it really having the information that you are really looking for.
• Secondly the thumbnail also gives you a look and feel of the website which in turn gives you an idea to guess if the listed website is trustworthy (I mean that the sites which don’t have any bad stuff associated with them).
• Thirdly it also helps you to guess if the listed website is really carrying any information or is just a spam.

Please see below screenshot which gives you a look and feel of how search preview works in firefox.

So now, if you have agreed that this Search Preview is really beneficial, then here is the way to get it on your Firefox browser.

Way to get Search Preview For Firefox 

You will be amazed to know that along with the thumbnails, the extension also shows you the popularity rank of the listed websites. The best part of this extension is that it has an option “Request Update of this image” which in turn gives you the latest snapshot of the website. Please follow below listed steps to get this extension:

1. Please go this link.
2. Now once the page is loaded. Click on the “Download Now” button.
3. After the download is completed. Please install “Search Preview” Extension.
4. Please restart your Firefox Browser after installation.

Now you are all set to enjoy the Search Preview while surfing through internet using your Firefox Browser.

Happy Surfing.

Some people on facebook are power pokers. I mean if you are in the friend list of any such users they will make your social life terrible by poking you every now and then. So if any of your friends are suffering from poking mania then you are at the right place. Today I am going to share a technique by which you can auto poke back on Facebook.

This Auto Poking addon will Poke back your friends who have poked you without any interruption in your Facebook browsing sessions. All what you have to do is just install an extension in your browser and you are ready for auto poke backs on facebook.

For Google Chrome Users:

If you are a Google chrome user then you can simply install a plugin “POKE ALL FOR CHROME”.  Please follow below steps to do this:

• Please download the plugin from here.
• Once downloaded please install the plugin.
• After installing the plugin close your browser and then reopen it.

• You can see the extension FACEBOOK ICON in the Top right side of the browser. Click it and check the option “Auto Poke”.

Now you are done. When you are on your facebook homepage the extension checks if there are any pending pokes or not, If there are any, then it will auto poke them.

For Firefox Users:

If you use Firefox browser then please follow below steps to auto poke on Facebook:

• First of all Firefox users need to have Grease Monkey. If you don’t have it then get it here.
• After installing Grease Monkey close you browser and then reopen it again.
• Now install the “FACEBOOK AUTOPOKE SCRIPT”. You can install it here.

• After this an install popup will come, click on install button.
• After installing this script restart your browser and yippee you are done.

Note: If the Extension is not working then Clear the Cache and Restart the Browser to try again.

Happy Autopoking!

I am not the only person who feels that the new facebook chat is quiet annoying. It doesn’t shows who’s online except some of your friends with whom you interact the most. So, today I am going to share how to get old facebook chat back. Actually to get your old chat feature back you have to use a script called Facebook Sidebar Chat script as I have described below.

So without wasting any further time we would quickly jump onto our topic on getting old Facebook Chat back. Please note that there are various ways to achieve this depending on your internet browser. I will be listing down all of these below.

Google Chrome: 

If you are using Google Chrome then you have to use the Facebook Sidebar Chat script. Please follow below steps to do this:

1. First of all download the script from here.
2. Once the script is downloaded you need to install it.
3. After Installing the Script close your browser window and reopen it.

That is all and you are all set to use your old facebook chat.

Mozilla Firefox:

If you use Mozilla Firefox then there are two possible ways for you to get old Facebook Chat back.

Method 1 for Mozilla Firefox Users:

Please follow below steps to get old facebook chat on your firefox browser:

1. Please download the Grease Monkey Add-On from here.
2. After the download is complete, please install the add-on.
3. Once the installation of Grease monkey is complete, you need to download the Facebook Chat script. You can download the Facebook Sidebar Chat script here .
4. After downloading the Script, you need to install it.
5. Once installation of the script is complete you need to close your browser window and reopen it.

You are all set to use old Facebook Chat now.

Alternative method for Firefox Users:

Please follow below mentioned step to use the alternative method to get old facebook chat:

1. Download the plugin Facebook Chat Sidebar Disabler from here.
2. After the download is complete, please install the plug-in.
3. Once installation of the plug-in is complete you need to restart your firefox browser.

Opera Browser:

If you are using Opera browser then there is a separate plugin for you. Please follow below steps to use this plug-in to get your old chat back:

1. Download the plugin “Facebook Chat Sidebar Disabler” from here.
2. After the download is complete, please install the plug-in.
3. Once installation of the plug-in is complete you need to restart your opera browser.

So, By using the above mentioned plugin you can get your old facebook chat back.

This was all about on getting your old facebook chat back using various Plug-ins and Add-Ons on various internet browsers.

Happy Chatting.

I guess all of you would agree to the fact that Firefox is undoubtedly one of the best browsers in the world and its also my personal favourite. But despite of its cool features and superb add-ons somehow it has lagged behind in its looks. I mean if you don’t use any themes for firefox you are bound to feel it dull and boring. Today I am going to guide you on how to make Firefox transparent.

In the default firefox theme the top title bar looks transparent and the rest of the browser looks solid. This is what looks really awkward in the layout of Firefox. Without wasting any further time I would like to head onto our topic of making Firefox transparent.

In other words Transparency on Firefox is better known as Aero Glassy Effect. You could have a look at the below picture to have a feel of this layout.

I prefer this addon to any theme because it gives an Aero glassy effect to the Firefox toolbar and the best part is that it preserves the look of the icons, tabs etc. So, now you can also have a transparent browser and I bet you will love it. Without wasting any further time we will quickly jump onto our topic of making Firefox Transparent.

How to make Firefox Transparent

Its really simple to get this done. All you need to do is to follow below mentioned step by step procedure:

1. Download “New Glasser” add-on of Firefox from the below specified link: [Download Link]
2. Once it is downloaded, you need to install this add-on.
3. After getting installed it will prompt you to restart your Firefox Browser.
4. Now restarting your Firefox browser and you are all set to enjoy the new transparent look of your firefox browser.

This is all about getting the classic transparent look at Firefox browser.

Drop in your feedback in the comments section below to let us know how you found this classy transparent look.