Tag Archives: firefox

Top Mac OS X Apps: Got your new Mac? Now what to install?

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Apple iMac 27 inch

Have you just bought your new Apple Macbook Pro, MacBook Air, or the beautiful 27 inch iMac, with Apple’s rock-solid Mac OS X. What to install? What are some of the must have applications?

There so many articles out there on the web: Best 10 Apps for your iMac, or 12 must have Apple apps, etc.

Here are apps that I personally use, and that many of my friends have installed on their Apple machines. You don’t have to install each and every application, but more or less choose what you need and get cracking.

  • Google Chrome (an absolute must). I use Chrome because it integrates very well with most of my Google apps, however, many users complain Chrome’s text input on the Mac is slower than say that on a Windows machine.
  • Firefox – As if Chrome and Safari were not enough, I’ve installed Firefox simply because of the sheer number of useful add-ons it offers (think of Add-ons as plug-ins or extensions for your browser).
  • Evernote – If you haven’t already used Evernote, it is time you do. It is one of the most helpful applications out there, that you will use frequently. Store saved pages, notes, business cards, PDFs, cut-and-paste text, etc. all searchable and very cleanly organized. As the good folks at Evernote say – remember everything!
  • Dropbox – The most famous online storage on the web, since perhaps the invention of soda pop! Dropbox offers you free 2GB of storage online. The most people you recommend to use Dropbox, the more your free storage space increases. It also has a paid-account, in which you can subscribe to more storage space as well as the ability to undelete files (as far back as 30 days). You can install Dropbox on multiple machines and have them sync with each other effortlessly. I have it installed on my 2 Macs and a Windows laptop. Edit or save a file one one machines and in mere seconds, the files are updated across all the machines. Laptop gets stolen, you will be glad you had Dropbox to save your important files.
  • TextWrangler – A clean and very easy to use text editor for the Mac. Much more preferred (by me at least) over the TextEdit (built-in text editor in Mac).
  • Adium – Adium is a free instant messenger for the Mac OS X. It allows you to connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Twitter, Facebook Chat, IRC, ICQ (if you still use it) and a few others that you probably might never use. If IM is your game, rather than having half-a-dozen IMs open, opt for Adium and make your life easier.
  • 1Password – is a paid utility, but one that I must stress you get. At US$ 49.99 one times, it is a steal. Bet you have forgotten your password one time or another? Right? Bet you have it saved in a text file on your computer? Don’t do that. Get 1Password and make loggin-in and password management a seamless task.
  • Acorn – Everybody at some point in their life, will require the use of an Image Editor. Most of us don’t need the thousands of bells and whistles that Adobe Photoshop or GIMP offers, we just need a simple photo editor that is easy to use and reasonably priced. Acorn is just that. Try out the 30 day trial. Acorn is priced at US$ 49.99
  • Reeder – I’ve tried a whole bunch of RSS readers, they all have their plus/minus points. Reeder is my personal favorite. It is a very nice RSS aggregator for placing all your RSS feeds in one place and going through them.
  • Zipeg – .RAR and .ZIP files are a way of life. Just download the free Zipeg RAR/ZIP file utility and you will be all set.
  • Wunderlist – Have things to do? Need to keep a check on your To-Do list – Perhaps the best free task management software out there. Another alternative is Anxiety and Fantastical.
  • Alfred – If you need to search for anything on your Mac, be it a file, a link, a bookmark, etc. Alfred is the ultimate application. Free of course. Its fast, very easy to get a custom toggle and just type away and see instantaneous results.
  • SnagIt – Though there are many screen-capture tools (including the ones built-in to the Max OS X – see here) I still find SnagIt to be the best. Sure there are $1.99 apps and free plug-ins for Firefox and Google Chrome – so why spend a bundle on SnagIt, simply because if screen captures and using those captured images, resizing, editing, annotations, etc. matter to you, then SnagIt is the fastest and the best alternative out there.
  • OpenOffice – Though I have moved most of my work to Google Docs, every now and then I will get an odd Microsoft Word or Excel file. The best alternative to MS Office is OpenOffice. Its free, it works and its time you kicked the habit of using MS Office.
  • iTerm2 – DO you SSH or FTp via command line? DO you need a simple to use terminal emulator, but powerful enough for your CLI needs? Look no further than iTerm2.
  • Address Book Clearout – Managing an address book is frustrating. Your email client will have something else, your online something else, your Mac address bok (oh lets not get started on bad it is). However, to fix all this – you need the Address Book Clearout app. At US$ 6.99 it will save you hours of editing and going through your address book to sift through, sort out and deleted/merge all duplicate or haywire entries.
  • Skype of Mac – Skype – enough said. We all need it.
  • VLC Media Player – Gotta watch movies? VLC is the player to have. It will play those hard to play MKV format on the Mac with ease, as well as MP4, AVI, etc. Free to use.
  • CloudApp – Need to share pictures? files? documents? with others. Just get CloudApp (Free!), drag, drop and share! Voila!
  • Growl – Need a central notification center? Yes, you do (trust me on this one). Just download and install Growl. It works great. See all your notifications pop up on one side of the screen.
  • FileZilla for Mac – Simple, free and and easy to use, FTP client. Very robust and can be as detailed oriented as you want it to be.
  • AppCleaner – AppCleaner is a free, easy to use, applications to uninstall unwanted apps on your Mac!
  • Little Snitch – If security is your concern, Little Snitch is the solution. It protects and informs you what applications on your computer are trying to connect to the outside world.

Deliberately, I have left out apps like Email Clients of which there is a wide variety (Sparrow and Thunderbird are my recommendations). Tweetdeck for Mac as a Twitter Client. xCode if you are going to be an Apple developer/programmer, The Apps store is a great way to discover new and exciting apps for your computer and your computing needs.

Transfer to Google Chrome without worrying about Your Add-ons on Firefox

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I know that before Google Chrome’s entry into the market, Firefox was one of the most and reliable browser used out there. The one reason among all the reasons behind that, was the Add-on feature in firefox which let the user take out something more than just from its simple use. Add-ons makes browsing more easy and fun, and hence it put a question in minds of Firefox lovers that will Google Chrome give them such experience as Firefox does.

Well you don’t have to worry about all your Add-Ons on Firefox, because simply similer to the Firefox add-ons, we have Google Chrome Extensions, available on Google Chrome Webstore and they contain extensions from blogging to shopping. Today we bring you some of the extensions on Google Chrome, that you had as Add-ons on Firefox and you might start missing them once you are on Google Chrome.

Adblock+

It allows you to block/disable ads on a webpage.

Stumble it

Just stumble any page you are on, using this extension.

Gmail This

More intuitive, efficient and useful is what this extension is. It makes you go straight to a new email composing on G-Mail with the link of the webpage you are on, added already.

Lnkify

If you are on a webpage that has a long URL, well you can use this extension to shorten your URL and convert it into a hyperlink.

Socialize 

It lets you submite the page you are on, to any Social Bookmarking websites.

Video Downloader 

This add-on was one of the widely used on Firefox. It lets you download videos from any Video sharing website easily. This Downloader will also help you convert some video formats.

Google Pagerank

Use this extension when ever you want to check the Pagerank of any website you are viewing

Twitter Now

Twitter Now is a Google Chrome extension that provides an interface to the basic functionalities of Twitter. This extension which lets you tweet straight from your browser

Share on Tumblr

With this Add on you can directly share your posts or any content which you see on the web on your Tumblr account. Along with this, you can also use the extension Tumblr Dashboard.

Dictionary

This is a very helpful extension for the users, mainly bloggers and students. This extensions helps you easily search for a term or anything you wish to find the meaning of.

Google Translate

This one is an extension that I think overpowers all the previous ones. You can simply translate a whole webpage fromany language it is in, to English. This is quite a handy extension.

Delicious Bookmark

This extensions lets you access your bookmarks easily with just a click and also to save your bookmarks if you want to.

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How to Download Videos from Facebook Using Firefox

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Often we get to watch some interesting videos on Facebook that are worthy enough to be downloaded and saved on to our hard drives. Most of the videos shared on Facebook or other social networking sites are from Youtube or personally made (copied, downloaded, saved) and then shared. There are many such tools to download videos directly from the Facebook page on Mozilla Firefox web browser without any pains of downloading other applications and using them to download the videos.

For Mozilla Firefox we have the great flexibility of Add-Ons that help us get many features that are not built in on the sites. This space is dedicated to help you about how to download videos from Facebook using Firefox.

Steps:

  1. In case you do not have Firefox installed on your computer, go to www.Firefox.com and download this amazing web browser all for free.
  2. Install the Firefox and wait for its completion. After Mozilla Firefox finishes installing, open the browser and go to your toolbar. At the toolbar click on Tools and then Add-ons. It opens a new pop-up window.
Grease monkey search
  1. At the new window, in the search box type grease monkey, add this add-on to Firefox and install it.
  2. To install Grease Monkey, go to http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9789 and click on install button on the right hand side and install this script.
  3. To get the Grease Monkey start working, you need to make sure if it’s enabled in the Firefox Add-ons window. Go to your toolbar, click on Tools, click on Add-ons to open the add-ons window and click on enable link for Grease Monkey if it is not already enabled.  How to enable grease monkey add-on
  4. Click on the Grease Monkey options to enable using the download videos from facebook directly from your Firefox browser. On the new window, check the Enable button on the lower left side.

Bazinga! That’s it; you’re done with every setting that is needed to let you download your favorite videos from Facebook using Firefox. Every time you’ll watch a video on Facebook there will be a ‘Download Video’ link same as we get ‘Download Image’ or ‘Save Image’ links.

Download video link on facebook

Have fun saving videos and blackmailing people even when they put them off of their pages *winks*

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How to make SiteLauncher work in Firefox 5 and Above

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Firefox has been on the top since its launch, and hence when Google Chrome came out, it has started upgrading to newer versions very fast. And in between this, they have disabled many add-ons, options and functions that were there in the previous versions of Firefox. We told you about how you could enable ‘Save and Quit‘ option in Firefox again, while it is disabled by default.

And then I was using Firefox once again, while my love nowadays is Google Chrome, when I came to know that the handy addon ‘SiteLauncher‘ has stopped working in the newer versions. For those of you who don’t know what this addon does, well its an awesome addon in terms of bookmarking sites etc.  It actually provides an easy and fast way to open your favourite websites by only using some short-cuts on  your keyboard.

And then I did a bit of research and found how to enable it again in the newer Firefox versions, and here is a simple and straight how-to guide for you to do so too:

1. First of all, download SiteLauncher and save it on your desktop. (right click on the ‘Add SiteLauncher to Firefox’ and click ‘Save Link As’)

site launcher addon facebook

2. Now just rename the file to .zip, and open the file.

 site launcher addon facebook

 

3. Inside it, you will see the file ‘Install.rdf’. Open the file using Notepad. It will open as below:

sitelauncher firefox addon

4. Now look for ‘<em:maxVersion>‘ and change the value of ’4.2′ after it to, ’5.0′ or the higher version that you are using of Firefox.

sitelauncher firefox addon

sitelauncher firefox addon

5. Now rename the file back to .xpi from .zip and install the addon to Firefox to enjoy using SiteLauncher again.

If you face any problem somewhere, just leave a comment and we will be happy to help you!

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Enable the Save and Quit Warning in Firefox

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A default glitch in Firefox since the release of Firefox 4 until version 6 right now is the discontinuation of the warning of ‘Save and Quit’ whenever we close more than one tab in Firefox. This warning used to be very handy whenever we were doing something very important and accidentally click the CROSS on the top-right of the window.

That used to happen to me and if I didn’t remember which windows were open when that happened, I used to take the easy way of restoring the last session. We can do that easily by clicking the ‘Firefox’ on the left-top, move cursor to the arrow in front of ‘History’ and click ‘Restore Previous Session’. But still that ‘Save and Quit’ option comes in use most importantly when we are typing something and don’t want to lose it, so we can cancel that warning and continue to type.

The ‘Save and Quit’  is not removed from Firefox 4 onwards but instead is turned off by default, and we can turn it back on easily. For that I have brought you this simple guide below:

1. Start Firefox and type “about:config” in the address bar and press ENTER.

save and quit

2. Now in the new opened page, in the ‘Filter’ column, type ‘showQuit’ and you will see ‘browser.showQuitWarning‘ and in front of that, the value would be ‘False’

save and quit firefox

3. Now double click this line, and you will see the value turn to ‘True’.

save and quit firefox

4. That’s it, you are done now. Whenever you will close the window, you will get the ‘Save and Quit’ warning.

enable save an quit in firefox

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How to Disable Web GL in Firefox?

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Based on some reports by several security consultancies, users of different browsers should disable WebGL in their browsers to help mitigate the risks. These risks usually cover the ability of attackers to run malicious code on your computer. If you don’t know what WebGL is, well its a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without installing additional software. It is enabled by default in Firefox and Google Chrome. Now how to disable it in Mozilla Firefox? Type “about:config” in the Firefox address bar and continue with warning dialog. Type “Webgl” in the Filter box double click “Webgl.disabled” entry and turn its value into “True”.

how to disable webGL firefox

Restart Firefox browser, WebGL is now disabled in Firefox. If you find this article helpful, you can always subscribe to our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter & Facebook for more.

Restore Tabs in Chrome and Firefox Across all Machines with TabCloud

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Restoring tabs across different browsers and machines is one of the headaches of syncing nowadays. I have different browsers and I need to keep tabs in sync, otherwise it’s a giant “let’s email open tabs links to myself” mess. In the age of sync anywhere, anytime it amazes me that Google still hasn’t come up with a reliable solution to keep tabs and sessions in sync between different machines. People used Xmarks service for sometime, and then even that started giving errors.

Then out of the blue, came in a great extension, ‘Tab Cloud’ which is a neat little open source extension that you can use to save sessions and restore them later on another installation of the supported browsers, even across machines and OS’s. It works with your Google Account and once you log in with your Google credentials, every time you want to save a snapshop of your current window you open TabCloud’s menu and hit save.

You can get Tab Cloud, from Appspot website for both Chrome and Firefox.

Or you can even download Tab Cloud for Chrome from HERE.

 

restore tabs across browsers chrome and firefox

 

And for Firefox, you can get the addon from HERE too.

restore tabs across browsers chrome and firefox

restore tabs across browsers chrome and firefox

Once you’ve installed this extension and have signed in with your Google account, just save your session of the tabs, and even after that you can re-order them before finally saving them.

 

restore tabs across browsers chrome and firefox

restore tabs across browsers chrome and firefox

restore tabs across browsers chrome and firefox

You can choose to restore sessions either in the current tab or in a new window. You can also choose whether or not to go through a confirmation dialog when you delete saved sessions or close a window.  Like in the above pictures, when you are ready to save a session, just click the Tab Cloud icon, and then on the disk icon, which then saves your tabs.

After you start saving more and more sessions, you can of course delete any of them, but in Firefox you won’t be able to get a confirmation dialog, like you can in Google Chrome.

What apps do you use to share links across computers? Let us know in the comments!

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Social Web Browsers: Flock & RockMelt Review

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Social Web Browsers

“Another new browser?” you say, yes! With the browser market predominantly divided between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari, is there really space for a new web browser? The answer is a definitive Yes! Not just any browser, but the new age browsers being rolled out are being coined as “Social Web Browsers“.

As if the name was not a dead giveaway, these new social browsers are all about making you get the best of your social networking experience integrated directly onto the browser.

So, browsing, searching, sharing, interacting, communicating, etc. is native and in one application. Apps like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Gmail, Blog, RSS Feeds, etc. are all present within the browser itself.

The two main social web browsers worth looking into are: Flock and RockMelt.

Social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, stream a lot of data, and a typical web-tab environment is not the best of place for it. Because of the higher refresh required, it makes it a complete nuisance to have such streams loaded in a web-tab and constant refreshing. Hence, the social web browsers have been designed to have client-type apps built directly into the default browser.

It can be said with a lot of certainty that social web browsers are like the Swiss Army knife of the online world. They combine the best of the web, search, sharing, social media and audio/video into one app.

Flock

Flock was the early entrant in this market. Originally it was built using the Mozilla open source code on which Firefox runs, but today, Flock is powered by the Chromium engine (developed by Google). Chromium is the same engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser. Making Flock HTML 5 compliant, fast and secure (the same can be said of RockMelt)

Once downloaded and installed, Flock will make you connect to all your social networks. It does this by using a concept called a master account. The master account has all the child accounts that contain the log-in credentials of each of your social network sites. When you fire up Flock, it will automatically connect all your accounts and show them on one seamless window.

As with any browser, you can import all your bookmarks, favorites and other related information.

Here is an intro video for Flock

New Flock from Flockstar on Vimeo.

Here are some screenshots for Flock

Flock supports the following OS:  Windows, Mac and Linux.

Language Support: Windows: 31 languages, Mac: 17 languages, Linux: 17 languages.

RockMelt

RockMelt is the new kid on the block. Let me tell you upfront, I’m sold!

RockMelt is also based on the Chromium engine, which means it is fast. Really fast. Currently, the only way to get RockMelt is via Facebook. You will need to visit RockMelt’s website and connect using your Facebook credentials, to get an invite. The invite usually comes within 24-48 hours directly into your Facebook Messages.

Caution: Since RockMelt is activated via Facebook, you pretty much have to give RockMelt access to all your Facebook control. This is worrisome for many who just want to try the browser out. I did research the Internet before, to be 100% sure, that I am not going to allow some rogue organization / application to have access and control of my Facebook account. If Facebook privacy is a concern, then I would recommend that you do not download and activate it.

The left and right rails or “Edges” as they are being referred to, currently support only Twitter and Facebook, but I am sure as the browser gets more stable and mature, more social networks will be added on to it.

RockMelt is in Beta trials. So if you are having specific issues, be patient. It offers almost all the features that Flock does, but lays it out in a much more cleaner and user friendly manner.  Flock which uses one ‘side’ strip to constantly update, RockMelt uses the left and right rails of your browser to ever present you with information by simply moving your mouse over there.

The search and sharing is a breeze. It’s almost intuitive browsing and socializing at the same time. Very niche. Very much appreciated. However, RockMelt is not without problems. My Twitter feeds seems to get ‘stuck’ and my Facebook updates disappeared, until I restarted the browser. There are growing pains and the unprecedented response the browser got, a fact that is reflected in the blog entry of RockMelt here. So be patient, and the kinks in the system will be straightened.

Here is an intro video for RockMelt

Here are some screenshots for RockMelt

RockMelt supports Windows and Mac (I did not get a chance to see if Linux was supported or not), their site is void of such information right now.

If you check your Facebook more than 10 times a day and ditto with Twitter, RockMelt is definitely a browser for you. For social network addicts like myself, I would have preferred more networks, but am quite content with the current setup.

Keep an eye out for these browsers, with more than 2 billion people using the Internet, that gives it a market space of about 500+ million users in which a sizeable percentage is always looking to shift to social web browsers like Flock or RockMelt.

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