Walker News » Firefox

Firefox Hotkey Causes Right-To-Left Display In WordPress Post Editor

Walker — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 06:36:13 +0000

When using Firefox, the text display direction in a web form (.e.g WordPress post editor) suddenly changes from Left-To-Right (LTR) to Right-To-Left (RTL).

I don’t know how many (WordPress users) experienced this before, but I have certainly triggered the right alignment for a number of times.

How to change between LTR and RTL text alignment in Firefox?

Note, this Firefox hotkey (thus NOT working on IE8 and maybe other web browsers too) is only tested on Firefox 3.6.3:

press CTRL+SHIFT+X together to switch between left and right text alignment, as shown in the animated GIF.

How To Change Firefox User Agent String?

Walker — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:39:03 +0000

Sometimes, you might encounter problem of accessing a website, just because the web server doesn’t recognize or allow that web browser (client program) you used to access the site.

Some of you might recall Google Chrome version earlier than 0.4.154.33 encountered problem with Windows Live Mail (a.k.a. hotmail), as the Microsoft free webmail system didn’t properly recognize this new kid :-)

To fix it, the Chrome developers introduced --user-agent option switch to spoof Live Mail system to believe it’s a “compatible” web client.

Now, back to the subject – is it possible to change or overwrite Mozilla Firefox default user agent string, to spoof web server that only flavour particular web browsers? The answer is certainly YES, according to Johne. (I was wrong in an earlier post talking about the same topic :-(

Step to change Firefox user agent string

FYI, these steps are just tested with Firefox 3.5.3:

1) Open Firefox web browser, type about:config in the address bar and press ENTER.

2) You might see some text titled “Here be dragons!”, just click the only button to proceed. Now, you should see a page of Firefox settings (known as Preference). Right click on the page, select New follow by String.

3) In the New String Value dialog box, enter the preference name exactly as general.useragent.override (as per screenshot) and click OK.

4) The next dialog box appears, this time prompt for a value for the Preference name defined in previous step – enter the user agent string of your choice here:

Now, you should close all the Firefox windows. Upon reopen, the new user agent string specified in general.useragent.override should be effective. To verify it, type about: in the address bar and press enter.

Google Chrome Memory Usage Is Better Than IE7 And Firefox

Walker — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:26:04 +0000

Google Chrome is not only efficient in handling flash video cache but is also good in memory utilization.

If your system often runs out of free memory or you are habitually open many web links in new tabbed browser window (not bother to read and close it before open another URL in the current page, like a typical me), do consider to browse happily with Google Chrome. It’s really worth to try, but no refund if you’re not happy with it (as it’s absolutely free of charge)!

To examine CPU and memory utilization of active web browsers, use the Google Chrome Task Manager or Google Chrome memory diagnostic page.

To access the browser’s Task Manager, right click on Google Chrome title bar or the task bar icon and select Task Manager option from the right-click menu.

To access the memory diagnostic page, type about:memory in Google Chrome Address bar and press ENTER.

Google Chrome Task Manager only reports processes related to Google Chrome itself. The memory diagnostic, however, provides summary of memory usage of all active web browsers.

While this following screenshot was taken, there are two Google Chrome open with a total of 52 tabbed windows (i.e. 52 web pages; each tabbed window = 1 web page), three IE 7 with a total of 8 tabbed windows, and one Firefox 3 with a total of 6 tabbed windows:

^{Google Chrome memory utilization is more efficient than IE 7 and Firefox 3.x}

Although not all three active browsers are opening the same web pages, all of them have been running more than 24 hours and used to browse all type of web pages.

According to tooltips, the Private Memory described as resident memory that is not shared with any other process and is the best indicator of browser memory resource usage.

Now, considering the number of pages open in respective web browsers, and the belief of memory usage reported by Google Chrome memory diagnostic page is without bias (i.e. the about:memory), do you agree that Google Chrome is more efficient in utilizing the memory (and thus suggest Google Chrome has better performance than IE 7 and Firefox 3.x)? Have you says, please.

YouTube Downloader: Download YouTube Video For My Mom!

Walker — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:45:45 +0000

Steve Chen and Chad Hurley created the most wanted video clip hosting site for sharing video collection easier on the Net, that’s YouTube!

YouTuber, the users of YouTube (I call it), like it very much. The reasons are simple: it’s free; it’s really easy to share and really fun to interact with community about the posted video clip collections!

So, active commenter (I am) prefer watching YouTube video clips online than having the videos playback at local hard disk.

However, there is another camp of people (me too), who occasionally would like to download YouTube videos and save them to mobile hard disk or the latest 8GB USB thumb drive.

The reasons? Well, as for me, those are for my mom and dad who are too old and reluctant to learn something about computer! You might want to download them for safekeeping, backup, playback on media server at home, saving the metered broadband usage at home, etc.

OK. For whatever reasons, how could you direct download YouTube video clips (or from any other video hosting sites)?

1) Native way – retrieve video clips from a Web browser cache folder

This native method works for most video hosting sites, as long as you know where is the web browser cache folder that used to temporarily keeping web page contents (including picture, MIDI, MP3, FLV, SWF, etc).

Firefox cache folder:

Type the following Firefox URI in the Address bar, press ENTER, and look for the Cache Directory: path of Disk Cache Device:

about:cache

Vista-IE7 cache folder:

By default installation, you could find the IE7 super-hidden cache folder in Windows Vista at this folder path:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Low\Content.ie5

Note: You might need to enable “view hidden files/folders” option in Windows to locate all sub-folders or the browser cache folder itself.

For example, you could find YouTube video clips that finish playback in web browser leaving the cached video files with file name similar to get_video, get_video[1], get_video[2], etc.

Save all these cached file to another folder and rename them with a flash video file extension (i.e. FLV, e.g. get_video to be renamed as video1.flv) and you’re ready to play the YouTube video offline or convert them to other video format as you like.

For more detail, you may refer to Where Is IE7 Cache Folder, Retrieve Flash Movie In IE7 Cache Folder Of Windows Vista, How to save flash video from Firefox cache folder.

2) Techie way – retrieve the hidden YouTube video direct download link

This method is only applicable to YouTube video and it’s working at this time of writing.

It’s not really user-friendly but it’s good enough for those who wonder how YouTube Downloader extracts the YouTube video direct download link.

For the detail of this method, please refer to YouTube Video Direct Download Link

3) Easier way – retrieve the YouTube video download link with YouTube Downloader

There are many YouTube downloader freeware that you could easily find one or two from Google search.

If you’re not serious about downloading YouTube video (to be frank, watching YouTube video online is more fun because of the interactive features), I’ve my friend developed this simple one-click YouTube downloader.

Enter YouTube video URL here and click Submit button

And click your YouTube Video direct download link at here:

Strictly speaking, it’s not a perfect downloader. For example, sometime it’s not working without hard forcing web browser to refresh (i.e. pressing CTRL+F5 hotkey). And, it doesn’t download the video. Indeed, it merely presents the YouTube video direct download link that described in previous method.

Transformer Hiding In Firefox 3

Walker — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:04:36 +0000

Geeks around the world call this Firefox Easter egg and I thought the guys behind Firefox 3 are fans of Transformer (or they work like the robots?).

Perhaps, this is the second and latest Easter egg that has been found so far (am I right?).

To get the first Easter egg, enter the about:mozilla URI in Firefox web browser Address bar and (gently) press the Enter key.

Then, how about the second Easter egg? Well, you might already know that.

In Firefox 3, type about:robots in the Address bar and press enter (as shown in the screenshot), the hidden “Transformer” Easter egg appears to welcome humans (to this lovely web browser in the Earth)!

And take note on the last message, stated that “They have a plan”!

YouTube Video Direct Download Link

Walker — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:15:19 +0000

You like YouTube? I do. You want to download some of the nice YouTube video clip for offline leisure. So am I.

Besides relying on freeware, you could also copy the YouTube video clips from browser’s cache folder. Now, there is another trick where you could find a hidden direct download link of each YouTube video clips.
Best of all, you don’t have to worry about installing too many freeware (that potentially slow down Windows performance) nor you’ve to watch the video and then locate it from cache folder.

How to extract the hidden direct download link of YouTube video?

With this trick means you could directly download the YouTube video clips to local hard disk!

1) For example, click these links to open the Jumper trailer or the Batman The Dark Knight trailer hosted at YouTube (you could just open any video clips hosted on YouTube) with your favorite web browser.

2) Right-click on the empty / blank place to bring up the web browser context-menu, then click the View Source (IE7) or View Page Source (Firefox 2.0.0.12)

3) Press CTRL+F hotkeys to bring up Find function dialog box and search for watch_fullscreen

4) On the same line, copy all the text from video_id up to title.

E.g. Copy the red-color highlighted text only:

YouTube page source of Batman The Dark Knight trailer:

var fullscreenUrl = '/watch_fullscreen?fs=1&q=batman&e=h&sourceid=ys&video_id=WaIR9dAZRR0&l=127&sk=VCaWxqmJZiKonU1nSiudlwC&t=OEgsToPDskIruDrrzg8rrmEurgby4CAq&hl=en&plid=AARG6hg5eMe3TU0HAAAAoARKYAA&tk=qFuW4Ccd3bcw0maq8nDIEhW4w-HlY7INZ_61k0CTk6utKedGb4Uveg%3D%3D&title=Batman - The Dark Knight Trailer HD';

YouTube page source of the Jumper trailer:

'/watch_fullscreen?fs=1&e=h&video_id=9rz5NekSUTM&l=149&sk=GJ-xz7O9MhF7a9YqeK9xQwC&t=OEgsToPDskJfBx_V8_vxpGb1nnFNj6Ky&hl=en&plid=AARG6j6Dw6RqOq7AAAAAoAAYYAE&title=Jumper Trailer - World Premiere';

5) Open another new browser window, type this URL

www.youtube.com/get_video?

and then press CTRL+C keyboard shortcut to APPEND the copied text in step 4.

E.g. these are how the hidden direct download links of YouTube videos look like:

The Jumper Trailer direct download link:

www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=9rz5NekSUTM&l=149&sk=GJ-xz7O9MhF7a9YqeK9xQwC&t=OEgsToPDskJfBx_V8_vxpGb1nnFNj6Ky&hl=en&plid=AARG6j6Dw6RqOq7AAAAAoAAYYAE&title

Batman The Dark Knight Trailer direct download link:

www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=WaIR9dAZRR0&l=127&sk=VCaWxqmJZiKonU1nSiudlwC&t=OEgsToPDskIruDrrzg8rrmEurgby4CAq&hl=en&plid=AARG6hg5eMe3TU0HAAAAoARKYAA&tk=qFuW4Ccd3bcw0maq8nDIEhW4w-HlY7INZ_61k0CTk6utKedGb4Uveg%3D%3D&title

Now, just press ENTER key and you’ll prompted to save the get_video file. Before saving the file, you may rename it with a meaningful filename and append the .flv as the flash video file extension.
With reference: Lawrence@NextMile

How To View RSS Feed In XML Format With Firefox

Walker — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:50:09 +0000

Similar to IE7, Firefox 2.x built-in Feed Reader that understand RSS and Atom protocol.

By default, both IE7 and Firefox are set to render the XML format of RSS / ATOM feed in human readable form.
Although the default reader works well for majority users, developers might sometimes expect turn it off to inspect the underlying XML structure of a Feed.

IE7 comes with an option to turn off or disable Feed preview function. However, Firefox 2.x doesn’t have such explicit option to do so!

Though, Moggylaceous posted a simply hack or trick to disable the Feed preview function in Firefox 2.x too.

All you need to do is edit the FeedConverter.js, a JavaScript file that comes with Firefox installation.

In my Windows Vista Ultimate, this FeedConverter.js is located at this path

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\FeedConverter.js

Open the FeedConverter.js, search for this block of code and remark it to become comment (refer to the screenshot below for reference)

if (result.doc && (!this._sniffed || (result.doc.title && (result.doc.link || result.doc.id)))) {

and add a new line, i.e. if (0) {, as a replacement to the remarked block of code.

For Windows Vista, saving the FeedConverter.js file might be rejected with an error message that similar to “Please check whether if this file is opened in another program.”

In this case, you might wonder what other application using FeedConverter.js file while there is no active Firefox is running.

Well, it’s not because of Firefox, but this is likely due to Windows Vista UAC security feature! I’ve successfully save the change by using Notepad++ that was executed in an elevated Command Prompt window!

Once the changes are saved, restart Firefox to get it renders the underlying structure of a Feed. (Though, this hack doesn’t work with ATOM feed).