Temporary e-mail address

When a website requires you to give your mail in order to register, you can usually expect some spam messages later on. Using a temporary mail is a good solution. You can create a virtual mail account, which forwards mails to your real address only until you remove it. There are plenty of websites offering it, like guerrillamail.com, 10minutemail.com or spambog.com.
I’ll just focus on two with support for Firefox.

Tempomail

• Download Tempomail
• Tempomail Homepage

Right click and choose tempomail from the context menu.

Enter your real address in the pop-up and in the next step you’ll see the temporary address automatically put in the form.

Perfectly simple and useful.

Gish it!

• Download Gish it!
• Gishpuppy Homepage

Pretty similar to Tempomail. Register at the extension’s homepage and install the add-on. Now, when you need to register, just click the Gish it! button in the right-click menu.
In the pop-up window that appears you get an automatically created virtual e-mail account.

Copy the temporary address, paste it to the registration form and you’re done.

Control cookies

• Download CS Lite
• CS Lite Homepage

Cookies can be used for tracking your Internet behavior. Therefore, you may want to be able to manually allow websites to install them on you computer.
CS Lite will allow you to easily control cookie permissions. It can be accessed from the statusbar, a toolbar button, or the context menu.

Just click on the icon to allow, block, or temporarily allow the site to set cookies. You can also view, clear or edit the cookies and exceptions by right clicking on the cs lite icon.

For safer browsing you may choose to deny cookies globally and then enable them on a per site basis. You can also download a blocklist that contains a list of untrusted hosts that you may choose to import into FF and block.

The ultimate anti-tracking solution. Tor: anonymity online.

Tor project homepage
Tor works independently from Firefox, but I decided to put it here as it may be a very useful application for those of you, who need absolutely safe Internet websurfing.
Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

FoxyProxy

• Download FoxyProxy
• FoxyProxy Homepage

Your IP address is recorded every time you visit a website. Sites like Google tie your searches with your IP address. Every search you perform may be used for gaining some knowledge about you – your hobbies, medical remedies and so on.
FoxyProxy is a Firefox extension which automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns. Put simply, FoxyProxy automates the manual process of editing Firefox’s Connection Settings dialog. Proxy server switching occurs based on the loading URL and the switching rules you define.
For even more safety, this extension can also be used with Tor, the project described before.

Don’t send the referring site information

• Download RefControl
• RefControl Homepage

When you click a link, the website you visit can check where you’re coming from. This may be used for example for analysis. If you want to disable sending information on the referrer, RefControl is for you. You can enable referrers on a per site basis.

Other privacy-related apps and add-ons

NoScript (download) – this extension blocks scripting languages globally, protecting you from attacks like XSS, XSRF or CSRF. It can be configured to allow scripts to run on a per domain basis.

LocalRodeo (download) – JavaScript can make your browser connect to a site with a different IP address than originally set. If you don’t use NoScript or want to check even the pages you excluded from NoScript protection, you may find it useful.

SafeCache (download) – segments browser cache, which an be used for tracking your activity.

SafeHistory (download) – restricts the marking of visited links on the basis of the originating document, defending against web privacy attacks that remote sites can use to determine your browser history at other sites.

Even more stuff

8 Firefox extensions towards safer browsing
Porn addict’s toolbox: 100 Tools and Resources to Keep Your Privacy and Security

Fed up with wasting time online? If you’re addicted to watching hundreds of Youtube videos, stumbling through Facebook or Twitter, reading news all the time, LeechBlock is for you. This extensions allows you to intentionally block the time-eating websites within specified periods of the day or limit the daily time you are willing to sacrifice for reading them.

As you read a post about customizing your web browser, there is a great chance you need this extension. It lets you control what you’re doing in the Internet in a more conscious way. Blocking a website, the extension reminds you that you wanted to limit time spent there.

LeechBlock is highly customizable. In order to change it settings go to Tools » Addons » LeechBlock Options

You can divide the time sucking websites into sets. I have two groups myself – Social networks and News sites.
Each set can have assigned different times and rules.

For inspiration, check out these exemplary settings.

What happens when you try to enter a website while you’re not supposed to visit it, depends on the settings of the set. You can be redirected to any local or online page or see a default extension’s page:

New websites can be easily added to block sets with context menu item (right click anywhere on a page you wish to add to one of your block sets).

Make disabling LeechBlock as difficult, as possible

While deciding to install LeechBlock may be a hard decision, keeping to it is even harder… If you think your will may be not strong enough, use the extensions settings which make uninstalling or turning it off really strenuous.

Block set option tab contains “Prevent access to options for this block set at times when these sites are blocked.” option.
In the General settings tab you can disable “Disable” and “Uninstall” buttons for the extension and set a password required for changing the extension’s settings – the longer, the more discouraging it’s going to be.
The point is, of course, giving you time to control your bad habits and take a conscious decision about visiting a website or going back to more productive tasks.

Table of contents

Customize toolbars:

• Stop-or-Reload Button extension
• Advanced modification of the toolbars – userChrome.css
• Remove the Edit and Help menus
• TinyMenu extension
• Menu Editor extension
• Remove disabled Back, Forward and Stop buttons
• Remove padding from the navigation buttons
• Remove the Go button in the location box and the magnifying glass in the Search box

Bookmarks Toolbar

• Organize your bookmarks in folders
• Smart Bookmarks Bar extension
• Favicon Picker 2 extension

Tabs

• Customize the display and location of the close tab button on the tab bar
• Don’t use bold text on the active tab
• Reduce tab width
• Make the active tab wider
• FaviconizeTab extension
• ColorfulTabs extension
• Vertical tab bar – Vertigo extenion

More

Customize toolbars

Let’s have a look at the standard interface. From the top, we have: menu bar, navigation bar, bookmarks bar and tab bar:

First of all, let’s consolidate them into one or two bars (depending on the resolution and the size of your screen).
Open View » Toolbars » Customize... window.

Tick the Use Small Icons box. Now the fun begins. You can drag and drop all the icons and boxes from the window to the toolbars and remove whatever you want from the toolbars. It is not possible to remove the menu here, so let’s use the menu bar first. I suggest moving the menu items to the right as you probably do not use them very often.

So, drag the navigation buttons to the menu bar. If you are accustomed to the Alt-Home shortcut, you can safely remove the Home page button. Location box suits in the space between navigation buttons and menu items. I use Smart Keywords instead of Search box so I removed it.
Activity Indicator (spinning circle in the upper right hand corner) is unnecessary as well as status bar includes a page loading progress meter. You can also remove it using userChrome.css, I’ll describe how to do it later on.
Finally, you can add some Spaces to the bars to make it look clearer.

I managed to put everything in the menu bar so I unticked View » Toolbars » Navigation Toolbar Here’s the result:

Stop-or-Reload Button extension

Download Stop-or-Reload Button extension

You probably do use stop and reload buttons. But as they are never necessary together, why don’t you merge them into one? Once you install the extension, you will only see just one of the buttons at a time.

Advanced modification of the toolbars – userChrome.css

If you don’t know, check what userChrome.css is.
By adding a few lines you can get rid of anything you don’t need in the menu bar so that you can see as much of the current web page address as possible. So, let’s edit userChrome.css.

Remove the Edit and Help menus

If you want to remove the Edit menu, you need to memorize some keyboard shortcuts:
Copy Ctrl-C; Paste Ctrl-V; Find Ctrl-F; Find next Ctrl-G; Select All Ctrl-A.

Probably you do not use Help menu as well. However, you can always access Help with F1 key.

I use Ctrl-H to access History so I removed this menu as well.

To remove the menus that you do not need, add the following lines to your userChrome.css:
/* Remove the Edit and Help menus */
#helpMenu,
#edit-menu
{ display: none !important }

Id’s for all the menus are:
file-menu, edit-menu, view-menu, go-menu, bookmarks-menu, tools-menu, helpMenu
If you want to remove more menus, just add the #’s with their names after commas, e.g.:
/* Remove Edit, History and Help menus */
#helpMenu,
#edit-menu,
#go-menu
{ display: none !important }

TinyMenu extension

Download TinyMenu extension
HomePage

If you don’t like the idea of removing menus or need to compress it even more, consider using the TinyMenu extension, which replaces all the menus with a merge one and leaves just one dropdown menu in the bar.

Menu Editor extension

Download Menu Editor extension

This small extension is probably one of my favorite. It allows you to remove any entries from the menus in the menu bar and from the context menu (right-click menu) as well.
Install it and open its options:
Tools » Add-ons » Menu Editor Options
A simple menu lets you untick all the entries which you do not want to see.

It lets you make your menu look really transparently, no matter how many extensions you’ve installed. To get the idea, have a look at my context menu:

Remove disabled Back, Forward and Stop buttons

The following tweaks remove the buttons when they are not necessary: Back button when there’s no page to go back to, Forward button when there’s no page to go forward to and Stop button when there is no page loading. Otherwise, they dynamically appear.

Open userChrome.css and add the following lines:

/* Remove Back button when there's nothing to go back to */
#back-button[disabled="true"] { display: none }
/* Remove Forward button when there's nothing to go forward to */
#forward-button[disabled="true"] { display: none }
/* Remove Stop button when there's no page loading */
#stop-button[disabled="true"] { display: none }

If you add the code below instead, you won’t see the Back/Forward if there’s nothing in browser history, the View Background Image if there’s no background image, the Cut/Copy/Delete if there’s no text selected, Paste menu item if there’s nothing in clipboard, the Reload All Tabs/Close Other Tabs/Close Tab on tab bar context menu if there’s only one tab opened.
/* Remove all disabled menu items */
menuitem[disabled="true"] { display: none }

As I mentioned before, I use Alt-Home shortcut instead of Home button. I removed it using View » Toolbars » Customize... window but you can also remove it via userChrome.css:
/* Remove Home button */
#home-button { display: none }

The Activity Indicator (circle in the upper right hand corner) can be removed via userChrome.css as well:
/* Remove Activity Indicator */
#throbber-box { display: none !important }

Remove padding from the navigation buttons

This userChrome.css tweak makes toolbars use less space around buttons, leaving more space for actual web pages. It alo affects additional toolbars (e.g Googlebar).
/* Remove extra padding of the navigation buttons */
.toolbarbutton-1, .toolbarbutton-menubutton-button
{ padding: 2px 3px !important }
.toolbarbutton-1[checked="true"],
.toolbarbutton-1[open="true"],
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-button[checked="true"],
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-button[open="true"]
{ padding: 4px 1px 1px 4px !important }

Remove the Go button in the location box and the magnifying glass in the Search box

I always hit enter after typing the address or the search query. Probably so do you. So you don’t need these buttons:

/* Remove Go button */
#go-button-stack, .search-go-button-stack
{ display: none !important }

/* Remove the magnifying glass in the Search box */
.search-go-button-stack { display: none !important }

What I achieved until now:

Bookmarks Toolbar

Organize your bookmarks in folders

I consolidated the Menu and Navigation bars. Nevertheless, I like to have a good access to my Bookmarks toolbar so I’m leaving it. But it can still be optimized.
Start with organizing your bookmarks in folders if you have a lot of them. (right click on Bookmarks bar » New Folder…). Give short, relevant names to the folders and single bookmarks. The easiest way to do it is via the sidebar. Press Ctrl-B. You can drag and drop separators and bookmarks in it. Right click allows you to add separators and folders. Just play around with it for a while.
I’ll describe how to edit the Bookmarks Toolbar. Bookmarks visible on it are placed in the “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder”.
If you can’t see the bookmarks toolbar, click
View » Toolbars » Bookmarks Toolbar It is really useful.

Smart Bookmarks Bar extension

Download Smart Bookmarks Bar extension

This extension hides bookmarks names an only shows them on mouse over.

You can modify its actions via
Tools » Add-ons » Smart Bookmarks Bar Options

Hide bookmarks names with no favicon option is responsible for hiding names of bookmarks of pages which do not have favicons – these bookmarks have the standard favicon assigned. I advise leaving it ticked. You can always use the next extension – Favicon Picker 2 – to solve this problem.
You can also make spaces between favicons smaller and auto-hide Bookmarks Toolbar (I personally find it irritating).

Favicon Picker 2 extension

Download Favicon Picker 2 extension

It is very useful combined with Smart Bookmarks Bar extension.
After installing it, you can change favicons assigned to your bookmarks.
One way to do it is via options window
Tools » Add-ons » Favicon Picker 2 Options
However, it is simplier to do it with a right click on a bookmark and then a click on Properties.

Click Browse and find the favicon of your choice. Click OK. You should see the change now.

Some favicons collections:
Delta Tango Bravo
MpP Favicon Gallery
You can always google for more.

Tabs

Customize the display and location of the close tab button on the tab bar

You can edit this preference using about:config page. I will write about it in the future. If you do not now what it is, do not worry. Just enter about:config in the address box. You will see a page with hundreds of preferences. Find browser.tabs.closeButtons and double click it.

You can enter following values in the window which appears:

0 – display a close button on the active tab only
1 (default) – display close buttons on all tabs
2 – don’t display any close buttons
3 – display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

Choose which suits you the best, type it and click OK.

Don’t use bold text on the active tab

If you do not want the title of the active tab to be bold, add the following code to your userChrome.css file:
/* Make the active tab not bold */
tab[selected="true"] { font-weight: normal !important }

Reduce tab width

If you do not have a widescreen and tend to open a lot of tabs simultaneously you may irritate because of the scroll which appears on the tab bar.

The scroll appears when the tabs are at the minimum width and still cannot fit in the Firefox window. The solution is to change the minimum width of the tabs. The default value is 100 pixels. Change it to around 75 pixels. The titles are still readable and more tabs fit in the screen.
Press Ctrl-L (move the cursor to the location bar) and type about:config. In the Filter box type browser.tabs.tabMinWidthDouble click on the preference name and change the default value in the new window to 75. Click OK.

Alternatively, you can type value 0 which, when necessary, makes titles disappear and leaves favicons only.

Make the active tab wider

Whilst 75 pixels should be enough for background tabs, the active one can be wider so that you can easily read its title. You just have to add the following lines to your userChrome.css: /* Make the active tab wider */
tab[selected="true"] { min-width: 200px !important }
I chose 200 pixels, probably 150 pixels should be enough for you.

FaviconizeTab extension

Download FaviconizeTab extension

You will find this extension useful if you tend to keep some tabs opened all the time, e.g. Gmail or Google Reader.
You can place them in the beginning and minimize these tabs to the size of a favicon.

You can either faviconize tabs by clicking on them or make faviconizing automatic by adding addresses of the websites which you want to always open in faviconized tabs.

ColorfulTabs extension

Download ColorfulTabs extension

ColorfulTabs extensions simply assigns colors to your tabs so that you can simply distinguish them.

The extension lets you choose the fading level of the tabs colors.

Vertical tab bar – Vertigo extension

Download Vertigo extension

Maybe you would like to have a vertical tab bar instead of the default one. You can simply achieve it with Vertigo extension.

It allows you to change the width of the bar.

More

Description of Firefox configuration files, including userChrome.css
Chrome element names and IDs
userChrome.css tweaks

Bypass compulsory registration – access websites that require you to register in order to view content.

BugMeNot extension comes in very handy when a website requires you to register in order to get access to its contents. In most cases, instead of setting up an account, you can log in with just a double click.

You only need to right click in an “Username” or “Password” field and select “Login with BugMeNot” to make BugMeNot try to fetch an existing account data and log you in automatically. For me in, 7 out of 10 cases it’s successful.

The extension uses the bugmenot.com database. It contains data of accounts for hundreds of websites. Nevertheless, it only stores free accounts – do not expect it to work for websites like rapidshare.com.

Configuration

Nothing really needs to be changed here.

To see the extension’s options, choose Tools » Add-ons

Click “Options” button under BugMeNot and you’ll get the configuration menu:

You may consider ticking the box “Disable automatically attempting the next account when login fails”. Otherwise, if the accounts do not work, the website refreshes for every single account which may be pretty annoying. And if the first account does not work, chances of the rest to be valid are relatively small. The choice is yours.