My primary browser is Mozilla Firefox v3.0.1. The reason I champion that particular browser over others is because it has the most plugins available. If there is anything on the internet that can be done in a browser, chances are it will happen in Firefox first.

Plugins, while a blessing, can also be a curse. As cool as it is that you have tons of nifty add-ons to choose from, some of these add-ons may screw up your browser. How the screw-up occurs could be in any number of ways, but you know when you’re browser is screwed up.

Firefox browser problems don’t happen often, but when they do you can fix just about any of them by creating a new profile.

Here’s how:

Close the browser first.

Do a run dialog and type firefox -P, then click OK.

This is what you will see by default:

If you want to "start over", delete the profile and all files associated with it. Note: You will lose all your bookmarks and browser settings when you do this. (For bookmarks you can retrieve them if you have Foxmarks installed.) Add-ons will remain installed.

When you create a brand new profile, Firefox will treat it as if you’ve just installed the browser for the first time.

If you’re not sure whether you want to delete the old profile, just create a new one. Firefox allows multiple profiles to be installed. From there you can troubleshoot to see if it fixed any issues you may have present.

For the add-ons present, they will "see" it also as a new installation so you can do additional troubleshooting that way.

For those who were bummed out (including me) that the "full version" of Hotmail didn’t work with Firefox 3, it appears that it’s now a-okay and working great. I logged in this morning and noticed no warning messages or anything like that.

In addition, the operation is smooth. Very nice. The operation of full-version Hotmail in FF3 is way faster than it is in IE 7.

If you use Hotmail and Firefox but don’t like the Windows Live Mail client for whatever reason, full-version web-based Hotmail will suit you nicely.

Firefox 3 was recently released by Mozilla and they broke a world record in doing so for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. There is a reason the browser is so popular: it is flexible and well thought out.

Out of the many new features available with the new version, one of them is the way it handles bookmarks. So, what’s new and what are my tips for using it?

Continued

I have already found that the “Smart” Location Bar, a new’n'improved feature in Firefox 3, really ticks me off. Why? Because there’s absolutely no way to shut it off via the options panel.

Note before continuing: Some people really like the “Smart” bar. I don’t.

Fortunately you can somewhat disable it via about:config.

Step 1. Type about:config in the location bar.

You’ll get this:

(click to enlarge)

Oh ha ha ha, very funny Mozilla. A warranty on a free product. Oh yes, I’ll be careful, not to worry!

Notices like this annoy the crap out of me. [click]

Step 2. Type urlbar next to filter.

Looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

Step 3. Change two of the values.

Change browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true and browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 1 or 0. If you want the location bar to act like Firefox 2 did, set it to 1. Otherwise set to 0.

Looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

You’re done at this point.

Now when you start typing in something in the location bar it will skip popping up this crapola all over the place.

Final tip:

If you like the Smart Location Bar but would rather see it have less results, keep matchOnlyTyped to false and set maxRichResults to 5 instead of 12.

Honestly said I wasn’t all that excited about FF3 but decided to go ahead and download it anyway.

There were only 2 things I wanted to know about this release:

1. Did they (Mozilla) fix that oh-so-stupid memory leak?
2. Did the zoom improve?

Per no. 1, I can tentatively say yes. I’m noticing it’s not eating up as much resource as version 2 did. And hopefully the mem usage will stay down like it’s supposed to.

Per no. 2, I can absolutely say yes.

Here’s an example using YouTube:

(click image for full size)

Looks ordinarily, right? Wrong. This is YouTube zoomed in several times on a full-screen 1680×1050 monitor. And it looks perfect. This is how zoom is SUPPOSED to work. FF3 has now nipped this in the bud (thank God).

Foxmarks works just fine in FF3 and the one other plugin I use carried over okay as well, so no complaints.

I like it and recommend you get it if you like FF.