iTechnoBuzz!!

The Mozilla Dev. team had planned to release Firefox Security update v3.6.2 at the end of this month first, but a critical security hole that allows remote attackers to access and control one computer made the Developer team to release this update today. The exploit is discovered by Evgeny Legerov and Secunia rated it as highly critical.

The Updated version (3.6.2) of Mozilla Firefox is all-ready released and is available at Mozilla Firefox home page, plus it is also available in Firefox Web-browser’s automatic update section.
The Developer team asked Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version, to avoid their systems being hacked or remotely accessed by attackers.

Bugzilla lists 111 bugs that have been fixed in Firefox 3.6.2 of which 21 have been classified as critical by the Mozilla developers. The recently reported security vulnerability is not the only security vulnerability fixed in the latest Firefox release. Firefox users should look at the known issues section in the release notes to make sure that they do not run into problems after updating their web browser.

FireFox 3.6.2 releasenotes:
Firefox 3.6.2 fixes the following issues found in previous versions of Firefox 3.6:

Hello Readers,

Like many other applications, Firefox uses the small yet powerful SQLite Database for storing all its information. SQLite database file is located on the harddisk itself. Over the time, the data stored in the database grows to a large amount. It also includes irrelevant or unwanted information.

This causes Firefox to work extremely slow & you can see it hanging every now and then.  So we have  a way to speed up your Firefox by putting SQLite Database as well as your Profile in the RAMDisk.

By adding the SQLite database in RAMDisk, you can speed up its performance to make it 10 to 20 times faster than your harddisk.

We will use Dataram for creating our RAMDisk. You may download it here.

Here is one example for doing the same.

1. Download the latest version of Dataram RAMDisk and install it.

2. Simultaneously press WIN + R to bring up the Run command.

3. Type %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and hit Enter. You should see a folder with random characters followed by .default (For example, 89ns5tbp.default) and that is your Firefox’s profile folder.

4. Right click on the folder and select Properties. Take note of the Size of the folder.

5. Run RAMDisk Configuration Utility from the Start Menu.

6. Set the Disk Size which is the amount of space that you want to create. Do not set it too high because the number will be deducted from your memory. I personally set it to 300MB as I have 2000MB of RAM and my Firefox’s profile folder is only 133MB in size.

7. Select FAT32 Partition. FAT32 is faster than NTFS in small volumes because the structure is simpler and the system does not have to check permissions since there is no controls regulation.

8. Click Start RAMDisk button.

9. Go to Load and Save tab. Check the 3 option, “Load Disk Image at Startup”, “Save Disk Image on Shutdown” and “AutoSave”.

10. Click the Save Disk Image Now button and select OK. Step 9 and 10 is very important because if you don’t save the image, your Firefox profile will be lost when you reboot your computer.

11. Finally, click File from the menubar, select Save Settings and click OK.

You’ve successfully set up RAMDisk and there should be a new drive letter on My Computer with only 300MB of disk space or the amount that you’ve set. Now you will have to copy your Firefox’s profile folder to the RAMDisk and configure Firefox to load your profile from there.

1. Simultaneously press WIN + R to bring up the Run command.

2. Type %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini and hit Enter.

3. A notepad should appear with profiles.ini being loaded. Edit the path like the example below and save. Replace the “Profiles/” at Path with the drive letter that has been created by Dataram RAMDisk.

Change Path=Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default to Path=E:\xxxxxxxx.default

4. Again simultaneously press WIN + R to bring up the Run command.

5.  Type %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and hit Enter.

6. Copy the xxxxxxxx.default folder to the new drive letter created by RAMDisk.

Thats it, enjoy a Super Fast Firefox !!

Source: http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/12/09/superspeed-firefox-by-putting-profile-and-sqlite-database-in-ramdisk/

GreaseMonkey one of the most popular firefox addon that enables one to customize a webpage displays using user created javascripts. There are enormous scripts available on userscripts to mod many popular sites like Orkut, IMDB, twitter, Youtube and many more.

Talking about the GM Compiler, it is an online tool which could convert a gm script(with extension .user.js) into a firefox addon(with extension.xpi). After this the gm script extension would change to .xpi , hence would become a firefox addon and would be easy to distribute further.

The Grease Monkey Compiler’s some parameters are pre-filled like a random GUID , firefox min and max compatible versions. All you need to do is to copy and paste the source code of the Greasemonkey script into the User Script text form on the website. The tool will create a .xpi file, which could lately be used to install on firefox and work the same as it works like the user script.

On a small review over the same, i came to know that, the script was originally developed by arantius.com, and lately the source of the script was published publicly for webmasters. If you want to make or install the same script on your server, you can get the source code by clicking here.

Mozilla Firefox , the browser everyone love to surf on! The browser along with enormous addons is really a master piece. Being used with over 40% of internet users ,  developer readily works to enhance the browser with developing new addons regularly. Not only for the sake of  better user experiences, there are certain great addons to ehance the skills of webmasters and  make them power bloggers.

On iTechnoBuzz, we regularly list out Top firefox addons for certain specific task. Like we reviewed Top 5 firefox addons for better privacy and security, and FireFox addons that make your twitter life beautiful and many others. Today is the day am going to write about Top addons to enhance your blogging experiences.

Here is the list of Top firefox extensions for better blogging experiences:

SEO QUAKE:

SeoQuake a Firefox SEO addon extension devloped primarily to help bloggers and web masters who regularly deal with search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize their blogs and websites for internet promotion. SeoQuake allows one to obtain several important SEO parameters of the internet project under study, save them for future work, compare them with the results, obtained for other, competitive, projects and much more other features. It shows many important parameters like Alexa ranking, Google Pagerank, Domain information, backlinks, keywords etc.

Twitter Bar:

Twitter is a great source of traffic for any website. iTechnoBuzz get’s 5-7% of its traffic from Twitter only. TwitterBar is a good extension in firefox to regularly update your Twitter profile, it allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small Twitter icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.

KGen:

KGen (Keyword Generator) is an extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web pages. KGen retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears on her and their weight in the page, in this way, you can easily know how to optimize your pages, know what’s the secret of your competitors or simply know what’s the main subject of a webpage. You can also select some words and transfer them to your clipboard and paste them on tag fields on your favorite social network or fill meta-keywords of your web pages. You can also generate a tag cloud for your blog.

Adsense Notifier:

If you are a Google Adsense user then this addon is very useful to you . It displays your adsense earning on the statusbar.With every new $ in your adsense account it will bring an update in front of your eyes. Until few days, this plugin was used under older version of firefox (upto 3.0) but now, there comes a new fix to use the plugin with the latest firefox v3.5.

XMARKS:

A great addon to backup and synchronize your bookmarks.

What does the developer says : Xmarks is the #1 bookmarking add-on. Install it on all your computers to keep your bookmarks and (optionally) passwords backed up and synchronized. Xmarks also helps you uncover the best of the web based on what millions of people are bookmarking. I recommend you to use Xmarks if you use more than 1 PC for implementing your job and all works.

Tell us about your favorite addons which help you to blog. Use the comment box for comments and critisisms.

While surfing through one of my favorite blogs ghacks, i came across the news of serious security vulnerability in firefox 3.5.

This serious vulnerability is discovered by Simon Berry and is posted on the milw0rm security portel under the title ” Firefox 3.5 Heap Spray Vulnerabilty”. This news is allready confirmed by mozillalinks and they have allready published the security patch for this.

This vulnerability could be fixed by following these simple steps:

• Enter about:config in the location bar to access advanced preferences.
• Look for javascript.options.jit.content and double click it to set it to false.

Since, the vulnerability is related to TraceMonkey JavaScript optimizer, users needs to mitigate it by temporarily disabling the optimizer. By this the javascript performance of firefox3.5 would be reduced but we trust that the mozilla team will prepare a quick official patch for solving the problem.

Do share this post with your friends to make them aware of the critical problem and help them to get it fixed.

Share your experiences with us by using the comment box.