I have three versions of the Firefox browser installed simultaneously, including Firefox stable branch, Nightly and a special UX build. I use Nightly for my regular browsing tasks very often. Yesterday, I noticed that the browser was preventing me from using the Google +1 service and Gmail as well and Google was showing me the following error message: Oops! your browser seems to have cookies disabled. Make sure cookies are enabled or try opening a new browser window. I had not changed any settings and cookies were enabled, however, the error still continued to occur. Here is how I fixed it.
Category: Firefox
How to select text inside a hyperlink without opening the link in Firefox
Every browser has features to make it easier to do basic tasks such as selecting and copying text. Firefox has a special feature for selecting a portion of hyperlinked text. Sometimes when browsing the web using Firefox, you need to select some text on a web page, often some words or a phrase inside a longer sentence. It is no problem selecting it if that text is not hyperlinked to open another page. However if the text is hyperlinked, then when you try to select the text, especially a single word or a phrase, you may end up unintentionally opening the hyperlink. You can easily select the whole link text but it's not easy to select a part of the hyperlinked text. Here is a native solution for Firefox users on both Windows and Linux. This special feature of Firefox will allow to you to precisely select exactly the text you want.
How to run Firefox in private browsing mode from the command line or a shortcut
Private browsing mode is a feature of the Firefox browser designed to not record the history of your web surfing. When you open a new private window, Firefox does not retain cookies, temporary internet files, history, and other data related to your browsing activities. When the Private browsing session window is closed, this data is cleared. Additionally, Firefox will reset the clipboard content for better privacy. Private Browsing mode can be activated in settings, there you can enable it permanently so Firefox always runs in private mode. However, you might want to run it usually in normal mode and only have a shortcut instead to run Firefox in private mode.
Disable and remove the search box from the new tab page in Firefox
Mozilla released a new stable version of the Firefox browser for desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux) and mobile (Android) platforms. In desktop version of Firefox 31, there is a search box that has been added to the New Tab Page. But Firefox already has a dedicated search box. If you found the search box on the New Tab page redundant, you can remove it. Just follow these simple instructions.
Disable safe browsing and prevent Firefox from sending downloaded file info to Google
I have noticed that with the upcoming Firefox 32, which is currently in Nightly state, the browser will use Google's safe browsing database to check files you have downloaded from the Internet. For every executable file you download, Firefox will perform a check against the online database which is provided by Google. The current version of Firefox 31 also ships with a similar option, but it uses a local database and does not send any request to Google's sites. Firefox 32 will continue to use the local database, however, if the downloaded file isn't found in the local database, Firefox will send the information to Google. You might be interested in disabling this behavior due to privacy concerns. Here's how you can turn it off.
Several useful Firefox hotkeys everyone should know
Firefox is a very powerful browser which supports a number of plugins and has lots of settings and tricks. Like every other powerful tool, it supports hotkeys to improve usablity and speed up regular browsing activities. I would like to share my list of must-have hotkeys which can be helpful in almost all browsing scenarios.
How to paste as plain text in Firefox without third party plugins
By default, when you copy some text from a web page in Mozilla Firefox and paste it into a text field at some discussion board, forum or a WordPress post, it will be pasted with all the source page markup and formatting intact. Links, headers, bold and italic text - all these elements of text appearance will be preserved in the pasted content. If you wanted to paste what you copied as plain text, this can be annoying. There are several add-ons available for Firefox which implement the 'paste as plain text' feature, but in this article we will look how to paste as plain text using Firefox's built-in options, without using third party plugins.
Fix: YouTube and Google Drive are broken in Firefox Nightly
I always use the Firefox Nightly build as I have mentioned in the past in order to stay abreast of the latest developments. If you use the Firefox Nightly too like me, you may have noticed that YouTube videos no longer work after the latest update to the Nightly branch. Also Google Drive does not work correctly. Additionally, some Russian sites stopped working properly for me, mostly those that use modern client-side JavaScript libraries. If you faced this issue, here's how to fix it.
How to start Firefox in safe mode quickly
The safe mode in Mozilla Firefox is a really useful way to troubleshoot issues related to stability and performance. Safe Mode is a special mode where important browser settings are temporarily reverted back to their defaults and all add-ons are disabled. It is easy to figure out what might be causing problems by comparing Firefox behavior in normal mode to its behavior in Safe Mode.
How to enable YouTube HTML5 video support in Mozilla Firefox
While Mozilla Firefox has good support for HTML5 standards, you might have noticed that it does not support all features required to play videos on YouTube without having Adobe Flash Player installed. It supports the required HTMLVideoElement, but some videos do not play anyway. Those videos require the Media Source Extensions feature which is disabled by default in Firefox. By default, this option is off in Firefox, so the browser is not able to play some HTML5 video streams. If you prefer HTML5 videos over the Adobe Flash Player, you might want to enable Media Source Extensions to get advanced support of HTML5 videos in Firefox.
