Turn Your Greasemonkey Script Into Firefox Extension

Well I came across this online tool which lets you compile your greasemonkey scripts which we commonly call User Script into a working firefox extension. Hence I decided to share the link.

Greasemonkey Compiler

I hope the URL proves useful to you guys :)


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Wappalyzer - Browser Extension To Identify Web Servers

Wappalyzer is a very useful browser extension that reveals the web technologies and server softwares used behind to empower any webpage. This extension identifies different CMS, e-commerce portals, blogging platforms, web servers, frameworks, analytic tools, etc.

This very useful browser extension is available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. It is quite useful in server fingerprinting and identification steps. Wappalyzer tracks and detects several hundred applications under several categories.

Wappalyzer for Mozilla Firefox

Wappalyzer for Google Chrome

Wappalyzer @ GitHub



Once you install the addon and reload the browser, you will see the icons for identified applications on the right side of address bar (near to the bookmark & reload icon) in Mozilla Firefox. You can click in that area for more details.

One particular setting you would like to disable is the tracking and gathering of anonymous data which is *said* to be used for research purposes. You can turn off the tracking by going to the addon's preference page. Screenshot below shows the preference page in Mozilla Firefox.

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Mozilla Announces First Beta Release Of Persona

Persona is finally ready for use. Today, Mozilla is going to announce the first public beta release of Persona, a login management system that eliminates per-site passwords in websites while being safe, secure and easy to use. Mozilla Persona is a completely decentralized and secure authentication system for the web based on the open BrowserID protocol. To get started with Mozilla Persona, you'll have to signup here. FYI, Persona was first introduced as BrowserID.

Persona is now ready to use for authentication and will be available from today to the public as the first beta release. It works in all major smartphone, tablet, and desktop browsers and the user experience has been thoroughly reviewed and polished.

Available in more than 25 languages, Persona does not need any API keys and it will always remain free. Persona is an open source project and you can easily use persona with your site. Persona is safe, secure, and built on top of public key cryptography. Instead of a password, the user's browser generates a cryptographic "identity assertion" that expires after a few minutes and is only valid on a single site. Because there are no site-specific passwords, websites using Persona don't have to worry about securely storing or potentially losing a password database.

The sites such as OpenPhoto and Times Crossword are already using Mozilla Persona in their websites.

Persona is built upon BrowserID protocol. Once popular browser vendors implement BrowserID, they will no longer need to rely on Mozilla to log in. You can easily integrate Persona in few minutes. Persona is already getting integrated in different applications.

Lets see how successful will be Mozilla Persona, its success depends upon the adoption by websites and applications and then the subsequent use by the users.

Want to read more?

Announcing the Beta release of Persona

Mozilla Persona Documentation

New API for Persona


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How To Enable Native PDF Viewer In Firefox 15

Firefox 14 added a native HTML5 and javascript based PDF reader to read PDF files within the browser but it is disabled by default in Firefox 15 since it is not totally ready. If you don't mind few minor glitches, you can experience the native PDF viewer in Firefox 15 through about:config

Browser developers are integrating many functionalities in the browsers themselves. PDF viewer is no exception and Mozilla is still working for fully functional PDF viewer based on HTML5 and javascript which is called as pdf.js. Pdf.js is still in Beta phase and Mozilla has not declared it as 100% usable so it is disabled by default in firefox 15.

Type about:config in the URL bar (and ignore warning if it appears). Then search for pdfjs. A particular preference pdfjs.disabled will be listed on the search result whose value is by default set to true.

You will just need to double click on this preference row and it will be set to false. This will enable the native PDF viewer in Firefox 15.

You'll possibly have to restart your browser to see the effect in action.

I have been using the native PDF viewer and haven't faced any glitches or problem still. I hope this is helpful :)


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How To Enable SPDY 3 In Firefox 15

Firefox 15 now supports version 3 of SPDY, an open networking protocol designed to reduce latency of web pages but is not turned on by default. This post will provide the instruction to enable SPDY 3.

Type in address bar, about:config and then search for spdy. Now you will see a particular preference name network.http.spdy.enabled.v3 which is by default set to false.

All you have to do is double click on that preference name to change its value to true. This will enable version 3 of SPDY in your firefox 15.

Note that SPDY v3 will bring support for flow control, update the compression dictionary, and remove wasted space from certain frames, along with other minor bug fixes.

Also, note that the version 3 of SPDY is included for the first time in firefox 15 and might not be fully stable.


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How To Automatically Start Firefox In Private Browsing Mode

In this post, I will provide the instructions for few of the methods to automatically start firefox in private browsing mode.

Method 1

Go to Edit -> Preferences and then select the Privacy tab. From the History dropdown list, choose the Firefox will Use custom settings for history and then check the Always use the private browsing mode option.

Method 2

The second method involves changing the firefox configuration which can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar. The first method described above essentially changes one particular preference name browser.privatebrowsing.autostart in background and this second method involves doing that background job manually on our own.

Once you open about:config configuration page, search for private and from the resulting list, modify the boolean value of browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to true by double clicking on it.

I hope this helps. If you got any other method, please drop it as a comment. :)


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Firefox 15 Released With Support For SPDY 3

The stable firefox 15 has been released yesterday on August 28 with several enhancements and changes on user interface, plugins and performance.

Among the changes, Firefox 15 provides a support for version 3 of SPDY, an open networking protocol developed at google labs with the aim of reducing the latency of web pages. Other notable changes are WebGL enhancements, including compressed textures for better performance and Optimized memory usage for add-ons.

Several other changes have been added to make firefox more superior choice for general users and developers. Few more supports for HTML5 has been also added. You can read the Firefox release notes and complete list of changes.

You can download firefox 15 for your appropriate device from HERE.


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How To Manually Install Flash Player 11 In Linux

This post will provide a step by step instructions for installing flash player 11 plugin in ubuntu 11.04 and other different versions and distros. This will be helpful for everybody who are having trouble with the software center like I had.


Make sure no firefox process is running and then fire up the terminal and type the following commands in order:

mkdir -p ~/flash && cd ~/flash

wget http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.238.orig.tar.gz

tar -zxvf adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.238.orig.tar.gz

sudo cp -r libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

sudo cp -r usr/* /usr

Once you have finished copying the shared object and other necessary files in their respective target directories, you can open the firefox and you're good to go. :)


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Check Your Plugins To Keep Firefox Updated and Safe

Mozilla foundation is now providing an online tool to check if the plugins you've installed are up to date or not using simple interface. The objective of this service is to keep your third-party plugins up to date which helps Firefox run safely and smoothly.

The service lets you check all the plugins and update the outdated ones from a simple UI in two major steps:

Step 1: Click Update to update a plugin.
Step 2: Complete all recommended updates before restarting your browser.

Head on to Firefox Browser Plugin Check & Updates.

Stay safe :)


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Torbutton works differently now: you can't turn it off any more

The way torbutton works has been changed and it can not be disabled anymore when the addon is active. You'll have to disable or remove the addon itself to not use the torbutton in firefox.

Whenever you try to click on the tor button icon to disable tor, you'll see the following information:

Torbutton works differently now: you can't turn it off any more.

We made this change because it isn't safe to use Torbutton in a browser that's also used for non-Tor browsing. There were too many bugs there that we couldn't fix any other way.

If you want to keep using Firefox normally, you should uninstall Torbutton and download Tor Browser Bundle. The privacy properties of Tor Browser are also superior to those of normal Firefox, even when Firefox is used with Torbutton.

To remove Torbutton, go to Tools->Addons->Extensions and then click the Remove button next to Torbutton.

If you don't like to have torbutton always enabled in firefox, you can instead use the tor browser bundle which consists of patched version of firefox made to work with better privacy. The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained.

You may continue to use tor by disabling the torbutton but manually configuring the tor proxy configuration by going to Edit menu - Preferences - Advanced - Network - Settings from where you can choose Manual Proxy Configuration(This may be different in windows OS, probably in Tools menu).

First uncheck the Use this proxy for all protocols if it checked. Then in the Socks Host field, type 127.0.0.1 and 9050 in the corresponding port field. Screenshot below can help you.

Now you can use tor connection without any need to install torbutton. I hope this helps. :)


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Epub Reader Within Firefox Without Any Other Software

There is a very very useful firefox addon EPUBReader which allows you to read the .epub files from within the firefox without any need of installing other softwares. Personally I've loved this add-on very much since its simple and works really great.

About the add-on

If you click on a link to an ePub file, you are normally prompted with the Firefox save dialog.

With EPUBReader installed, you don't see the dialog. EPUBReader downloads the file, makes some processing and displays the ePub file ready to read! If you have got already downloaded ePub-files, you can read them by using the Firefox "File/File open" dialog.


Install EPUBReader For Firefox.


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Mass Youtube Videos Download Using BYTubeD under Firefox

Before going for vacation, I wanted to download some youtube videos and I wanted to download them in bulk but I had no idea. Tried searching firefox addons site and found an addon known as BYTubeD that allows me to perform bulk downloads from youtube.

BYTubeD is a Bulk YouTube video Downloader. It can be used to download all/selected YouTube videos on any page which has some links to YouTube videos, by clicking the BYTubeD menu item in the Tools menu or in the context menu (i.e. right click menu).

Get BYTubeD in Firefox.


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Anonymous and Secure Web Surfing With JonDoFox

JonDoFox is a firefox profile that has been optimized for anonymous and secure web surfing. The profile requires a proxy changer such as Tor. However JonDoFox makers have also developed JonDo as the proxy changer.

JonDoFox is available for all major platforms and debian/ubuntu users can download the .deb package for easy installation. For downloads and installation instructions, visit the JonDoFox page.





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Download Books From Google Books Using A GreaseMonkey Script

Do you want to download the undownloadable books from google books? If yes, here's the solution for you.

Google Book Downloader is a greasemonkey script that works in firefox with greasemonkey addon. Greasemonkey is a very useful firefox addon used to manipulate the webpage with the javascript.

For more details on the script and how to use it, refer to the official site.

The script is available at userscripts.org collection.

I hope this is useful.

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How To Steal Stored Passwords From Firefox

Many of us use the Firefox's built-in password manager to remember and store the password of the sites we login to frequently. While this can be very useful feature, it can be exploited by anyone with physical(or any other form of access to the filesystem) access to know the saved passwords of the user. In this post, I will discuss how you can view and save the stored passwords of your friends for future reference.

When we select "Remember Me" option to store passwords, the passwords are stored in two files.
1.key3.db
2. signons.sqlite

These two files are in the profile directory of the mozilla firefox application data for the respective user. Profile folders are placed in a common location by default but are named randomly for additional security (e.g., "xxxxxxxx.default" is the profile folder name for the "default" profile, where xxxxxxxx represents a random strung of characters). This directory is available at different places according to the distribution.

Under windows: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles folder will list the profiles and you can open any of the profiles from there.

Under linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default folder is the profile folder. So you can navigate to ~/.mozilla/firefox/ to view the profiles.

Under MAC: ~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ or ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/ are the folders containing the profile directories.

You can follow any of the following two methods to view the stored passwords:

Method 1: In the target computer, go to Edit->Preferences->Security and click on Saved Passwords and then click on Show Passwords to view the login details of the victim in linux. In windows, you will have to go to Tools->Options->Security.

Method 2: The first method would be applicable only for viewing the login details in victim PC. Whenever you want to save these details for further reference, you will have to copy the previously mentioned two files and save to your USB drive(or maybe in mailbox). Now, all you have to do is copy these two files to the profile directory of your PC and then go to the menus mentioned in method #1.

I hope this was useful. Thanks. :)

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Torbutton for Firefox 4

Torbutton is a 1-click way for Firefox users to enable or disable the browser's use of Tor. It adds a panel to the statusbar that says "Tor Enabled" (in green) or "Tor Disabled" (in red). The user may click on the panel to toggle the status. If the user (or some other extension) changes the proxy settings, the change is automatically reflected in the statusbar.

I lately upgraded my firefox 3.6 to firefox 4 and so far it looks pretty good and I am having fun with the new firefox. But many of the old add-ons were not working and I had to upgrade them as well. Among them, torbutton was also not working so I checked the mozilla addons site but apparently didn't find any update to it. I could each time edit the network preferences to set the proxy but I am too lazy to do that always so checked the torproject site and found new release of torbutton.
Torproject has released alpha version of new torbutton that will work for firefox for now. Though its still in testing phase and might need to be worked on, we can still use it and seems to work well except I can't see the menus properly when I right-click on the torbutton icon.

To download and install torbutton in FF4, Click Here. Btw, the new add-on manager makes the installation process pretty simple and sleek.

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Browsing the restricted forums without registering

Well it has worked for me and I am posting how you can browse the restricted forums by misusing the SEO things(I guess). A website traffic hugely depends upon the google search and hence most of the websites allow the google bot to crawl and index their pages for appearing in the search result. Now the google bot useragent is allowed to crawl any restricted forum and hence they can index those pages.

The requirement is the useragent switcher add-on for firefox which can be downloaded from HERE. Install this addon and restart it.

Now in the firefox menu, under tools, you will see a new option Default User Agent from where you can choose different user agents and add new user agents. Among the available user agents, you will find the Google Bot 2.1 useragent under the Search Robots option. Choose the Google Bot 2.1 as your default user agent and now start visiting the forums that were asking you to register. It will also work on other types of websites which usually require login. I hope this helps you. Thanks :)

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Download Helper - Download videos from youtube, facebook and almost any site

Today, I found a new mozilla addon that I can use to download any videos, audio and photo galleries easily from any site including but not limited to youtube, facebook, myspace, etc.

DownloadHelper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites.

Just surf the Web as you are used to, when DownloadHelper detects it can do something for you, the icon gets animated and a menu allows you to download files by simply clicking an item

For instance, if you go to a YouTube page, you'll be able to download the video directly on your file system. It also works with MySpace, Google videos, DailyMotion, Porkolt, iFilm, DreamHost and others.

Since version 3.1, you can setup the extension to automatically convert the downloaded movies to your preferred video format.

When you are on a page containing links to images or movies, you can download some or all of them at once. Moving the mouse over the items in the menu will highlights the links directly in the page to make sure they are the ones you want to pick up.

DownloadHelper also allows you to download files one by one, so that you keep bandwidth to surf for other stuff to download.

To modify your preferences, like changing the download directory, right-click on the icon and choose "Preferences".

Download This Addon

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Running firefox inside firefox

This is not a useful thing but still is a fun trick to show to your friends.

Just paste the following code in your mozilla firefox address bar and hit ENTER to see the new firefox inside the firefox.

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

View the screenshot below to see how it looks like:

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Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Firefox is becoming more and more popular among the web browsers and this page lists the keyboard shortcuts that can be used with Mozilla Firefox.

F1     Opens Firefox help
F3     Find more text within the same webpage
F5     Reload the current webpage
F6     Toggles the cursor between the addressbar and current webpage
F7     Toggles Caret Browsing on and off.
       Used to be able to select text on a webpage with the keyboard
F11     Switch to Full Screen mode 
CTRL + A  Select all text on a webpage
CTRL + B  Open the Bookmarks sidebar
CTRL + C  Copy the selected text to the Windows clipboard
CTRL + D  Bookmark the current webpage
CTRL + F  Find text within the current webpage
CTRL + G  Find more text within the same webpage
CTRL + H  Opens the webpage History sidebar
CTRL + I  Open the Bookmarks sidebar
CTRL + J  Opens the Download Dialogue Box
CTRL + K  Places the cursor in the Web Search box
CTRL + L  Places the cursor into the URL box
CTRL + M  Opens your mail program to create a new email message
CTRL + N  Opens a new Firefox window
CTRL + O  Open a local file
CTRL + P  Print the current webpage
CTRL + R  Reloads the current webpage
CTRL + S  Save the current webpage on your PC
CTRL + T  Opens a new Firefox Tab
CTRL + U  View the page source of the current webpage
CTRL + V  Paste the contents of the Windows clipboard
CTRL + W  Closes the current Firefox Tab or Window
CTRL + X  Cut the selected text
CTRL + Z  Undo the last action

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