58 items tagged “firefox”
2008
Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction.
2007
I don't even use Firefox and Firebug anymore, the revised Web Inspector in Leopard has been incorporated in Coda and that does everything I need and more.
Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later.
In the long term, I want to replace JavaScript and the DOM with a smarter, safer design. In the medium term, I want to use something like Google Gears to give us vats with which we can have safe mashups. But in the short term, I recommend that you be using Firefox with No Script. Until we get things right, it seems to be the best we can do.
YSlow: Bug (fix) in Firebug’s Net Panel. The latest release of the YSlow page analysis plugin (announced at FOWA) also fixes a misleading bug in Firebug’s Net panel.
Currently WebRunner applications share cookies with other WebRunner applications, but not with Firefox. WebRunner uses its own profile, not Firefox's profile. There is a plan to allow WebRunner applications to create their own, private profiles as well.
Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google. Stories like this crop up every now and then, but no one ever seems to mention that the Google Toolbar has been doing this since it was released (more than five years ago) provided you have PageRank display turned on.
HTTPOnly cookie support in Firefox. Five years after the bug was filed, HTTPOnly cookie support has gone in to the Mozilla 1.8 branch. This is a defence in depth feature that has been in IE for years—it lets you set cookies that aren’t available to JavaScript, and hence can’t be hijacked in the event of an XSS flaw.
VeriSign’s SeatBelt OpenID plugin for Firefox. The first good example of browser integration for OpenID. It catches phishing attempts by watching out for rogue OpenID consumers that don’t redirect to the right place.
Why FireFox is Blocked. Idiotic campaign by site owners who don’t like AdBlock Plus. If you block Firefox we won’t link to your site, so you’ll miss out on PageRank, so you’ll miss out on traffic, so you’ll miss out on money.
YSlow. New extension for Firebug (yes, an extension on top of another extension) from the Yahoo! performance team which provides improved performance measurement tools and optimisation advice.
Appalachian. “Appalachian is a Firefox add-on that adds the ability to manage and use several OpenIDs to ease the login parts of your browsing experience.”
Firefox promiscuous IFRAME access bug. Lets malicious sites “display disruptive or misleading contents in the context of an attacked site” and intercept keystrokes! The demo worked in Camino 1.5 as well. Avoid using Gecko-based browsers until this is patched?
Gaping holes exposed in fully-patched IE 7, Firefox (via) Michal Zalewski released a new Firefox 2.0 vulnerability in addition to the IE cookie stealing one.
XForms in Firefox (via) Practical tutorial on taking advantage of the Firefox XForms plugin, sadly not yet bundled with the browser itself.
Firefox3/Firefox Requirements (via) OpenID and CardSpace are both listed as mandatory features.
2006
Introducing Operator. New microformat detecting Firefox extension, developed at IBM and released by Mozilla Labs. Examples are from Yahoo! Local, Upcoming and Flickr.
Firebug 1.0 Beta. Unbelievably brilliant software. I use this every day.
Graphing requests with Tamper Data
I spent the weekend in Boston, speaking at GBC/ACM’s Deep Ajax seminar with Alex Russell and Adrian Holovaty. I’ll be posting some notes on this later, but I wanted to share a really neat Firefox extension that Alex showed me: Tamper Data.
[... 318 words]2005
Canvas demos
Jesse Andrews (of Book Burro and userscripts.org fame) has built some awesome canvas demos for users of Safari or Firefox 1.5. He has a bar chart and some animated rectangles, but the real gem is the live chart which polls a server using XMLHttpRequest and updates a line graph with live data. He also has some fun mathematical experiments: a cellular automata generator and a neat exploration of Lindenmayer systems (both static and interactive). Read more on his blog.
Firefox 1.5-compatible Greasemonkey beta now available. I’d been waiting for this.
Firefox 1.5 developer highlights
Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out, and is the most exciting browser release in a very long time. It comes with the Gecko 1.8 rendering engine, which includes a ton of interesting new features. New in this version (unless you’ve been tinkering with the Deer Park series):
[... 719 words]Dissecting the Google Firefox Toolbar
Google have finally released a Firefox version of the Google Toolbar, with some nice praise for XUL in to the bargain. Of course, the most interesting part of the toolbar from a geeky point of view is the bit that queries Google’s servers for PageRank. Sure enough, if you download the google-toolbar.xpi file, unzip it, then unzip the google-toolbar.jar file within there’s a file called pagerank.js with all of the juicy details.
Greasemonkey: Yet Another Reason to Use Firefox. Great writeup of Greasemonkey on the PC World Techlog(!)
Wired News: Firefox Users Monkey With the Web. Greasemonkey on Wired—and I get quoted!
Firefox Counter. How the Firefox counter works.
A Firefox observation
There are (to my knowledge) around 80 people on my undergraduate computer science course. Of those 80, I know of at least fourfive who’s final year project involves writing a Firefox extension of some sort. That’s 1 in 2016.