After I disabled that guy, things went back to normal — I guess that one of the extension’s recent updates broke something. So, if your tab key has been acting up too, that could be worth a try. (For those who may be curious, Paste and Go adds an item to the URL bar’s context menu which allows you to paste from a URL from the clipboard and load it in one step.)

Oh, and if you’re running Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 — a perfectly cromulent arrangement — you may have a bit of a hiccup since Resizable Textarea extension has only been green-lit to work on versions up to Firefox 1.5. Not to worry — the Nightly Tester Tools extension can take care of that for you. Among other things, it adds an “override compatibility” to the normal extension dialog box; since most extension authors are very conservative in their version boundaries, overriding those tends to work almost every time.

Overall, Greasemonkey is pretty sweet. Unfortunately, a security hole has come to light over the past couple days. Mark Pilgrim, known for his sites Dive Into Mark and Dive Into Greasemonkey, explained it this way:

“This particular exploit is much, much worse than I thought. GM_xmlhttpRequest can successfully ‘GET’ any world-readable file on your local computer.

“[this test page] returns the contents of c:\boot.ini, which exists on most modern Windows systems.

[…]

“In other words, running a Greasemonkey script on a site can expose the contents of every file on your local hard drive to that site. […] ”

In a later message to the Greasemonkey mailing list, he sounded the alarm:

“Uninstall Greasemonkey altogether. At this point, I don’t trust having it on my computer at all. […]

“[…] And I’m posting a big red blinking warning on every page of diveintogreasemonkey.org advising visitors to uninstall it, until all of these security holes are closed. This is why God invented the <blink> tag.”

I liked his reference to the <blink> tag there; and, yes, security holes and impending nuclear meltdowns are about its only appropriate uses (HHOS). That aside, I have uninstalled Greasemonkey for now. However, I look forward to re-enabling it once the developers work past this.

(Via: Anil, via Leia/IM)

I was a little bit annoyed but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I wrote the entry a second time and I later looked around to see if there were any utilities which might help prevent that kind of thing in the future. One that I thought to look for was some kind of “undo close tab” extension. Well, ask and ye shall receive — a guy named Dorando created an extension called Undo Close Tab (how apropos). And, if you'd normally be wary of downloading an extension from a forum post, rest assured that he has a home page for his extensions as well, though the bulk of the information on Undo Close Tab is in his forum post.

I then took aim at the second thorn in my side, that dumb close-tab button which foiled my plans earlier. After all, even though an undo-close-tab extension would have saved me from the predicament last time, I wouldn’t have even been in that scrape if it wasn’t so easy to hit that button ;). Fortunately, that’s easily done as well. This MozillaZine Knowledgebase article writes about moving the tabbar (to the bottom of the browser or elsewhere on your screen) but it also includes the steps on removing the close-tab button (regardless of whether you want to move the tab bar as well). In short, you can remove your close-tab button but shutting down your Firefox and adding these lines to userchrome.css:

/* remove the close-tab button */
.tabbrowser-tabs > stack {
display: none;
}

Your userchrome.css file goes in your Firefox profile directory but the file doesn’t exist by default. Rather, there’s an example file called “userChrome-example.css” which you can Save-As to userchrome.css and make use of that. And, that previous link on the profile directory offers some tips on where your profile directory is located; that information is fine, though you may find it just as easy to just search your drive — starting from C:\Documents and Settings\ — for “userChrome-example.css”.

I felt better after getting those Firefox bits in order, and I then came across a WordPress plugin which also looked helpful. Gregory Wild-Smith wrote a plugin called Twilight AutoSave which “uses cookies and JavaScript to save the data you are typing and allow you to restore it (or delete it) later”. With that and the Firefox goodies in place, I should have a lesser chance of losing my posts next time. Not that I’m going to tempt fate, but I do have some peace of mind about it now.

That was the case with the April 16th check-in for some “Tree widget refactoring” (whatever that means) which busted a couple things. In particular, Firefox would crash when entering text in an input field. And since that’s a fairly common thing to do, the daily Firefox builds were virtually unusable. Sure, there was a workaround where you could prevent the crash if you turned off form-autocomplete, but I’d rather stick with an older build than turn that off.

So, for the next two-and-a-half weeks, I just stuck with my April 15th build (without the bug) until they finally fixed this in yesterday’s builds (why it took so long, I have no idea). In any case, today’s builds are back to normal and better than ever — URL bar autocomplete is now available. Though I haven’t tried it yet, this should mean that the URL bar can be configured to autocomplete as-you-type (like Mozilla) in addition to presenting the usual list of likely matches.

In other Firefox news, the Flash Click to View XPI has been updated (and it’s now called Flashblock). The basic functionality is still the same — Flashblock adds a placeholder over any Flash content which can then be activated by clicking on it. And, while older Flashblock versions used just a gray box for the placeholder, the current placeholders have a more polished look which includes the background color of surrounding elements. In case I’ve explained this poorly, there’re also screenshots.

Now you can have your Flash and eat it too. As a spin-off from bug 94035 (“Allow blocking of any media type”), Jesse Ruderman wrote some code to cover Flash elements with a “Click to Play” box. And, from there Ted Mielczarek packaged that into a handy XPI browser extension for Mozilla & Firefox.

Once installed, each Flash element in a page will be covered with an unobtrusive gray box labeled “Click to Play”. If you want to view that Flash, just click the box. I’ve found that this browser extension makes Flash much more palatable since I only view the Flash elements that I want to see. And, because it installs to your profile directory, you don't have to reinstall it each time you upgrade Mozilla.

And, next to each day’s listing are links to processor-specific builds. In order to save some space, he makes use of some acronyms, but there’s a section which goes over all those. The key is to match up your processor’s special features (such as SSE) with the build that offers those.

If you’re not sure which features your processor has, Neil mentions that AIDA 32 will check your processor and figure that out for you. AIDA probably works fine, though I prefer WCPUID for that kind of thing — it’s a processor-focused utility and all the information you need is right on the first screen.

In the FAQ, Jesse also includes a quick-reference to match up which build is fastest for your processor:

So which optimized build should I get if my processor is X?

• P2: G6 is fastest
• P3: G6 SSE is fastest
• P4: G7 SSE2 is fastest
• Celeron: Depends on whether your Celeron is P2-based, P3-based, or P4-based.
• Athlon XP: G7 may be faster than G7 SSE even though SSE is supported

Yeah, those acronyms may seem a bit obtuse for now, but it’s fairly straightforward once you’re looking at the list of builds for the day. And, apparently, the results can be quite dramatic:

Still with me? Good, because if you follow the above you may make yourself very, very happy. This optimized build is insanely fast — probably the fastest browser I’ve ever used. New tabs open instantly, menus appear as soon as you click on them, and page rendering is noticeably faster. If you’re willing to spend a few minutes trying to find a build that works best with your computer, then you’ll be thanking yourself in future.

If I had a halfway-decent processor, I’d try some of these optimized builds for sure ;). As it is, I have just an Athlon 700 in my box and about the only thing it supports are MMX and 3DNow, neither of which appear in specialized builds. To be fair, I may give a G6-optimized build a chance, as that one has rather lenient optimization that doesn’t completely require a modern processor.