Anyone who’s familiar with the Mozilla Firefox browser will have seen that Google has been the browser’s default search engine for some time, allowing users to make Google searches directly from the taskbar. This relationship has been hugely positive for both Google (helping to ensure their market dominance by featuring so prominently on one of the most popular western browsers) and Mozilla (adding user functionality, improving brand awareness and making them a considerable sum of money), so news of the pair continuing their relationship at first doesn’t seem too surprising.

However, with the current deal between the two major brands expiring in November, plus Mozilla’s recently released ‘Firefox with Bing’, many people had begun to speculate that the deal between Mozilla and Google could be coming to an end (with many suggesting an imminent switch to Bing as the primary search provider). Considering the growing rivalry between Firefox and Google’s own Chrome web browser, this didn’t sound completely outside the realms of possibility.

According to an announcement from Mozilla, the new deal between the company and Google will run for a minimum of three more years, with Google continuing as the Firefox default browser.

Although the monetary elements of the new deal weren’t disclosed, one can expect it to be extremely lucrative for Mozilla, with their relationship with Google accounting for more than 80% of their revenue in 2010.

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Internet security is something that a lot of us worry about, but how much do we know about what goes on behind the scenes? In very many cases we know almost nothing, and rely on internet security programs and certificates to tell us that our data is safe.

However, online fraud, phishing and identity theft have been on the rise for the past decade, and now constitute the largest form of online criminal activity. It is estimated that losses from this are well into the billions of pounds each year, and with the constant increase and diversity of the ways people access the internet it is a problem that is set to continue.

An example of this has been uncovered recently with the Dutch company DigiNotar. They were a company called a ‘certificate authority’, which issues digital security certificates based on public key encryptions. These give the base for the security of everyday users, who see an SSL certificate and assume they are safe.

The problem began when lax security policies at DigiNotar ended up in a network breach. The hackers that broke in then managed to forge and distribute many different certificates including Google, Mozilla and over 200 others. This in turn put millions of people at risk, not to mention that the same company was responsible for security certificates relating to sensitive government information. Worse than their inability to account for security certificates was the six week period it took them to own up to it, angering many people around the world.

This breach has now been brought under control, with Google and Mozilla adding the offending certificates to their blacklists, but not without consequence for DigiNotar. Since the debacle they have officially been banned for life by both of these internet giants, and the bad publicity has caused the company to go into administration with the loss of several hundred jobs.

Although the results of this whole episode haven’t been as disastrous as many thought it could be, it is a stark warning of the dangers of the internet. It only takes sloppy security in one part of the chain for it to potentially collapse altogether. At Pixel Internet we take our security very seriously and do our best to stay on top of all latest news stories like this, in turn keeping our customers as secure as possible.

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1. Top 10 Firefox Plugins – Web Development Tools
2. Google Challenges You To Hack Chrome

Firefox and its variety of Web Development extensions makes it the first choice browser for many web designers and developers.

We have picked out 10 of the most useful and most popular web development Firefox plugins to help you build and optimise your website.

Below is our top 10 list of web development plugins for Firefox and a brief description of their features:

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 1. FIREBUG
Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page, “probably the best Firefox plugin in the world”. (ED)

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 2. WEB DEVELOPER TOOLBAR
Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. I used this add-on for a long time prior to Firefox 2.0. I found its pixel measuring tool to be useful and back when I did table design I used its outlining/bordering tool to help me adjust that flow-based layouts. I’ll have to relearn how to use this sucker for the new methodologies I use for client-end design.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 3. SEOQUAKE
Seoquake is one of the most powerful tools available for analyzing your websites Search Engine Optimisation results. It will help you determine what your Google PageRank score is, how many pages on your site are indexed, how many external sites link to yours, similar statistics for Yahoo and Live.com, your Alexa ranking, your del.icio.us vote count (for specific pages), and mountains of other data. I’m still finding out more and more about this tool, but I think this is by far and large one of the most powerful extensions available to web developers.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 4. COLORZILLA
Have you ever seen a really interesting colour on a website and try to find out what it is? ColorZilla gives you the ability to simple use a “colour picker” to mouse over the desired colour and capture it’s hex value. This extension has proved to a real time saver and I’ve used it longer than any of the other extensions or plug-ins on this list (since late 2004).

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 5. IE View
Sooner or later, you’ll need to check your pages in IE. The IE View extension makes this as simple as possible by adding a “view in IE” option to the right-click menu.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 6. AARDVARK
This has to be the most impressive development plugin for Firefox yet. It’s great for just trimming down pages and isolating portions to print as well.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 7. MEASUREIT
Draw a ruler across any web page to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 8. FIREFTP
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 9. ACCESSIBILITY EXTENSION
Every company and site owner should ensure their website is accessible to able-bodied and disabled users. The Accessibility Extension is a toolbar that allows non-disabled designers the ability to experience what it’s like to be a disabled web user, as well as giving disabled users a selection of tools to help with their browsing experience.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 10. DEVBOI
DevBoi is a great sidebar for coders and developers that gives you instant access to all the manuals you could ever need. Simply launch from the Tools menu in Firefox and then double-click on the element you’re interested in to bring up the right manual page.

There you go, thats our top 10, although there are 100′s more fantastic plugins out there! Have we missed your favourite out? If we have we would love to here about it!

Please feel free to add your favourite Firefox Extension to our list.

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3. DigiNotar Certificate Authority Banned For Life From Chrome And Firefox

This tutorial shows you how to clear your browser cache in Internet Explorer. This is particularly useful if you have noticed your PC become ‘sluggish’ when browsing the internet – a clear indication that your PC is storing too many files.

This is because the browser cache serves to store a copy of each web page you visit on your PC’s hard drive, it does this to speed up page loading times by not having to download each element every time you visit the page. This feature is very useful, but over time can cause your computer to slow down.

Open Microsoft Internet Explorer, click ‘Tools‘ in the top left corner, then click ‘Internet Options‘.

A window will pop open. First select the ‘Delete Cookies‘ button.

Another little window will pop up. Select ‘OK‘.

Then select ‘Delete Files’.

Another window will pop up, make sure you have ‘Delete all offline content‘ ticked.
Select ‘OK‘.

Then click the ‘OK‘ button near the bottom. This may take a few minutes to complete, so be patient.

Your browser cache has now been cleared. It is good practice at this point to reboot your computer.

If you use a different method or you’re having difficulties following this tutorial, please feel free to add your comments.

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