Anyway, I have fully switched to Chrome since a few months, and today I suddenly remembered I don’t need my Firefox Sync account anymore. An inactive account containing sensitive information is not a good thing at all, so I went ahead and deleted it.

Deleting your Sync profile is quite easy. Just go to this Mozilla page, fill in your username and password, and click on the “Permanently Delete My Account” button. Simple as that. Do it if you were a Firefox user, but have since switched to Chrome (I know many who have).

No related posts.

Delete Your Firefox Sync Data (If You’ve Switched To Chrome) | PC Tonic

Chrome is just a ridiculously better browser than Firefox at the moment (and is likely to stay so), but there are a couple of reasons that make me go back to Firefox every so often.

• Firefox Sync. Chrome has its own sync feature that’s shaping up to be really good, but it is yet to get password sync, which is what I really want from a syncing app. And no, don’t point me to the LastPass or Xmarks extensions – they’re both extremely crappy on Chrome, thanks to all the lockdowns issued upon extensions by Google.
• AdBlock Plus. I’ve stopped using ad blockers (hey, I’m a content publisher too!), but sometimes a lot of times I stumble across a website that has more ads than a daily Oriya newspaper. Chrome has ad blockers too, but yet again, they suck. Browsing with Adblock Plus turned on is a pristine feeling, although I try to refrain myself from using it too much.
• Flexibility. Firefox screams flexibility at your face. Even if it has anything that you don’t like, there are like a dozen ways to have it fixed. The interface is designed to be modified to your liking.There is about:config. With Chrome, you’re more or less stuck with what you get. There’s almost nothing not to like about Chrome, but then there is so little in there in the first place.
• Loyalty. I’m a loyal Firefox fan. I’ve been using Firefox since July, 2006 – just a month after I started using the Internet. As with most other open source projects, Firefox feels fresh and lively. Chrome, despite being based on Chromium, somehow doesn’t feel open.

So yeah, I use Firefox now and then. But thanks to Mozilla’s ass-like attitude in recent times, Firefox has been spectacularly falling behind other browsers when it comes to performance. Yeah, there’s that webpage rendering thing that everyone is crazy about. I’m not talking about that. Frankly speaking, I can barely see how faster Chrome or Opera is compared to Firefox – it’s a matter of few hundred milliseconds after all.

What I’m talking about is the speed of the software – how well it runs on your machine. Firefox has always been a slow browser, but lately it feels even slower as it has practically achieved no speed improvements, while its rivals have been trimming down like they are on some super-effective diet.

On a Windows 7 netbook, every browser – Safari and IE 8 included – is usable except Firefox. Give it more than five tabs and a couple of add-ons, and it gives your Atom processor a frightening seizure.

As long as Chrome’s shortcomings aren’t addressed, I need Firefox. At first, that didn’t seem possible on my new netbook. So I set down to tweak some settings and make the damn browser without getting paralyzed way too often. Surprisingly, I was successful! Firefox 4 beta 2 on my netbook still doesn’t match Chrome, but it’s much, much better than how it worked before.

Here’s how I tweaked my Firefox on my netbook. It also happens to be my biggest and most tenacious post ever (probably barring this). If you’re a netbook owner and Firefox fan, you may want to read it.

The Ultimate Guide To Making Firefox Run Smoothly on Netbooks [Guiding Tech]

Related posts:

1. Ditch The Search Box In Firefox For The Address Bar [Firefox Starter Tips]
2. My First Ever Hardware Review : The Samsung N150 Netbook
3. Add Search Engines [Firefox Starter Tips]

Use Firefox On Your Netbook, Without Pulling Your Hair Out | PC Tonic

Step 1 – Create Keywords

Before taking out the search box, we’ll use one feature to create different keywords for different search engines that you’ve got in Firefox. from the dropdown menu of the search box, select ‘Manage Search Engines…’ . You’ll able to see all your installed search engines in the new window that appears.

Now it’s time to create the keywords. Select any search engine, click on Edit Keyword and assign a suitable keyword to it. The shorter the keyword, the better (we’ll get to the reason later). For example, the best keyword for Google will be ‘g’, that for Wikipedia will be ‘w’, and so on. Of course if there are two search engines starting with the same alphabet, you’ve got to assign a two-letter keyword to one of them. Once you’re done click OK.

Step 2 – Remove The Search Box

There’s no more need to keep the search box. Let’s proceed to remove it from Firefox’s UI! Go to View > Toolbars > Customize, simply drag the search box into the Customize Toolbar window. I couldn’t find a good way to show this; here’s the best I’ve got :

Hopefully you get the idea! Once you click on Done, the search box will be gone from Firefox’s chrome[1]. Hurrah! You can always bring it back by reversing what you did above.

Step 3 – Use Your Address Bar As Your Search Box

Your search box is gone, and all you’re left with the obnoxiously big address bar. Lets put it to use. To use the search box, you had to select the required search engine, click inside the box (or press Ctrl-K), and type your query. Instead of doing that, now you’ve got to enter the keyword for the required search engine followed by a whitespace and your query, in your address bar. Keeping the keywords short requires you to type lesser characters, and hence saves time. For example, if you want to search YouTube for videos of Lady Gaga, type this and hit Enter :

y lady gaga

Of course, if you provided a different keyword for YouTube, you should use that instead. Similarly, say you want to look for the Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia; your search query would be this :

w large hadron collider

You get the idea! The search box is no longer required, and your address bar becomes a lot more like the one in Google Chrome.

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#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.

1. Chrome refers to the user interface of any software. Every element that is present in Firefox’s user interface, together constitutes its ‘chrome’. Don’t confuse it with the other Chrome, which is actually a browser from Google. Google Chrome also has a chrome (its own user interface)! I know, it’s crazy but that’s the way it is.

Related posts:

1. Add Search Engines [Firefox Starter Tips]
2. What Are Userscripts, And How Can I Use Them?
3. Use Chrome As A [VERY Barebones] Music Player

Ditch The Search Box In Firefox For The Address Bar [Firefox Starter Tips] | PC Tonic

Thankfully, Firefox lets you to easily add search engines from various websites to its search box. For example, to add YouTube search, all you’ve to do is visit youtube.com. Now click the downward pointing arrow on the search box, and then on Add “YouTube Video Search”.

Booyeah! You can now search YouTube directly from Firefox without visiting the website again.

This works for a lot of aggregating sites, like Scribd, Grooveshark, Torrentz, Dailymotion, Hulu, Flickr and so on. Just visit a website and check the search box if the website search can be added to Firefox. Do note that you need to have Firefox 3 or later for the feature to work. The latest Firefox version is 3.6, which you should be running anyway. Download it from here.

In a future post, we shall see how to create keywords for the different search engines that we added, so that we can just totally remove the search box and use the address bar instead.

#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.

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2. Block ads, flash and other annoyances with a few mouse clicks [Opera Trick]
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Add Search Engines [Firefox Starter Tips] | PC Tonic