Firefox responds to fake certificate issue

Recently, we have seen false SSL/TLS certificate issued by DigiNotar causing trouble to a lot of people. The Tor project's blog describes it at length. Details of such vulnerabilities are detailed here. Firefox has been fast in responding to this. They have released an update which basically prevents its users from becoming a victim.

What happened to Thunderbird 4?

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird since version 2.0. Recently I saw a version bump directly from 3.x to 5.0. This is because Mozilla wanted to keep the version numbering same as Firefox. From the release notes, the main reason for such a bump seems to be the new Gecko 5 engine.

Recently Firefox versions have come up very fast. By the time add-ons became compatible with Firefox 4.x, Firefox 5.0 was out and some add-ons are incompatible with it. Mozilla should slow down the release cycle, decide what it wants to implement as part of its next release cycle and provide a feature rich and stable browser.

Robust Firefox

Today an interesting incident occurred which reassured by trust in Firefox's robustness. Well I was downloading gentoo minimal install image in Google Chrome and after 80mb, the download speed had gone down to some bytes per second. When I started a parallel fresh download, I was getting a speed of about 60 kbps. So, I decided to try and get Chrome download the rest of the original file at about 50 - 60 kbps. I tried the following procedure:

- copy the install*.chrdownload file (i.e. the temporary file into which the file was being downloaded) into some other folder
- cancel the download
- start a fresh download
- pause it
- overwrite the new .chrdowload file with the old one

However, this trick did not work with Chrome. It was still downloading more than 100 mb as if it were the fresh download.

I opened up Firefox and applied the same procedure except for renaming the .chrdownload file to .part file and Firefox intelligently downloaded only what remained of the file completing the download in minutes.

Chromium and Firefox: a comparision

Well I have been a hard-core firefox fan for a long time. However, recently I have found some improvements on the chromium front, that are worthy of notice.

The battle started when Chromium started using Webkit and V8, one is a fast web page rendering engine and the other is a fast javascript engine. Firefox fell behind for some time; but those are old days. I shall just brief on some points of comparision between Firefox 3.6.13 and Chromium 9.0 on Arch linux x86_64.

Firefox:
- It is very stable. I have not seen it crash for over a year now.
- With AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant, I can easily get rid of ads as well as unwanted iframes, images etc.
- With Ghostery, I can easily get rid of tracking sited too.

Chromium:
- Its is stable for use but not as stable as Firefox.
- It does not work with a number of sites. I have been posting such sites since when it was in version 4. Even in recent versions (8.0 and 9.0) there still are sites that don't work well with it.
- It however works fine with those sites that are tailored to work with Internet Explorer and not on Mozilla Firefox.
- AdBlock or Ghostery are not completely supported on Chromium yet.

Sent mail appears in Thunderbird's Inbox

When retrieving mail using Thunderbird, I noticed that all mails that I have sent using the web interface are also downloaded but they are put into the Inbox folder. Obviously, I would like Thunderbird to put them into "Sent" folder. However, over multiple versions this did not change; but the solution is pretty simple. You just have to create a filter redirecting mails sent from your email to the "Sent" folder.

Tools > Message Filters

Redirect sent mail to "Sent" folder

Firefox personas need to scale better

Tweaking Mozilla

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years now, witnessed many major and minor changes in the software. I started using it on my Windows XP system. Over time I have shifted to Linux. However, Thunderbird is still my preferred email client.

I save my Thunderbird folder in the Application Data folder on Windows or the .thunderbird folder on Linux as backup. When I use the folders on a fresh installation of the same OS, things are simple. However, when I use the Linux files in Windows Application Data and vice versa, I still get my configuration and folders. Therein lies the robustness and power of Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is able to restore my configuration and folders perfectly; but the configuration for plugins does not get restored in a similar manner. The reason for this is plugin management is part of the internals of the software and it is not completely platform independent. As it happened, when I tried using my Windows backup for my Linux installation of Thunderbird, I was not able to install any plugins. Actually, my package management showed that the plugin was installed but Thunderbird did not. Thunderbird showed that the only plugin I had was bdToolbar which is the plugin for BitDefender Toolbar which I had on my Windows installation. So, it was clear to me that Windows configurations of plugins were still there and were blocking fresh configuration of plugins. So, I just deleted the extensions.rdf file and restarted Thunderbird to get my fresh plugin collection.

Well extensions.rdf is kind of internal registry of Thunderbird for its plugins. It was regenerated from existing plugins when I restarted Thunderbird and things were just as I wanted.

Firefox in KDE

Recently, I was trying to save a webpage to a USB drive from Firefox. However, each time it was writing a blank document. Initially, I thought it was some problem with my system. After a few trials, I saved the file on my desktop and copied it to the USB drive. Now this worked fine. So I decided to dig deeper.

I found out that gnome-mount is needed to write to USB sticks. Mozilla products are kind of gnome addicts. I installed gnome-mount and it worked fine after that.

I have been looking for the KDE port for about a year. Initially, I was told that Nokia is developing a Qt port of Firefox. So, it would only a matter of time to port from Qt to KDE. I am not sure what happened of that; neither am I much interested in it. Now there is a KDE port of Firefox in the development tree of Firefox. I shall await a release.

Firefox catches up

With the recent 3.5 release, it seems Firefox is catching up with other browsers. With the introduction of new and intuitive features and nice speed, Chrome was a nice alternative to whatever default browser you had before that. However, Firefox is fast again. [Well Firefox 2 was quite fast. Gradually, by 3.0 Firefox had grown sluggish and bulkier.]

This version was a pleasure to upgrade to. Starting from speed to the slight change of shades of the icon, Mozilla developers had done good work in all aspects of the browser. That is the reason of my appreciation through this blog.


There is a private browsing mode now.

This was an interesting feature.

It was a pleasure to find my Firefox skin Chromifox was supported by this version of Firefox. On top of that, it was improvements to give a more chromy feel.


At the performance front the new Javascript engine - TraceMonkey [Mozilla people seem obsessed with monkeys.] - was expected. It outperforms Chrome's V8.

Qtcurve updated

I updated qtcurve-gtk2 to version 0.62.5-8.1 on my opensuse 11.1 and the results were apparent in my Thunderbird buttons.

Mozilla 2010 Goals

To move Mozilla mission, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla has proposed a few goals for the next few years called "Mozilla 2010 Goals". As part of my contribution to it, I have answered a few questions from a personal perspective. My answers are in a broader sense. Specific conclusions can be made after discussions in the line of my answers. Their purpose is guiding.

1. How do you feel the Mozilla community can help you with your individual development, whether it's personal, professional, or both?

Today, nearly all of us have a virtual life synced with our real life. The internet (not to be confused with the web) is an essential tool/way of communication, job control, etc. Mozilla tools like Firefox and Thunderbird (these are the ones I use) serve as basic internet usage tools. I follow internet news, check email and follows RSS feeds through Thunderbird and browse through Firefox. These two tools are used seamlessly by me. The basic nature of these two tools in my case is evident from the fact that Firefox was the first software I downloaded after more than a dozen reinstalls I have had during my four years of experience with it.

2. Do you feel Mozilla can be more involved in certain communities, whether they be geographical, technological, or within the Mozilla world?

Yes I do feel Mozilla can be more involved in many other communities. For example, currently Firefox on Linux has some GNOME bindings. KDE users (XFCE users won't have much trouble as they have some GNOME linkages.) find this problematic. I heard of Nokia developing a QT port of Firefox.

3. Where do you think innovation comes from in the Mozilla world?

Every time we use a software product, we translate our needs into tasks that the product can do. There are occassions where this is not possible and we either find a work around or leave the task. However, sometimes when direct translation of needs into tasks is not possible, we boldly go for creating the functionality to suit our needs. This is where innovation comes in. For example, plugins serve specific purposes which their authors want to have as functionalities.

4. What specific areas in the world of Internet technology and the open Web do you see Mozilla being a leader?

I see Mozilla as a leader in basic communication. I like the ease of usage of Mozilla products.

5. How can Mozilla play a bigger role in moving the Web forward?

Today many people do not feel a difference between online use and offline use. That transition phase should be minimised more and a seamless integration of browsing, mailing, document reading, writing and editing should be aimed at. The ease of usage, security and simplicity of the technology shall lead it ahead.

6. Do you feel strongly about how your information is stored and used online by the websites you visit?

Yes. I like privacy and try to minimize the information that is being stored.

7. What concerns do you have about Mozilla getting more involved with data related to Web users?

I doubt breach of privacy.

8. What benefits do you see for aggregating anonymous "usage data" and making it available to the world as a public resource?

No problems as long as the user permits it explicitly and with full knowledge of it rather than in ignorance.

9. Do you have ideas on how Firefox for mobile devices can carry on the Mozilla mission?

I want seamless integration of web services and Firefox for mobile is an essential part of it.

10. Why do you think Firefox has not captured more browser marketshare?

Ignorance about Mozilla products is a major cause. I would like to have input from people in the corporate sector on this issue.

11. What can Mozilla do in order to spread awareness about the open Web and continue our Firefox marketshare momentum?

Mozilla can make its products more versatile.

Compacting folders in Mozilla Thunderbird

For those who use e-mail clients but do not understand "compacting folders", let me tell you that it is essential. The reason you might never have heard of compacting is that most e-mail clients default to automatically compacting the folder whenever a certain amount of space is wasted, while we have to enable this in Thunderbird. Tom Koch speaks about it with Outlook Express background referring to it as The Other E-Mail Threat: File Corruption in Outlook Express.

When we delete or move a message, most e-mail clients simply flag the message and postpone the actual task of deletion. So a large number of flagged messages accumulate over time until the folders are compacted. Even emptying the Trash does not physically delete them. this is done by e-mail clients to improve performance by not requiring to rewrite the entire folder every time we delete a single message. In Thunderbird, the reason is even stronger as the inbox is not a folder but a single huge file. So are trash and other folders. this makes manual compaction in Thunderbird a bit complicated and unwieldy for many users.

To do it in Thunderbird, follow these simple steps:
click on Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network & Disk Space -> Disk Space. Then check the box for "Compact folder when it will save over 100 kB" and click OK. If you have a high message rate like me, then you may change the default 100 kb limit to 300 kb.

Firefox

In this blog, I am writing about some Firefox tweaks and add-ons that help me improve my online experience. AdBlockPlus heads the list. It is an add-on by Wladimir Palant that blocks unwanted ads. As I hate to see fancy useless flash ads on my screen, this is always the first add-on I get from Mozilla. Also, it has remained at the top of recommended add-ons for quite some time. The ABP icon usually resides right of the search bar as you can see below.

Next comes Video DownloadHelper.
At times videos are more insightful than plain text. That's why sites like youtube are so popular. I like to keep videos for offline use. So Video DownloadHelper is an essential for me. Its icon resides to the left of address bar as seen below.

It is usually deactivated; but activates when there are links that can be downloaded. There are lots of add-ons available that allow numerous customizations from splash screens to 3D cube effect.

Now let's see how easy it is to manage cookies in Firefox. Simply click on Tools->Options->Privacy. A window appears as follows.

You can manage your private data, cookies and history to suit yourself.