If you are a Firefox nightly (Minefield user, then you must have gotten a notification today to update Minefield to 4.2a1pre. You probably did it tooonly to find that none of your addons are working anymore. Well, don’t worry, you can re-enable them in a jiffy.

1) Go to about:config and click the ‘I’ll be careful, I promise!’ button.

2) Right click on any empty space and choose New > Boolean.

3) Enter the name: extensions.checkCompatibility.4.2a

4) Click OK. Now choose the value ‘false‘. Click OK again.

5) Similarly make two more boolean values namely,

• extensions.checkCompatibility.4.2a1
• extensions.checkCompatibility.4.2a1pre

and set them to ‘false‘.

6) Restart Firefox and enjoy your addons.

Important: If you are using Firefox 4 Beta 9+, don’t follow this tutorial because you already have this feature built-in. The smart guys at Mozilla have used our method to permanently include this feature into Firefox 4 Beta 9+ ;).

This is the latest solution to the original hack to remove Firefox 4′s title bar. The problem with the original hack was that it was having some problems with beta version 7 and upwards. Also, the addon-bar has been introduced in Beta 7 which is not so pleasant looking. So I modified the original userChrome.css to include the fixes.

Here’s what Firefox 4 Beta 7+ looks like after using the new and improved userChrome.css:

Features and fixes:

• Neat relocation of tab-bar and removal of title bar.
• Engraved effect on inactive tab labels. (This effect was present in initial betas but was removed in the latest one. I liked it so I added it back ;)
• In the original hack, the tabs would overlap window controls in FF4B7+. In this new userChrome.css, I’ve fixed the problem.
• The menu bar is moved to the top. It can be viewed by pressing ‘Alt’ as usual.
• The addon bar’s background is made ‘light-blue’ to complement with the overall theme.

How to:

1) First, right-click beside the URL bar (Address bar) and click ‘Customize…‘. Now drag the ‘Group Tabs’ icon to beside the URL bar.

2) Now download this userChrome.css file (Right click > Save Link As…).

3) Place the file into this folder:

[Windows Vista/7] C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\chrome

[Windows XP] C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\chrome\

4) Restart Firefox 4.

Do note that, you need to have ‘Tabs on Top’ enabled for this to take effect. If you find any problems, do mention it in the comments. If you like this post, please share it.

A reader just asked me, "I have been on an uninstalling spree and want to get rid of every junk inside my Windows 7 PC. I noticed that there are several versions and updates of Java Runtime environment installed in my computer. These updates are taking much space. So, is it ok to uninstall all except the latest one?"

The answer is yes. You can uninstall older versions and updates. The thing is, every time a new Java update/version arrives, it has all the goodness of the previous versions plus some additional features. However, installing an updated version does not remove the previous installations. If you’ve been updating Java since a while, you’ll notice many entries in the Programs & Features list, each representing an update. Since every new update has all the features of the previous ones, you can safely uninstall the previous updates. Infact, Java itself recommends you do so.

In spite of not providing unlimited storage space like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, Gmail is the favorite choice for most of us. It is a primary email service provider for most people and hence the problem of running out of space in Gmail bound to happen for most of us, sooner or later. The only thing one can do is to remove the emails that take up lot of space. These are mostly forwards with lots of multimedia attachments. You don’t want that. But the problem is, there is no easy way to sort emails according to size in Gmail (this was my favorite feature when I used Yahoo! Mail back in the day). So it becomes rather impossible to hand-pick the larger ones.

However, there is a cool service called FindBigMail which is nothing short of a bliss. As the name suggests, it scans your Gmail account and separates out mail with large attachments.

Once the scan completes, you need to login to your Gmail account and look for labels marked ‘My Big Mail‘, ‘My Really Big Mail‘, ‘My Ultra Big Mail‘. This is where you can easily select the large emails and delete them.

The service also sends an email with stats about how much space your can recover by deleting those emails. Try it now.

Quick-tip

Facebook recently rolled out ‘Facebook Groups’ which is more like ‘Friend Lists on steroids’. I was quite happy with the sleek implementation and thought it to be near-perfect way to manage friends. Frankly speaking, even though we all have a huge friend-lists, we interact with only a selected few on regular basis. This is where Groups play an important part.

However, the single most annoying thing about Facebook Groups is the opt-out system of receiving notifications. This means that, by default, you are entitled to receive notifications of any small activity done in a group of which you are a part of. Additionally, you have no control over your friends adding you to any group without your permission. This can get nasty. Ofcourse the option is to immediately leave the group. Or you need to change the settings to atleast stop receiving email notifications.

1) Login to Facebook and click ‘Account’ > ‘Account Settings’ > ‘Notifications’ tab.

2) Scroll down to ‘Group settings’ and uncheck all. If you prefer, you can change individual settings for each group using the link below.

That’s about it. No more annoying emails notifications.

Quick-Tip

Facebook uses a lot of Javascript and Ajax to deliver real-time dynamic content. This has secretly played a great role in the success of the social network because technologies like Javascript and Ajax manage data requests very efficiently without page refresh, thereby not disrupting the browsing experience.

However, there are a few downsides of these technologies too. Ajax data requests are much more complicated and susceptible to minor network fluctuations compared to conventional HTTP requests involving page refresh. The most common and highly irritating issue with Facebook is that, at times, the Status Update just don’t work. The status just won’t submit after you click the ‘Share’ button. Facebook handles status update using Ajax and as I said earlier, a minor network glitch can break the functionality. In such cases, HTTP data request can be helpful but the normal version of Facebook do not have any secondary option (besides Ajax submit) to update Status.

So we let our common-sense run wild and use the mobile version of Facebook to update status. The mobile version uses conventional HTTP requests which is quite awesome.

1) Just login to the mobile version of Facebook: http://m.facebook.com

2) Write your status and click ‘Share’. The status will be submitted successfully followed by a page refresh.

Quite a simple trick but many wouldn’t have guessed it. So please share this post.

For some really strange reason, Google Instant (and the interactive Google Doodles) are not available on the Opera browser. The Google Instant search simply doesn’t happen while you’re on any version of Opera. So, if you are an Opera user and have been wondering how to get it working, maybe we can help:

1) While you are on Google’s homepage, ‘Right click’ > ‘Edit site preferences…’.

2) In the window that appears, choose ‘Network’ tab and then in ‘Browser identification’, select ‘Identify as Firefox’. Click OK.

That’s it. You’re done. Google Instant will work as beautifully as in other browsers. Just to make it clear, this is just a temporary fix from our side because the actual problem lies with Google. After Google stops discriminating Opera ;) you can change the setting back to ‘Identify as Opera’.

I use Thunderbird as my offline email client and it’s been a really smooth ride since more than a year. But recently I ran an update [3.1.2] and restarted my PC only to find myself not able to connect to Gmail [using IMAP] on Thunderbird 3.1.2. Turns out the issue lies with Google’s servers. They have been changed. I don’t know whether this affects every offline email client (well, it should) but here’s a quick workaround to fix the problem.

» In Thunderbird, open Tools > Account Settings… > [your Gmail account] > Server settings. Change the Server name to ‘imap.gmail.com‘ (previously the server was imap.googlemail.com).

» Then in the left pane, click ‘Outgoing Server (SMTP)’ edit the server name to ‘smtp.gmail.com’. Click OK.

» Now try to reconnect again. It will work.

Windows Live Essentials Beta [Build 15.3.2804.607] is now available for download. I downloaded the Beta only to find myself stuck with a weird problem with the uninstall of the previous version of Windows Live Essentials. I tried to uninstall the previous version but the ‘Uninstall Wizard’ failed to launch. The previous installation had messed up and the uninstall couldn’t initiate. Moreover, you can’t over-ride the previous version of Live Essentials with the new installer. It throws a message, something like, ‘The following programs are already installed’. Fortunately, after hours of searching on the internet, I found a way to completely uninstall and remove all traces of the previous ‘Windows Live Essentials’ installation. If you are facing a similar problem, the following steps might help:

1) First, download and install the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.  This little kid removes traces of previous installation of any program installed on your computer.

2) Once installed, launch it by clicking → ‘All Programs’ → ‘Windows Install Clean Up’.

3) In the window that appears, select the entries that has the words ‘Windows Live’ in it. Click Remove.

4) Once done, restart your PC (IMPORTANT). Then run Windows Update, just in case an important update is required to be installed prior to fresh Windows Live Essentials installation.

5) Finally, install Windows Live Essentials. This time it should go well.

Opera has this really nice feature to handle .torrent files itself with its integrated BitTorrent protocol solver. Turns out, most of the torrent users already have a client software like uTorrent for downloading torrents. So the BitTorrent feature in Opera not only becomes useless, it also gets quite irritating when downloading torrent files. What happens is, when ever you click on a .torrent file link, Opera tries to open the torrent in its own torrent client. To avoid this, you first need to save the .torrent file on your computer and then run it using your favorite torrent client software.

As a workaround for this little problem, you can disable Opera’s BitTorrent feature altogether.

1) In Opera’s address bar, type in ‘opera:config’ and press enter. This will open the Preferences Editor.

2) Now roll open the third option that says ‘BitTorrent’ and un-check ‘Enable’ checkbox. Click ‘Save’. 

That’s it. Now whenever you click on a .torrent file link, it will open in your torrent client and not in Opera.