Mozilla Firefox

Hi in this post I am discussing Mozilla Firefox. But why?

The reason for writing this post is to increase awareness on Mozilla Firefox, an open source web browser which is more standard-compliant and safer than Internet Explorer.

How is Firefox better?
Firefox is based on the Gecko Engine developed by Mozilla and has high performance in terms of speed. Accompanied with speed the other great features of Firefox are:

Personal

1. Smart location bar - When you enter a phrase in the location bar of the browser the match is found based on your previous usage and also from the bookmarks and the tags you assign them.
2. One click bookmarking - When a website is opened in the browser a star icon is shown at the right side of location bar. Just click the star to bookmark the website. Also double clicking the star icon gives you a popup for selecting the bookmark location and tag for it.

Security

1. Instant Website ID - For a secured website an overview about the identity of the owner is shown. Click on that icon an you can see complete information provided by the site owner. This prevents you against phishing attacks (Fraud websites looking just like the Original ones).
2. Anti-malware - If you visit an website known to inject viruses, trojan horses, spyware etc. Firefox shows a full-sized browser message warning you against the site. The list is constantly updated by the community.
3. Anti-virus software - Firefox integrates itself with your antivirus software and when you download something its checked by your antivirus to ensure safety.
4. Pop-up blocker - Firefox prevents unwanted pop-ups from being displayed.
5. Password Manager - Firefox offers you the facility to save your passwords.

Customization

1. Addons Manager - Install additional features to your Firefox easily using the Addons Manager. There are over 5,000 addons available for Firefox.
2. Themes - Change your themes easily to suit your feelings.

Productivity

1. Feed Reader - Read RSS feeds directly from your browser.
2. Download Manager - Advanced download manager supporting pause and resume feature. So you could easily resume unfinished downloads.

Search

1. Search bar - There is a search bar at the right top of your Firefox so that you can do your search easily. Also it suggests words as you type something in the search bar.
2. Change search engine - There are hundreds of search engines which firefox supports. So you can have your search done on your favourite search engine.
3. Smart keywords - You can assign keyword to your search engine, so that you can enter the keyword followed by your search query directly in the location bar to get your search done.

Tabs

1. Tabbed browsing - Firefox supports tabbed browsing, so that you can many websites side by side in a single window.
2. Save on exit - You can save all of your tabs on exit so that when you open Firefox again all of your tabs are restored.

Performance

1. Uses less memory - Firefox uses less memory while it is running and also cleans up unused memory continously.
2. Faster page load - Takes less time to render page. Also it has an improved graphics rendering engine and faster JavaScript engine.

This is some of the features of the new Firefox 3.0 .For a complete list of features visit
Mozilla Firefox Home Page.




Also, read "10 Reasons Why Not to Use MSIE (Internet Explorer)"

HTML, CSS and JavaScript

HTML is the basic building block of all websites. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HyperText is something advanced than simple text, it means plain text embedded with other media types like images, flash animations etc. HTML was the idea of Tim Berners-Lee and is based on SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language) which was used earlier for the same purpose. HTML is the claimed standard for web page display and currently its development is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HTML is organised in form of tags. Some tags belong to the header and others to the body. The most used header tags are title, meta-tags(description, keywords etc.). The body contains tag used for display of hypertext and that too with correct formatting. HTML is now slowly replaced by a better alternative known as XHTML which is a fusion of HTML and XML.

CSS stands for Cascaded Style Sheet, a recent development in the field of web technologies. CSS is the stylesheet information attached to the HTML pages and provide information about the look and feel of the webpage. It replaces the default styles attached with the tags in a page, set by the browser, with values given by the web designer. For example if you want to change the color of the visited links from purple to some other color or you want an 'on hovering' effect etc. Current implemented Specification of CSS is 2 in Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox also supports CSS 3 to some extent.

JavaScript is a Client-side scripting language which in simple words means its a programming lanuage which is compiled (rather interpreted) by the browser at runtime. JavaScript is very similar to C Programming lanuage. JavaScript was developed by Netscape and it has absolutely no relation with Java developed by Sun. It derives its name JavaScript due to a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun. Javascript is used for making the website dynamic. Since it is processed at the client side, so it does not require resources from the server and hence prevents the server from overload and also the user relieves from loading time of content from the server. Use of Javascript has increased considerably over the last few years. Now most of the site implement one or the other use of Javascript for their website. For example - showing popups, verifying form fields, showing some mouse over effects etc. Also, many website today use AJAX which is an implementaion of Javascript.

Domain name by CO.NR

CO.NR provides you free domain names with the postfix .co.nr like yourname.co.nr . This sites provide you with url masking service. For details about URL masking view my post URL Masking (URL Cloaking). So, to give an overview it is hiding your original web address with other another URL. For example, if your address is something like http://you.yourhost.com/ or http://yourhost.com/you etc. will get replace with http://yourname.co.nr .

This is a free service and easy to configure. Just follow this simple instructions:

1. Book your account on webhost providing you with subdomain names or subfolders (Almost all webhost give this).
2. Open an account on CO.NR and configure it to point to your homepage.
3. Also fill the whole form with meta tags, favicon etc. and you are done with the process.

With URL Masking it also supports URL forwarding which means if you type http://yourname.co.nr/subdir it will open and mask the URL http://yourhost.com/you/subdir.

In addition to URL Masking CO.NR also provides URL redirection that is when someone types your CO.NR domain name, he is redirected to your homepage and no URL hiding takes place. This is good if you don't want to hide your original URL but I will not prefer that you do it.

Though there are some drawbacks of CO.NR domain names:

1. When you click on a link on any page of your website which is relative (Ex- href="subdir/index.html"), the url in the address bar of the bar does not change. Instead use absolute links like href="http://yourname.co.nr/subdir/index.html" with a target="_top" added to the hyperlink.
   
2. This uses a framed structure, so it becomes hard for the Search Engines to index your website.
3. You have to link back to CO.NR website from your website's home page using one of their graphical buttons.
   

URL Masking (URL Cloaking)

URL Masking is a process by which your original URL is hidden by another URL. For example you have your homepage at http://yourhost.com/you (Original) and booked any URL Making service with your homepage set as http://yourname.com (Mask) then when you enter the Mask URL you will see the page at Original URL but the address bar will show the Mask URL. To make it easy lets take an example:

The website named szakaly.co.nr is a mask for the true URL domain1030180.sites.fasthosts.com/szakaly08 . So you could see, URL Mask are used to convert long URLs into short and easy ones.

So, how does URL Masking work? URL Masking is implemented using frames. How? An invisible frame (frame having border equal to zero) is used to cover your original page. Also, some text is given in the noframes tag for the the browsers not supporting frames (Ancient browsers) and Search Engines since they could not interpret the frames tag.

For a better understanding of how URL masking works, take a look at the source of the website in the above example. The source starts with some meta tags into the head tag constituting the header information about the website. Following that, there is a frameset tag having the properties of border and framespacing set to zero. Then comes your original URL, embedded in the frame tag and the whole page is displayed by this tag only. Finally there comes noframes tag containing some text about the website for the old browsers and Search Engines discussed above.
noframes tag for the browsers not supporting frames (Ancient browsers) and for Search Engines.

For a better understanding look at the source of the website in the above example. There you can see meta-tags embedded in the head tags which give header information about the website. It is followed by frameset tag which has properties of border and framespacing both set to zero. The original website url is then embedded in the frame src="" tag. At last there are noframes tag having some text for the old browsers and search engines.

Review of Free Hostia

Free Hostia is my favourite free web hosting service. The various qualities of Free Hostia are:

1. Web Space - 250 MB

2. Monthly Bandwidth - 5 GB

3. PHP with PHPMyAdmin

4. 1 MySQL database with 10 MB storage

5. 3 POP3 enabled e-mail accounts

6. Elefante free scripts installer

7. Custom "Error 404 : Page Not found" page

8. Hosting for 2 domains with upto 10 sub-domains

9. Good Customer Support

10. Control Panel with Detailed Bandwidth Stats

This webhost is given a rating of 114 out of 125 by Free-Webhosts.com. The review of Free Hostia by Free-Webhosts.com can be read at
http://www.free-webhosts.com/reviews/FreeHostia.php