Optimize Your Web » firefox http://www.optimizeyourweb.net enhancing your net experience Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:44:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 User Agent Settings http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/09/30/user-agent-settings/ http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/09/30/user-agent-settings/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:03:43 +0000 admin http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/?p=197 Ever wondered what the purpose of User Agent settings were for?  Well it has changed over the years, and was used to determine what type of browser or service was accessing your website.  Mainly it is used by people to determine what browser their main subscription base is using in order to tailor their website to that viewing.  One thing that I have seen is that some people use a spoofed user agent setting are trying to see things that they only want a website crawler such as Google’s GoogleBot to view.  This may be taking advantage of if they are showing the crawler special files that they may try to SEO optimize in order to get better ranking.

If you are looking to see whether or not the GoogleBot that has visited your site is legit, visit this list to check and see.  Also, if you are looking to tweak your user agent settings (that I mentioned in my “Top Firefox Pluggins (Addons)”) through your Mozilla Firefox, download it here.

Make sure that you use the correctly formatted user agent information, which you can get a huge list here.  For more information, please feel free to contact me with questions or tips.

]]> http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/09/30/user-agent-settings/feed/ 0 Top Firefox Plugins (Addons) http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/09/15/top-firefox-plugins-addons/ http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/09/15/top-firefox-plugins-addons/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 06:01:28 +0000 admin http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/?p=169 Many users, such as myself, enjoy the great addons to customize and enhance their internet experience for Mozilla Firefox. Well there’s more than a few add-ons out there and most are housed here. Here is a good list of add-ons that may interest you, especially for web development and design, along with blogging and search engine optimization (SEO).

  • Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
    • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
  • Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
    • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
  • ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
    • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
  • Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
    • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
  • Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
    • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
  • FireFTP – FTP client.
    • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
  • IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
    • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
  • SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
    • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
  • User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
    • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
  • Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
    • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.
]]> http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/09/15/top-firefox-plugins-addons/feed/ 2 MySpace Hacks and Code http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/08/29/myspace-hacks-and-code/ http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/08/29/myspace-hacks-and-code/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:01:04 +0000 admin http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/?p=127 MySpace users will often want to hide certain parts of their MySpace
profile. This is easy enough to do, but you do need to know the
correct MySpace code to enter into your profile.

These MySpace codes are readily available on different MySpace sites
around the internet. I’ve compiled a list of the most popular MySpace
Hide Codes here for your convenience. Be sure to follow the
instructions carefully. Enjoy!

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE LAST LOGIN

Last login is located to the right of your MySpace display pic. Hiding
last login means that your friends won’t know when your last logged
into your MySpace profile

1) In your Headline section enter:

<div class=”hll”>

2) In your About Me section enter:

<style type=”text/css”> div.hll {overflow:hidden; height:120px;} </style>

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE FRIENDS & COMMENTS

MySpace friends and comments have been the cause of some major drama
for some MySpace users. In fact, some MySpace users decide it’s better
to not have either of these displayed on their profile. Hiding friends
and comments will keep your friends from being able to see your Top
friends list and checking out who’s been leaving you comments. Of
course, you’ll still be able to see your friend’s list and comments.

1) In your About Me section enter:

<style type=”text/css”>.comments {visibility:hidden;display:none;}</style><br />

2) In your Who I’d Like To Meet section enter:

<div class=”comments”><table><tr><td><table><tr><td><br />

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE FRIENDS ONLY

Want to leave your comments up, but just don’t want to deal with the
drama of choosing the order of your Top friends? There’s a code for
hiding your friends list only.

In your About Me section enter:
<style type=”text/css”>
td.text td.text table table table, td.text td.text table br, td.text
td.text table .orangetext15, td.text td.text .redlink, td.text td.text
span.btext {display:none;}
td.text td.text table {background-color:transparent;}
td.text td.text table td, td.text td.text table {height:0;padding:0;border:0;}
td.text td.text table table td {padding:3;}
td.text td.text table table br {display:inline;}
</style>

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE COMMENTS ONLY

In your Who I’d Like To Meet section enter at the bottom:

<div style=”position:relative; height:400px; overflow:hidden; border:0px;”><table><tr><td><table><tr><td>

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE EXTENDED NETWORK

Extended network is that banner above your MySpace blog that says
“MySpace User is in your Extended Network”. Get rid of the extended
network banner to simplify the look of your MySpace profile.

In your About Me section enter:

<style type=”text/css”>.blacktext12 {visibility:hidden;
display:none}</style><br />

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE ABOUT ME SECTION

Don’t want to be bothered with coming up with cool, new content for
your “About Me” section? Hide it instead…

In your About Me section enter:

<style>.LIGHTBLUETEXT8{DISPLAY:NONE;VISIBILITY:HIDDEN}</style><br />

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE NAVIGATION BAR

The Navigation bar has links to Home, Browse, Search, Blogs, Music and
more. Make it disappear with this code…

In your About Me section enter:

<style type=”text/css”><br />
table td div div font {visibility:hidden;}<br />
</style><br />

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE CONTACT BOX

Your MySpace contact box is the way that MySpace users can send you
messages, add you as a friend, add you to their favorites or even
block you. Hiding it means that anyone viewing your profile won’t be
able to do any of these things with your profile.

In your About Me section enter:

<style type=”text/css”>
.contactTable {display: none;}
</style>

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE GENERAL INFO

General info is your age and location which are to the right of your
display pic. If you don’t want people to know these details about you,
simply hide them using this code…

In your About Me section enter:

<style type=”text/css”>
table td.text {visibility:hidden;}
td.text td, td.text span, td.text a {visibility:visible;}
</style>

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE URL BOX

Every MySpace user is prompted to pick a unique URL after signing up
for a MySpace account. This replaces the friend ID number that you’re
given in the beginning. But if you don’t want that URL Box dispalyed
on your profile, it’s certainly easy enough to hide.

In your About Me section enter:
<style type=”text/css”>
table table table table div {visibility:hidden;}
div table table table table table div input, div a, td.text div
{visibility:visible;}
</style>

MYSPACE CODE TO HIDE DETAILS

Sometimes you’d just rather not reveal things like relationship
status, occupation, hometown, zodiac or whether or not your want kids.
So hide your entire Details box with this code…

1) At the bottom of Heroes section enter:

<table><tr><td><table><tr><td>

2) At the top of the About Me section enter:

<style>.hidethem {visibility:hidden; display:none;}</style>

If you run into problems, check your code and make sure that you copied it in correctly. Enjoy hacking your page.

]]> http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/08/29/myspace-hacks-and-code/feed/ 1 Firefox vs IE http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/08/28/firefox-vs-ie/ http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/2008/08/28/firefox-vs-ie/#comments Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:52:28 +0000 admin http://www.optimizeyourweb.net/?p=123 Who is better Firefox or Internet Explorer (IE)? Is it Internet Explorer or Firefox? Well a lot of people would like to think that Internet Explorer is/has caught up, but are wrong. Firefox is the more versatile browser and the reason is simple. Firefox is OPEN SOURCE! The amount of time it takes for things to be “fixed” in Internet Explorer or implement new ideas and deployed is much longer than Firefox. First let’s take a look at a few noticeable things, then get down to the some solid evidence.

Let’s go ahead and use Internet Explorer 7 as our comparison. The implementation of Tabs is GREAT! but it is in response to Firefox already having tabs implemented. Use both to visit a webpage and you will see both block a popup. But visit a few hundred webpages that have popups, and you will notice that Firefox will block more, if not all of them, compared to Internet Explorer. A lot of people may not be used to keyboard shortcuts to create a new tab for Firefox, but if they did a little tinkering with it, they would realize click right next to an open tab will open up another tab, the same as Internet Explorer. But even more important is how Firefox implements addins, etc. allowing greater versatility with neat plugins that developers from ANYWHERE can develop and release, unlike Internet Explorer which is a closed source application, so developing plugins, etc. is a virtual pain in the ass. Firefox also allows you to change the look of your UI with different themes, does IE?

Let’s get into some hard evidence now. From the Associated Press I bring you two snippets of articles. Author ANICK JESDANUN wrote the article, “A leading printer maker wants to help you do less printing.“. Two excerpts from the article are:

The Web software also extends the “printer-friendly” features many sites offer. Often those printer-friendly versions still carry logos and other graphics; the Lexmark tools let you eliminate those as well.
…
Lexmark has versions available for both Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers.

The Firefox version offers more functions. Lexmark says Firefox users tend to be more technically advanced, and thus open to more customization. While the Internet Explorer tool lets you eliminate images, for instance, the Firefox version lets you remove forms, links and other elements, too.

Read the last paragraph? Need I say more? Probably not, but here is another example from author JORDAN ROBERTSON who wrote the article,”Researchers offer new way to avoid bogus Web sites“. Here is a snippet from their article:

Intercepting Internet traffic, and spying on the communication between two computers, is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they’ve built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot.
The software, a free download for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they’re trying to visit is authentic.

Simply put, the researchers are Carnegie Mellon were able to implement a solution to their findings quickly through Firefox because it is open source. No mention of Internet Explorer is stated in the article.

The new version of IE8 beta is released, and looks to be some competition to Firefox. But by the time the stable version is released, my guess is that whatever security features and extra functions are to win back market share for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox will have already included it in a release or tweaked it so it works a little better.

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