Firefox

So I tried playing a video on Netflix in Firefox and while everything worked including the previews while hovering over a title, the actual movie/TV episode failed to play and resulted in the following error:

Playback Error Code: F7701-1003

The main thing that needs to be done is to enabled DRM support in Firefox's preferences section. (Look for a checkbox titled "Play DRM-controlled content".)

I accidentally unpinned my Windows 7 Firefox taskbar icon. While I was able to re-add it easily enough, clicking it to open FF resulting in a duplicate icon being spawned which was where FF was opened. I had to google a bit to find a fix and here it is:

My windows machine is running off a bum drive and seeing as to how HDD prices are temporarily ridiculously high at the moment, I've decided to attempt a few workarounds to see if I can continue to use this erratically faulty drive for a couple of more months. The issue with the drive is in itself unknown. It just locks up suddenly with the HDD LED continuously on. Windows continues to be active for a while, but not terribly responsive. Sometimes, the issue sorts itself out after a while. Other times, the system reboots.

If you're a firefox user (and usually, also a programmer), you've very likely come across situations where you are confronted with an error page while accessing an https address, because the certificate is self-signed. Getting around it involves adding an exception, which requires a multitude of steps ...

If you, like me, are not fond of the new Veoh interface, this post is probably of interest to you. Veoh's new Web X.0 interface sucks eggs esp. with respect to its search functionality, but, thankfully, considering the large number of users with IE6, the old interface can still be accessed if you are one of the lucky (?) users who still have IE on their systems or if you set up your browser to identify itself as IE6 by modifying the user-agent string.

To modify the user-agent ...

I'm pretty sure most people are aware of the huge amount of content available on sites like YouTube, Megavideo etc., and of the existence of hangers-on sites such as Keepvid, Clip Nabber etc. as well that let you leech the FLV files directly. Furthermore, I'm also sure that you've noticed many of these leech sites not working more often than not nowadays.

I've been something of a fanboy of Opera for a long while now. It's quick-loading, has strong caching and doesn't hog memory like Firefox used to. However, with FF cleaning up house for its 3.x family, by fixing all those memory leaks, improving performance by leaps and bounds and introducing those little features (page zooming for e.g.) that make things ever so friendlier, I'm of a mind to switch back to it.

Firebug, the extremely popular add-on for Firefox is indispensable when it comes to debugging CSS issues. However, with the last update to Firefox, trying to inspect the CSS rules for an anchor element failed.

Issue: The update to Firefox 2.0.0.12 broke something.

(What an attention seeking title :S)

I find it highly annoying when Firefox allows certain pop-ups to open when I click on form elements such as textfields etc. I also find it highly annoying when it allows windows to resize the browser - nothing like clicking a link and the next second finding the browser in a minuscule rectangle on the top left of your screen. While I'm at it, I also dislike websites using the "_blank" attribute to force a link to load in a new window.

The following are the steps to rectify this:

Tor is an open source project that allows users to utilise the Internet anonymously through the use of something along the lines of distributed proxies - the Onion router network. Privoxy is more of a local web proxy that, when configured correctly, can protect your privacy by filtering such information at the source. Together they are an effective and user-friendly (but not necessarily perfect) solution to preserving your anonymity on the Internet.