Firefox – Mostly Harmless

August 7, 2016

Firefox and TLS

Firefox is weird. In a forum conversation (which went so off topic but that’s alright) the following was reported to me. When you visited my site in Firefox, you get a warning about being insecure.

Huh. That’s odd and a little embarrassing. I mean, I’m a network security professional so you can see how that would be awkward. 😉

So I looked at my site on the Qualys SSL Labs page and got this result.

Which is good but Firefox still didn’t like my site.

A few weeks ago I was playing with my nginx config and something I did made Firefox unhappy. I’m pretty sure I munged the cypher suite in my poking and prodding.

Fair enough, I used the configs from a site that does work in that browser and tonight I’ll play around to see what I broke. In the meanwhile my site is encrypted and viewable in Firefox.

December 30, 2010

End of year Firefox goodness

With the end of year upon us, it is good to see Lifehacker doing a review of good things for Firefox in 2010. Head over and give it a read.

I use Adblocker mainly as an additional security measure (yes, I have Google Ads on this blog) and this list escaped my notice.

Right now I am using Firefox Beta 8 and unlike the earlier betas this one has not given me any grief at all.

November 21, 2010

Trying Firefox 4 beta again

Recently I gave Firefox 4 beta 4 a try but ended up removing it. As a beta it was not bad but I had some minor problems with Adobe Flash and the benefits were not enough to get me to keep it.

Firefox 4 beta 7 is another story. On a whim I installed it on my Windows 7 PC and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. It’s fast and I don’t seem to get any web page rendering issues. I use my browser for news reading, WordPress, Facebook (okay, almost ashamed to admit that one), etc. and some of the content is mixed and dynamic. With this new beta, the only thing that is different is the menu is hidden. Other than that, the experience is very smooth.

It’s definitely not for the casual user (I am not installing it on the shared iMac) but if you want to see what’s next then give it a try.

March 7, 2010

And the winner is Xmarks

Earlier I had dropped Xmarks and installed Mozilla Weave. After a few weeks I’m back to Xmarks. Syncing the browser history is a very useful feature, but some really weird things have been going on with my Weave sync data lately.

My problems began when I installed Weave on my Ubuntu 9.10 work station. I could not get the bookmarks to install on that browser for anything. No errors in the log, just no sync either. I have just plugged in another old PC in the basement and installed Weave. The same thing happened and I was not getting any data synced.

Also being able to roll back to an earlier set of data on Xmarks is a huge benefit. I screw up sometimes and Xmarks has a great safety net.

I know that I can install Weave and Xmarks at the same time. That way I can use Xmarks for password and bookmarks and Weave for browser history. But I’m not going to do that because I want to limit the amount of add-ons that I’m using.

Now if only Xmarks would just sync web browsing history then I would not keep looking at Weave…

February 1, 2010

Mozilla Weave

Image from Mozilla's Weave website I’m giving Mozilla Weave a try. I’ve been a big fan of the extension formally known as Foxmarks (Xmarks) so when Mozilla released Weave, I was not sure if there was anything for me to look at.

I use a work PC, my HP, and a laptop. Xmarks has been good at keeping my bookmarks and passwords secure and supports a revision history of your changes. Somehow I messed up my bookmarks and this got moved to the Xmarks server. Not a problem, I just rolled back to an earlier revision and got all of my bookmarks back.

It’s like applying SVN onto my browser. Mozilla Weave is not quite like that. It does do bookmark and password synchronization but it doesn’t provide a means to rollback to an earlier version of your bookmarks (or maybe I just couldn’t find it). What appeals to me is that it also syncs up your browsing history. I have often been at work trying to remember a web site I had seen the night before at home. I’m hoping that this will sync my browsing history.

Xmarks has been very responsive to their users so I expect this feature to make it into their extension soon.

August 5, 2009

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2 out

“Images with ICC profiles now render properly on all monitors.” via Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2 Release Notes. I just upgraded and color management is working for me now.

June 30, 2009

Firefox 3.5 has been released

Firefox 3.5 has been released and I have been using Firefox 3.5 since it was 3.1 beta. It good, head over to Mozilla.com and get your fresh copy now.

April 28, 2009

Running Firefox 3.5 beta 4

I’m now using Firefox 3.5 beta 4. They bumped up the version from 3.1 beta 3 to 3.5 beta 4. Beta 3 worked really well so I expect beta 4 to be “betterer”.

April 12, 2009

Firefox 3.1 beta 3 looks good

firefox-31-b3

Firefox 3.0.x has a bug in it’s javascript handling that makes Flickr go insane for some people who use Nvidia drivers. I had tried an earlier beta and was disappointed to see that the bug was not addressed.

I’ve been using beta 3 and I have not been able to reproduce the bug. The javascript is fast. It might not be Chrome or Safari 4 beta fast, but it is noticeably more responsive than Firefox 3.0 and all the extensions that I actually use are compatible.

Google Gears is not compatible yet but the faster javascript makes my user experience fast enough that I can’t see the difference. And I only use gears with WordPress, so it’s not like I am really missing out at this point.

I’ll keep kicking it around but this beta looks solid.

July 19, 2008

Flickr Firefox 3 problem

Update: I re-installed Vista 64 cleanly (wiped out everything) and I am using the Nvidia video drivers from Microsoft. Flickr is still misbehaving on FireFox 3 for me.

On the upside, adding these lines to Adblock Plus’s whitelist did fix my problems with Facebook:

@@|http://*.facebook.com/
@@|http://*.fbcdn.net/

——————

On some of the installations I have, Firefox 3 and Flickr do not get along with each other. Here’s a screen shot of what’s happening.

Firefox 3 problem with Flickr

What happens is that when new content comes from Flickr’s website, the whole page does not get re-drawn. I drew a red box around the new page. Switching tabs forces the page to be redrawn but this is happening often.

This is not limited to Flickr. Facebook has problems where I click on something and nothing happens. This only occurs in Firefox 3, in Firefox 2 I never had any issue. The mozilla support forums are pretty looking but not really useful.

I hate to say it, but Flickr and Facebook are more reliable in Internet 7 than Firefox 3.

Tag: Firefox (page 1 of 2)