As you know with Firefox 3.5 geolocation is in-build into the browser.However I was extremely uncomfortable with the fact that I have to use Google as the geolocation provider instead of the GPS which I have.I felt it was a little silly because GPS is more accurate then wifi based geolocation.And I was looking out for ways to integrate my gps with Firefox or for that matter any websites.
Let me give a brief use case of Geolcation .So if you are in a city while driving and you are looking for the nearest hotel of your favorite cuisine.So till now you would have to type in your location etc.But with geolocation , if you allow Firefox to give your location to a website you can get context sensistive searches.You can read more about geolocation in a browser @ http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/

Now coming back to the original post that you want to use your own gps , to provide your location to firefox then recently someone has checked in a fix for it in firefox.So I anticipate for it to show up in 3.6.I will try out the nightly builds as Im extremely excited about this fix.

posted at: 04:30 | category: /firefox | permanent link to this entry

2007/2005 If you are using Microsoft Office live meeting  especially on Ubuntu/Debian or Red Hat Linux , you will see that Firefox , will utilize 100% CPU and will become unresponsive and  you will need to kill the process and not be able to join the livemeeting.
The way to solve this is to disable the adblock plugin and restart firefox and re-login back into live meeting and then it will be able to run the java client and you will be able to join live meeting.
After a lot of searching on the web , you can read more about it @ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947596

posted at: 16:32 | category: /firefox | permanent link to this entry

Over a period of time i have collected some tweaks which really speed up firefox.
Here are the tweaks.If you want to just copy paste in your prefs.js you can scroll to the bottom of this post and copy paste it.
Various config options with description

user_pref("browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl", true);//Enable Disk cache for SSL.Be careful if you are on a public computer don't use.
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons", false);//Disable Favicons.They are fancy initially but unnecessarily increases requests on the server
user_pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", false);//Disable Favicons.They are fancy initially but unnecessarily increases requests on the server
user_pref("network.dns.disableIPv6", true);//If you don't use firefox on a ipv6 network disable it as it will increase your browsing speed as it will not wait for Ipv6 dns requests.
user_pref("network.dnsCacheEntries", 120);//Number of DNS entries to keep in memory.
user_pref("network.dnsCacheExpiration", 600);//Number of seconds DNS entries are cached.
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);//Enable pipelining
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);//Max requests for pipelining
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.ssl", true);//enable pipelining for SSL that is HTTPS
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);//Enable pipelining for Proxy
user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false);//Disable fetching all links on a given page.This is useless and wastes precious internet bandwidth by downloading each and every link on any page you search

Code to copy paste in prefs.js in your profile directory.

posted at: 16:21 | category: /firefox | permanent link to this entry

I was impressed by the startup speed.Also the new version has tracemonkey a JIT for Javascript and it is quite fast.If you want to try it out and at the same time don't want to wipe up your existing firefox install you can run the latest version without installing it by downloading a portable version from http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/test
Most of my extensions stopped working so had to use the Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2 . With this extension you can make all your extensions compatible, though you might run into issues as these extensions have not been certified to work.Anyways you can always disable it if you run into issues.

If you have an extension called Prism for Firefox 0.2.1 from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6665 then you will need to disable it otherwise everytime you download something it will crash your firefox.
Till now all my extensions except the Prism extensions are working fine.

posted at: 21:50 | category: /firefox | permanent link to this entry

RSS editor no longer seems to be main tained and when you try to install in a 2.x version of firefox it does not insta ll as it says version incompatible. You can still make this beautiful extension work by hacking it a little.Just use an unzipper like www.7-zip.org or your favourite program and edit the file inst all.rdf from the extension .xpi lilke rsseditor-0.0.9.1.xpi. Edit the section near the bottom which says like for firefox , and change it to Now try installing the extension again and voila it will start working. Similarly you can make other extensions work by changing the install.rdf file.

posted at: 21:45 | category: /firefox | permanent link to this entry