Tech Weekly

If you are like a lot of folks on the net, you want to know your Internet speed. Well that is where this great Firefox Extension comes in. Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics is a nice and hand built in Internet speed test and diagnostic. All you do is load it like any other extension and access it via the tools drop down. There you have four choices. You can check your download speed,  your upload speed, diagnose your connection or show you complete current network setup.

I have this loaded on my USB memory stick working on Firefox 3 Beta 3 and it is great. I know from time to time I like to check the connection speed of a computer that I might be working off it is not mine from home and this eliminates the need to go to Google and search for a Broadband Speed Test. Though I am still partial to Speedtest.net. Here is what you will see when you click on the tools drop down of the Firefox Toolbar.

Labels: Firefox, Firefox Friday

Are you like me and have made several changes to your Firefox registry file or "About:Config" file? Well just like any other changes that take time to do you want to back them up so that you will not have to go thru the trouble of redoing all that work.

It is pretty easy and painless thing to do all you need to do is know where to go to get to the file that you need which is call "prefs.js" and for your Firefox installation on your desktop computer it can be reached by clicking on your start button, choosing Run and typing the following:

%appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles

If you do not have several Firefox profiles you will see a file names with 8 random characters followed by .default

That is the file you want to open where you will see something similar to what's in the picture to the left. The file that you are looking for is "prefs.js" once you locate it you will need to save a copy of it to a safe place.

But how do you do this for your portable version of Firefox you ask? Well you might not have asked but that was the first thing I thought of when I learned about this little tip was that my desktop installation of Firefox does not get used nearly as much as the one on my thumbdrive. So here is where you would locate that same "prefs.js" file for your Firefox on a stick. Since I have installed the Beta version of Firefox 3 beta version 4 I would look here for the file.

PortableApps\FirefoxPortableTest4\Data\profile

The reason I mention this is that for some reason when you install the portable version on your USB thumbdrive it has the "prefs.js" file on there twice and only one of them has the information that you want to save.

Labels: Firefox Friday

Pic: FolkenStardust's

As more folks are taking there computer everything with them these days it only makes
sense to have a online source to consolidate your information. I have for the past year
been using Google's Browser Sync. for Firefox, which has worked out okay but left
more to be desired.

I did not like the fact that half the time when I would restart my Firefox that I would
be prompted to log back into their service. And though completely functional it was
a bit clunky.

That's where Mozilla Lab's Firefox extension "Weave" comes in. The idea is that your
Firefox including: Bookmarks, History, Customizations, Passwords and Preferences
are stored out in the Internet Cloud. This makes all this information accessible from
any Internet enabled computer in the world. And if you pair that with a portable
version of Firefox for you USB thumbdrive then you can literally pickup and move
with your Internet usage all over the place to any computer that has a USB slot.

The only hitch is that it is for Firefox 3.0b2pre or greater, Windows/Mac/Linux.

 
Pic:Mozilla Labs

Labels: Firefox Friday