Windows vs. Linux

Where's your comfort zone? Windows, Mac, Linux? An unintellectual, emotional attachment to an operating environment often determines what consumers buy and may determine whether Google Chrome can ultimately compete with Windows.

In the consumer laptop space, specifically Netbooks, there isn't much hope for a Linux-based operating system like Google Chrome in the near term. So, first the bad news.

Market researcher iSuppli released a report Friday that I agree with. It begins with the usual, saying that Google's Linux-based Chrome operating system sets the stage for a battle of the Titans (Google versus Microsoft). But what it said after that affirmed my own convictions (and echoed comments I had heard before from other analysts).

"The small penetration of Linux in Netbooks is not due to any technical shortcomings," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms research for iSuppli. "Because the vast majority of people who buy Netbooks are consumers, who do not have a high degree of knowledge of the key players in the OS market, they are going with the names that they know. And in PCs, that name is Microsoft."

The report continues: "For Google to be successful, it needs to promote and position its brand so that non-tech-savvy consumers will be comfortable buying a Netbook running its operating system rather than one from Microsoft. This will be a major challenge."

In other words, it's hard to move people out of their comfort zone, particularly if the alternative is fractured like Linux. But there's a silver lining for Google's OS. The comfort zone is shifting. If consumers spend more time on a social-networking site (Facebook, Twitter) or a Web-based productivity environment (Google search, Gmail, Google docs) that becomes their comfort zone (the so-called "cloud") rather than the Windows, or Apple, desktop.

Of course, that's all just theory unless something else happens. What's that extra something? Give consumers a high-profile, respected brand like Google packaged with a slick Netbook and more than a few more could break their ties with Windows (because it becomes irrelevant). Particularly if the price is right.

It's been done before. A charismatic device like the iPhone proves that. In that case, consumers left the tenuous comfort zone of their interface-challenged cell phones in droves and embraced the iPhone.

But this doesn't happen often. And you need a very big, truly innovative company like Apple or Google to pull it off.

Conversations I had this week with both Texas Instruments and Qualcomm executives offer hope in the long term. TI and Qualcomm are building the chips that Chrome will run on and both have been working with Google. (TI told me that they have the Chrome OS running in some form already on their silicon.) Though Intel also says it is working with Google, I suspect Chrome is more of an ARM processor play than an Intel play.

Whatever happens in the next 12 months or so will be interesting and, at the very least, can only add to growing momentum behind mobile devices using ARM processors and non-Windows operating environments.

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Firefox 3.5's new features

The browser battle has just got hotter. A new version of the Internet browser Firefox has been released, offering users more speed and privacy and greater compliance with new Internet video standards.

The release of Firefox 3.5 came as the open source browser is proving an increasingly formidable challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. In June, Firefox has a 22.5 percent market share according to web metrics company Net Applications, behind Internet Explorer's 65.5 percent. Though Internet Explorer's share has been declining for some time, the slide has accelerated over the last year since Firefox released version 3.0.

Here’s looking into the eight new features in Firefox 3.5.

Super speed

Firefox 3.5 includes the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which Mozilla says makes it deliver unprecedented performance with today's complex Web applications. Firefox 3.5 is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2, claims the Mozilla group.

Open video and audio

With Firefox 3.5, users can enjoy video and audio content from within their browser, without the need for any plug-ins. Web developers can embed audio and video into Web pages in open format Ogg Theora, courtesy a new feature of HTML 5. Mozilla claims that it's the first to integrate this feature directly into the browser.

Web developers can use these technologies to design pages that interact with video content in different ways, offering richer interactive experience beyond controlling playback and volume.

With a new management function in place, Firefox keeps memory usage under control. The XPCOM cycle collector continuously cleans up unused memory.

Forget This Site

Firefox 3.5 includes features designed to protect users' privacy online and provide greater control over their personal data. With Firefox 3.5 users can have their browser history never record visits to a particular site (say Savesavitabhabi.com). To use the feature in Firefox 3.5, a user just needs to open the History panel, right-click any Savesavitabhabi.com reference, and choose 'Forget This Site.'

The Forget this Site feature can remove every trace of a site from the user’s browser. To remove all private data or activity of the past few hours, a user needs to click on Clear Recent History, another Firefox-only feature that gives him full control over what stays and what goes.


Location Aware Browsing

Location Aware Browsing aims to save users time by allowing websites to know where they are located. If a user chooses to share his location with a website, it can use that information to find nearby points of interest and return additional, useful data like maps of the area. It is an optional feature.

Also, Firefox assures that it doesn’t share users' location without their permission.



Downloadable fonts

Users can view a wider variety of fonts on web sites while surfing. Site designers and developers can create custom fonts that will be displayed and rendered properly even if they don’t have the font installed on their computers.



Easy web site organisation

This feature aims to get users site in order. Users can simply arrange the order of their tabs by dragging them in one swift move of their mouse. Or, if their browser window is getting cluttered with too many tabs, they just requite to drag a tab out of its existing spot and it will automatically open up in a new window.

Users can read feeds using an online Web service, a client-side feed reader or by creating a Firefox Live Bookmark. So there’s no need to comb the Web for the latest news and updates.

Over 6,000 add-ons

Mozilla's a growing library offers over 6,000 Firefox add-ons, the little extras that a user chooses to download and install for his browser to make it works his way. For example, manage online auctions, upload digital photos, see the weather forecast in a glance and listen to music all from the convenience of his browser.

There’s no need to open a new window or a tab for each task. If a user is not sure where to begin, he can try Fashion Your Firefox which is a handy Web application that recommends add-ons based on his interests.

Also, restart the browser without losing your place after you install an add-on or software update. And, if Firefox or your computer unexpectedly closes, you don’t have to spend time recovering data or retracing your steps through the Web. If you’re in the middle of typing an email, you’ll pick up where you left off, even down to the last word you typed.

Gets new Indian language

Firefox 3.5 has added support for more Indian languages than its last major release. The browser, which supports all three major operating systems Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, is now available in eight Indian languages, up one from Firefox 3.

The new addition is Assamese. Firefox 3.0 supports Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi and Telugu. Other Indian languages that are likely to be included in future upgrades of the browser are Malayalam, Oriya and Tamil.

Firefox has fully localised versions in 63 languages with an additional 11 language versions still in beta.

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Best Firefox extension: AutoCopy

Oh yes, I did just go there. Hands-down, without a skerrick of doubt, AutoCopy is the best Firefox extension. It may also be the best Firefox extension you've never heard of. Here's what it does, and then I'll tell you what makes it so great.

Developed at Mozilla, AutoCopy is a lightweight, single-feature add-on that copies any text you highlight to your clipboard. No more hitting CTRL+C, or using the context menu. That in and of itself is not so revolutionary. The feature has been around for a while in other programs. What makes it the must-have extension is that there's practically no other reason to highlight text on a Web page except to copy it to your clipboard.

Sure, highlighting can be used to reveal hidden words or perhaps make poorly-colored text stand out from a background, but those instances are few and far between. If they're not, you're spending too much time looking at badly designed sites. To do either of those when using AutoCopy, just hold down the CTRL key as you highlight and it won't copy it to the clipboard.

Once you've highlighted anything from a single letter to entire multipage New Yorker articles, the add-on opens a small options box where your cursor is. Through the extension options, you can configure how long that box appears for, or turn it off.

AutoCopy's add-on settings box offers a reasonable amount of configuration.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt)

If you choose to use it, the post-copy options box offers a couple of useful choices. You can undo the copy, or access up to 10 previous clipboards and bring them back as the active clipboard. You can also paste to the location bar or the search bar, search from your default provider using the clipboard text as the search term, or open the text in a new tab. This doesn't use the "feeling lucky" search, so it only works for URLs or FTP sites. The last option copies the URL to the clipboard.

Options to configure add-on behavior include toggling a status bar icon for the add-on options, paste on middle click, deselecting after you highlight, toggling AutoCopy in text boxes, blinking to notify you when it copies, and copying plain text. That last one requires an additional extension, and I found it to be more than I needed.

Back in 2007, my colleague Peter Butler thought that Tab Mix Plus was the best Firefox extension, and I agree that it's still an excellent one. If you're using the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5, you can grab a beta of the updated Tab Mix Plus here. Tab Mix Plus isn't for everybody--as he says, not everyone needs to make all of their tabbed browsing dreams come true. Not everybody cares about in-page ad-blocking, either. Copying text, though, is something everybody does in-browser, and it'd be great to see this functionality eventually built into Firefox or one of the other top browsers.

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Eight Tips for Super Searching

Plain old Web searching doesn't do the trick anymore: It yields too much random data, or not what you need. Here's how to get what you want when you want it—sometimes before you ask for it.


Nobody "surfs" the Web anymore. Some 80 percent of all online sessions now begin with a search. Google proves the point by making over a billion dollars every quarter on search ads. Nobody ever made than kind of money selling browsers.

But plain old Web searching doesn't do the trick anymore. Most Web searches either yield too much random data, or they don't give you what you need when you need it.

If you're an efficient searcher, you know to hit the Web running. Here are some tricks that will help you get what you want when you want it—sometimes before you ask for it.
Google Alerts

1. Go on the alert. Why search day after day for news about the next release of your favorite game? At Google Alerts you can tell Google to send you a daily, weekly, or up-to-the-minute e-mail that >sums everything up.

2. Alert Yahoo, too. Yahoo alerts don't offer Google's level of detail, but the menu-oriented interface gives novices a clear idea of what options are available in the alerts that they create. On the other hand, Yahoo makes you sign in before you can create an alert, a task that could easily sidetrack distractable users.

3. Know an operator or two. You can create tightly defined searches for your alerts if you use search operators when defining your alert. For example, if you want to search only PCMag.com, append the operator site:pcmag.com to your search query. If you really want to geek out on all the search possibilities, peruse Google's and Yahoo's lists of search modifiers.
Microsoft Live Search

4. Live a little. Microsoft Live Search macros are easy to overlook. Live Search macros let you build and save frequent searches—for example, if you're new to the Linux OS distribution Ubuntu and search the forums a lot, you can build a search (or use the already available macro) that includes those sites. When you're ready to search, just plug in what you're looking for and the search will automatically be limited to the sites you specified.

The macros are buried in the More menu at the right end of the main Live Search screen, and they can be really helpful. Go to the bottom of the More menu and choose See All. You'll see two headings that refer to Macros: Edit Macros and Find Macros. The Find Macros menu lets you browse macros other people have created, while Edit Macros is your choice for creating menus yourself.

5. Take a shortcut. Firefox launches a search when you right-click selected text and choose Search in Google from the shortcut menu. See "Firefox 3: 8 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do" to learn how to get zippier performance from Firefox).


6. Get personal. Vanity surfing isn't just an exercise in ego building. If you have a reputation to protect for any reason, you need to know what people can find out about you. Consider Google's Profiles service, which allows you to set up a personal page in which you describe yourself to the world of Google searchers (you know, everybody) on a page that gets priority in Google search results. Google profiles don't erase any nasty comments others may have made about you on the Web, but they do give you equal time to make your case.

When you're looking for personal information about other people, Web searches are often too general, but if you go to www.pipl.com, you can find a slightly scary level of detailed personal information about yourself or anyone else. The information you find on Pipl is frequently much more detailed than what you'll get from Google. Even if you don't like bad news, it's usually better if you find the dirt on yourself before someone else does.

7. Troll Twitter for timely tips. Despite its reputation for disseminating drivel, Twitter is probably your best source for fresh, time-sensitive information, and an essential resource for ensuring that you're dealing with current information. It also delivers information of a different nature—search engines tell you what a machine thinks you're looking for, but a Twitter search tells you what other people are choosing to say about that topic right now. The mainstream search engines also conflate today's information with stuff that's been hanging around for years, while Twitter searches skew toward recent relevance. Twitter's plain old search box can deliver a mother lode of information about what's on the world's collective unconscious right this minute, as can the search tools in the most popular third-party services like Twitscoop and Twitterfall. You can also ferret out current trends through the search tools built into many of the free, downloadable helper applications for Twitter, including Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, and AlertThingy.

8. Tailor responses. The Internet makes more wrong information available to more people than ever before. Google now invites you to promote items from your search results (that is, move them up in the search ranking), or remove them altogether, by clicking the gray icons next to each returned link. As you repeat this action in different searches, Google's software learns to deliver results that are more reliable for you—more in line with what you tend to look for. So, for example, you might get recipes when you search on "chicken," while Farmer Pete gets items about the care and feeding of laying hens. In addition, Google now tries to deliver "personalized" results by taking into account what you've clicked on in the past, so your own past search habits could affect the results you get as well.

If you can't have Web search results injected directly into your brain, that's only because Google's engineers haven't yet figured out how to push advertising up there, too. The minute they do, you'll know.

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IE 8: Nine Things You Didn't Know You Could Do

Optimize features you may not have noticed—and even one Microsoft won't tell you about at all.

Microsoft got many things right with Internet Explorer 8, and one of them was the way it made most of IE8's niftiest features easily accessible. You won't have to explore the menus very deeply to find new features, but we've put together some tips about features that you may not have noticed, and we've added one important tip that Microsoft won't tell you about at all—how to add powerful ad blocking to IE8. Read on for the details.

1. Select text with the keyboard
In older versions of IE it was often difficult or impossible to select exactly the text you wanted to copy into an e-mail or a document. When you dragged the mouse to select text, you often selected adjacent paragraphs or columns also, even though you didn't want them. IE8 finally solves this problem by imitating Firefox's "caret browsing" feature, in which you select text by moving the arrow keys. Just press F7, or Page | Caret Browsing, and use the arrow keys or other navigation to find the place in the text where you want to start copying; hold down the Shift key and use the arrows or other navigation keys to extend the selection. Ctrl-C then copies the selected text to the clipboard. It would have been nice if Web browsers used F8 (the "extend selection" key in Microsoft Office) instead of F7 for this feature, but you can't have everything.

2. Go back to the future with Compatibility View
In the bad, not-so-old days before Internet Explorer followed Web standards as closely as it does now, many Web developers designed their sites to display correctly in Internet Explorer, using IE's proprietary layout methods. In IE8, these sites typically display with some elements overlapping others or with similar layout errors. Make those sites appear as their designers intended by using Page | Compatibility View. You can make IE8 always display a site in Compatibility View by adding its address to Page | Compatibility View Settings.

Microsoft maintains a list of sites that need Compatibility View, and IE8 automatically switches to Compatibility View for sites on the list. You can tell if you're visiting one of those sites: Compatibility View will be grayed out on the Page menu. If you don't want IE8 to turn on Compatibility View automatically, go to Page | Compatibility View Settings and clear the check box next to Include updated website lists from Microsoft. The list is updated monthly, and you can find the current list (in Excel format) by searching the Web for "Windows Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View List." The download page should be near the top of the list of hits.

3. Hide your tracks with InPrivate Browsing
Confusingly, IE8 uses the InPrivate label for two different features, both accessible from the Safety menu. There's "InPrivate Browsing" and "InPrivate Filtering." InPrivate Browsing lets you surf the Web without storing traces of your visits on your own computer in the form of cookies, history items, or cached pages. Believe it or not, there are uses for this mode that you won't be embarrassed to talk about with your family: For example, you might want to hide your tracks when you shop for birthday presents for a spouse or child who might be curious about your browsing history. When you're browsing privately, a blue "InPrivate" icon appears in the address bar.

4. Fine-tune privacy with InPrivate Filtering
The other privacy feature is InPrivate Filtering. This prevents Web pages from displaying ads that have also been shown on other sites you've visited, ads that may have tracked your browsing to continue their assault on you. You can use Safety | InPrivate Filtering to turn on this feature for the current page, but you're better off using Safety | InPrivate Filtering Settings and choosing Automatically Block. The same settings dialog lets you set the threshold for the number of sites in your browsing history in which a specific item has appeared; the default is 10, so any item that appears on 10 or more sites gets blocked. I've changed that setting to 3, the lowest available setting, to increase my privacy as much as possible.

5. Add more accelerators
When you select anything on a Web page, IE8's accelerator feature displays a double-arrow icon next to the selection. If you click on this icon IE pops up a list of "accelerators"—tiny bits of code that perform operations on the selected text, such as translating it in Google Translate, displaying a map of a place, or any of dozens of other functions. (You can also access your accelerators by right-clicking anywhere on a page and choosing them from the context menu.) IE8 comes with some Microsoft-centric accelerators by default, but you'll probably want to install third-party versions as replacements or additions.

To add accelerators, use Tools | Manage Add-Ons; click on Accelerators, then Find More Accelerators. From the same Manage Add-Ons dialog you can also right-click on any installed accelerator and disable or remove it. I replaced most of the Microsoft-centric accelerators with Google-based alternatives.

6. Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering and Third-Party Filters
One reason I switched my default browser from IE to Firefox was that I could install an ad-blocking extension. IE8 doesn't support a similar add-on, but with a bit of effort, you can get almost the same level of stress-reducing ad blocking in IE8 that you can get in Firefox—using only IE8's built-in features. It's a three-step process.

First, turn on InPrivate Filtering by using Safety | InPrivate Filtering Settings and select Automatically Block. Click OK.

Next, add a Registry setting that turns on InPrivate Filtering by default so that you don't have to turn it on every time you start up IE8. In Notepad, create a text file with these three lines:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Safety\PrivacIE]

"StartMode"=dword:00000001

Save this file to your desktop with a name like "FilterOn.reg"; right-click on it; choose Merge.

Next, search the Web for files named Adblock for IE8.zip or EasyListIE8.zip, or search for "ie8 adblock xml list" or similar strings. You are looking for links to downloadable XML files converted from recent filtering lists created for Firefox's AdBlock Plus. Download one or more of these XML files to your desktop—you can use more than one without problems—and look at the files in Notepad to make sure that they're standard text files and not a dangerous executable program (scan them with your antivirus app first, just in case). In IE8, go to Tools | Manage Add-Ons, and click on InPrivate Filtering. Click the Import button, navigate to your downloaded XML file and click Open. IE8 will take a few seconds to process the list. Click Close. Now visit any normally ad-heavy site and enjoy the view of the site with few or no ads.

7. Try out Suggested Sites
IE8's Suggested Sites feature offers links to sites that may interest you, based on your browsing history. When you switch this feature on, using Tools | Suggested Sites, IE8 sends a list of the addresses you visit to Microsoft, and Microsoft sends back a list of suggestions. You view the suggestions by clicking the Favorites toolbar and choosing See Suggested Sites. Personally, I don't like sending my browsing history to Microsoft, and I found in testing that the suggestions tend to be sites I know about already. But if you're exploring some new and unfamiliar subject, it may be worth turning this feature on while you visit sites that cover the subject.

8. Customize the toolbars
Every experienced Windows user knows the mantra "right-click everywhere." When you right-click in the toolbar or tab bar in IE8, you can find options that make the browser look and work the way you want it, not the way Microsoft thinks you want it. For example, right-click in the Favorites toolbar, choose Customize Title Widths, and switch from the default Long Titles setting to either Short Titles, which displays the first few letters of the name of each link in the Favorites bar, or to Icons Only, which does what it says. Either of these settings packs more items into the Favorites bar than the Long Titles setting.

The traditional top-line Menu Bar and the new Command Bar (the one at the right above the main window) duplicate many of these functions. Right-click in the menu area, and uncheck one of these to see if you can manage without it. Feel free to experiment. If you turn off the Menu Bar, you still access its commands by pressing the traditional keyboard shortcuts that open items on the top-line menu: Alt-F for File, Alt-E for Edit, Alt-V for View—or just Alt to open the Menu bar.

9. Explore the status bar
Tired of drilling down through IE's menu structure to find the feature you need? Try clicking in different places on the status bar at the foot of the window to find quick access to some otherwise hard-to-find controls. You'll have to explore this for yourself, because the various square-shaped regions in the status bar aren't labeled. But you'll find that a click in one region brings up a menu that lets you turn the pop-up blocker on and off, while a click in another region lets you check a suspicious-looking Web site to see if Microsoft has marked it as unsafe. Other regions in the status bar let you access the Zoom feature quickly, or check or change the status of InPrivate Filtering.

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Firefox 3: 8 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do

The latest version of Mozilla's popular open-source browser enjoyed one of the most successful launches in software history, with a record-setting 8.2 million downloads the first day it was available. With the ability to drastically expand the browser's functions using plug-in extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, many of Firefox 3's built-in features are overlooked. Here are eight handy things you can do with Firefox, ranging from tiny tweaks to hugely powerful capabilities, all with nary an extension to install.

1. Duplicate tabs with drag-and-drop.

Duplicating tabs is a piece of cake: Simply hold the Ctrl key while dragging the tab you want to duplicate to an empty space on the tab bar.

2. Minimize the toolbar.

Free up a little extra screen real estate by getting rid of the big, round "Back" button and replacing it with a more streamlined control. Right-click the toolbar, choose Customize, and select Use small icons. The new controls are perfectly functional but smaller, allowing the toolbar to shrink and leaving more room for viewing sites.

3. Use smart bookmarks.

Smart bookmarks are live bookmarks that don't just refer to particular sites but actually generate live lists of sites according to parameters you define. For example, you might have a smart bookmark that lists the 10 sites you visit most often, or the last 20 sites you've visited with a particular keyword in their title.

To create a smart bookmark, select Organize Bookmarks from Firefox's Bookmarks menu. In the window that opens, select Bookmarks Menu in the left-hand pane, then click Organize in the toolbar at the top and New Bookmark in the drop-down menu. Give your smart bookmark a descriptive name, such as "10 Most Recent Bookmarks." In the Location field, you're going to enter in a line of code telling the smart bookmark what to do. For the 10 sites you bookmarked most recently, you'd enter: place:queryType=1&sort=12&maxResults=10 . There are dozens of parameters you can use; Mozilla's developer site includes a list of commands you can use in smart bookmarks. Here are a couple of the most useful:

* The 10 sites you've visited most recently (some installations of Firefox come with this smart bookmark already in place on the Bookmarks toolbar): place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10

* The 10 most visited sites with some search term in them: place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10&terms=keyword (replace "keyword" with your desired term)

4. Send e-mail via Yahoo! Mail or Gmail by default.

Normally, clicking on an e-mail address on a Web page will open up a new e-mail using your default e-mail program. If you'd rather use Yahoo! Mail, open up Options under Firefox's Tools menu, select the Applications tab, and scroll down to the mailto: entry. Select Use Yahoo! Mail and click OK.

Gmail is not included as a built-in option in every installation of Firefox, but if yours doesn't have it, you can add Gmail easily enough. Skip the Options dialogs for now and instead type about:config in Firefox's address bar and hit Enter. In the Filter field, type gecko.handlerServiceAllowRegisterFromDifferentHost. Actually, you can simply type gecko and find the entry in the filtered list. Double-click the gecko.handlerServiceAllowRegisterFromDifferentHost entry to change it to True.

Next, cut-and-paste this line into the address bar and hit Enter: javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

A message will appear at the top of the browser window asking if you want to add Gmail as an application. Now, repeat the process above for choosing Yahoo! Mail, but select the new Use Gmail option instead.

5. Change or remove the Close tab buttons.

By default, Firefox 3 puts an X on each tab, similar to the X button that closes an application. You can remove this button, or see it only on the tab you're currently viewing. Open about:config again and enter browser.tabs.closeButtons in the Filter field. Enter one of the following values depending on the behavior you prefer:

* 0 (Zero) Close button only on the active tab.
* 1 (Default) Close buttons on every tab.
* 2 No close buttons.
* 3 Single close button at the end of the tab bar, instead of on the tabs themselves.

6. Change the behavior of the Awesome Bar.

Mozilla has dubbed Firefox 3's address bar the "Awesome Bar" because of the useful suggestions it makes as you type. By default, the Awesome Bar bases its recommendations on your recent history, pages you've tagged, and your bookmarks. You can change the way the Awesome Bar acts in the configuration page. Open about:config and change the following values, depending on the features you want:

* To disable the Awesome Bar entirely and revert to Firefox 2–like functionality, change the value of browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to -1.
* To allow the Awesome Bar to recommend only sites whose address you've typed directly into the address bar, change browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped to TRUE.
* To remove unvisited bookmarks from the pool of recommendations, change places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus to 0 (zero).
* To remove all bookmarks from the Awesome Bar, change both places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus to 0 (zero).

7. Search any site from the address bar with smart keywords.

The smart keyword function allows you to create searches for any site with a search engine, and trigger the search from the address bar using your choice of keyword. For example, you could create a smart keyword "me" to search the archives of your own site. If you wanted to see if you'd ever written about cat juggling, you'd type me cat juggling into the address bar and Firefox would return the results from your own site's search page. Visit the site you want to search and right-click its search box, selecting Add a keyword for this search. In the window that pops up, add a short description of the search and enter a short, memorable keyword that you'll use to trigger it. For example, to create a smart keyword for PCMag.com, I visited the home page, right-clicked the search field, opened the smart keyword window, entitled my search PCMag.com and then entered the keyword pc as my search keyword. Now, if I want to search for something—say, laser printers—I just type pc laser printers and the search is run.

8. View your saved passwords for any page.

To view the passwords associated with any site, go to the log-in page and right-click anywhere on the page. Select View Page Info, and then the Security tab. Click View Saved Passwords. Another window will pop up showing the usernames associated with that site. Click Show Passwords to see the passwords for each username.

If you want to view all of your saved usernames and passwords, open Options under the Tools menu and select the Security tab. Click Saved Passwords to open a list of every site you've ever saved a password for. Again, click View Passwords and the list will display all of your passwords. You can't print this list, but you can just as easily take screenshots if you want to print out your passwords for safekeeping. Isn't this a huge security hole?, you may ask. Why yes, it is. Knowing how easy it is for anyone with access to your PC to view all your passwords, maybe you'd like to password-protect your passwords. In the Options | Security tab, click Use a master password and enter a password. Now this password will have to be entered any time you or anyone else tries to view saved passwords. You'll be asked to enter your master password every time you open Firefox; without it, Firefox won't automatically enter saved passwords for you. Make sure you don't forget this one!