Mac|Life Firefox 3 RSS Feed

Block Time-Wasting Sites - We're Looking at You, Facebook

Susie Ochs — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:47:00 -0600

This set blocks five time-wasting sites between the hours of 9-11:30 a.m. and 1-4 p.m. on the weekdays.

I have a bit of a problem. I obsessively check certain websites (cough, cough, Facebook) when I’m supposed to be working. Is there a way to block those sites during the workdays but still allow access after hours and on the weekends?

Firefox makes this easy to accomplish thanks to its ultrahandy add-ons, specifically one called LeechBlock. Go to Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons, and type LeechBlock into the search box. Once it’s installed, go to Tools > LeechBlock > Options, and you’ll find a huge list of options for blocking those time-wasting sites. You can specify certain days and times, what page Firefox displays instead of the blocked one, and lots more.

To block a site in Safari without using Tiger’s or Leopard’s Parental Controls (which you can’t use on an administrator account anyway) or fiddling with the Terminal, you can install the free add-on Safari AdBlock (safariadblock.sourceforge.net), and make it think your time-wasting sites are just giant ads. Go to Safari > Preferences > AdBlock, click the Custom Filters tab, click the plus sign, and set the pull-down menus to Block Elements Whose URL Starts With http://your-blocked-site.com. You can turn AdBlock on and off in that same preference, under the General tab, for times you want to allow yourself to squander a few minutes online. (Now get back to work.)

Firefox 3.1 Adds Multitouch Swipe Support

Florence Ion — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:54:47 -0600

On Monday, Mozilla released the latest beta update for Firefox. The “Beta 2” version of the Web browser includes a number of great new features that Firefox users envied in other browsers, including private browsing mode, improved rendering, and a faster JavaScript engine.

However, Mac users are in for a treat. Firefox 3.1 now has built-in support for the MacBook’s Multi-Touch trackpad. In fact, Firefox will support even more gestures than Safari, Apple's default browser, does. The multi-finger gestures (three fingers for a swipe and two fingers for a pinch or twist) include the following:

- Swipe Left: Go back in history (hold Cmd to open the last page in a new tab)
- Swipe Right: Go forward in history
- Swipe Up: Go to the top of the page
- Swipe Down: Go to the end of the page
- Pinch Together: Zoom out
- Pinch Apart: Zoom in
- Twist Right: Next tab
- Twist Left: Previous tab

As of now, there's no known release date for the final version of Firefox 3.1

Inline PDFs in Firefox

Scott Rose — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:46:00 -0600

The firefox-mac-pdf add-on lets you view PDF files right within Firefox.

I just switched from Safari to Firefox as my default Web browser, but the one thing that I miss is the ability to view PDFs right within the browser itself. Can I make this happen within Firefox?

Unlike Safari, Firefox makes you download PDFs to your hard drive in order to open them. This can be a nuisance after you’ve become accustomed to Safari’s convenient method of displaying PDFs directly in your browser window.

But, fortunately, Firefox has an active developer community that creates handy add-ons you can use to personalize your browsing experience. Some can be found on Mozilla’s list of Firefox Add-ons (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox), and many more are strewn about the Internet, found by searching.

One add-on, called firefox-mac-pdf (free, code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/), makes Firefox act more like Safari. It takes advantage of the native PDF tools built into Mac OS X to display your PDFs in Firefox’s browser window, just like you’re used to.