The first thing you will want to do is check for updates for your add-ons.  You can easily do this in the latest version of Firefox by clicking the Firefox button and then click Add-ons. This will open up the Add-ons Manager.  Next, select the gear button at the top and select, “Check for Updates”. Firefox will then search for and download any updates that are available automatically. Restart the browser when asked, and you should be good to go.

If the add-on has been simply disabled (Firefox sometimes does this with add-ons that were added by another program) you should be able to simply re-enable the add-on in question.

1. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button and then click Add-ons. The Add-ons Manager tab will open.
2. In the Add-ons Manager tab, select the Extensions panel.
3. Click the Enable button next to the add-on you’d like to re-enable.

Know of any more fixes?  Be sure to leave them in the comments!  Hope this helps you the next time you find your favorite add-ons are not working in Firefox.

Backing up and restoring your bookmarks in Firefox is a pretty easy thing to do.  However, did you know that Firefox has a way you can rollback to a previous day’s bookmark backup?  This can save you a lot of heartache if you have accidently deleted a folder of useful bookmarks and you need to get them back in a hurry.

The first thing you will want to do is open up the Bookmark Library, by going to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks in Firefox’s menu toolbar.  You can also press Ctrl+Shift+B to bring it up too.

Next, click on Import and Backup. Move the mouse down to where it says "Restore" and you will see the collection of bookmark backups the Firefox has stored locally for you.  To roll your bookmarks back to one of these days, simply select the date you want to roll back to.

Now, the next time you are in a pinch with your bookmarks – and you need to quickly restore thing to the way they were, you can do so with this quick bookmark restoring tip.

Although the feature might not get as much love as others, the Live Bookmarks function of Firefox is one to be admired. Live Bookmarks can deliver you the most recent updates to you from any website, right in Firefox.  This is done through the magic of RSS (really simple syndication) and the Firefox browser.  So how can you set up a Live Bookmark and what exactly are they good for?  Let me walk you through the process.

Find the RSS Feed

First, you need to visit a website that has an RSS feed.  Lets use Firefox Facts as our example, because I can always use a few more subscribers.  Click the orange RSS icon, next to the star in the address toolbar.

Subscribe Using the Live Bookmarks Function

Next, you will find yourself on the default RSS page in Firefox. Firefox uses it’s own styling for this page, because if they didn’t – it would just look like a jumbled mess of XML code to most people. On the drop down menu (next to “Subscribe to this feed using”) I want you to select Live Bookmark.

Save Your New Live Bookmark

Firefox will ask you where you want to save the new Live Bookmark and what do you want to call it.  We will just stick it on the Bookmarks Toolbar for now.  This can be moved around like any other bookmark in Firefox, so not too worried about messing this up. Hit the button labeled “Subscribe” to continue.

Using Your New Live Bookmark

There you have it.  Your Live Bookmark has been created.  The idea here is to give you all the recent posts from an RSS feed so that you can easily browse recent articles all from one simple bookmark.  Let us look at the Live Bookmark we just created.

When you click on it, it will show you the ten most recent posts from Firefox Facts, will let you visit the Firefox Facts website directly or will give you the option to open all these recent posts in new tabs.

So there you have it – this is how and why you might want to use the Live Bookmark feature from within Firefox.

Want to export your bookmarks to a .html file?  You can in Firefox with just a few clicks of the mouse.  This can come in handy when it comes to syncing your bookmarks with another browser, backing up or moving from PC to PC.  Mozilla has made the import and backup options in Firefox brain dead simple.

First, you will want to go to Bookmarks and then Organize Bookmarks from within the Firefox Menu toolbar.  That will open up the Bookmark Library.  From within there, click on Import and Backup and then Export HTML…

When you do, you will get a kind of “save this file as…” screen pop-up where the default name of the exported file will be bookmarks.html.  Select the location you wish to save the file to, and then hit the Save button.

There you have it.  You now have a picture perfect backup of your Firefox bookmarks.  Hope this basic tutorial comes in handy – and if you have any other bookmark exporting tips you would like to share – be sure to do so in the comments.

By default, Firefox has a pretty good pop-up blocker.  It gets the job done.  Sometimes, it does too good of a job and blocks a pop-up on a webpage where you want to see a pop-up though.  Today, I will be showing you how to allow pop-ups for a certain domain from within Firefox.

To access the pop-up blocker settings, from the menu toolbar go to Tools and then Options. Next, you want to select the Content panel.

Beside where it says, “Block pop-up windows” click on the button labeled Exceptions.  This will give you a list of sites that you want to allow to display pop-ups.

From here you can:

• Allow: Click this to add a website to the exceptions list.
• Remove Site: Click this to remove a website from the exceptions list.
• Remove All Sites: Click this to remove all of the websites in the exceptions list.

This can also be a good way to unapprove a website you have mistakenly allowed to display pop-ups too.

So, there you have it.  Now you know how to give a website permission to display pop-up windows, or take that permission away.  Now, in a perfect world businesses and websites would do away with the annoying pop-ups all together.  Until then though, this work around should do the trick.  Hope this helps those of you looking for a solution to let Firefox display pop-ups.

With that in mind, I thought it might be handy to guide you through the process when it comes to adding a new Persona theme to your browser, removing a Persona theme from your browser, and how to chance through Persona themes – once you have several saved to your system.

How Do You Install a Firefox Persona?

If you are using Firefox 3.6 or above, the options for Personas should be built into the browser.  Here is how you can grab your own Firefox Persona to use in Firefox.

Go to the Personas page on the Firefox Add-ons web site or the Personas Gallery.

Next, browser around the web site until you find a Persona you would like to use in your own Firefox browser.  Notice that as you hover over the thumbnail previews, your Firefox browser will change to show you what that Persona would look like.

Click on the Persona you would like to use, and go check out the official page for that specific Persona.  For example, here is the page for the Superman logo Persona shown above:

• Superman Logo Firefox Persona

To install that specific Persona for Firefox, click the orange, “Wear this Persona” button.

Once you do so, the Persona will be installed – and you will get a message come up in the browser telling you it has been installed, and giving you the option to undo or go to your manage themes settings.

You are now done.  Your new Persona for Firefox has been installed and is ready to decorate your browser till you change it again.

How Can You Uninstall a Firefox Persona?

Uninstalling Firefox Personas is as easy as installing them.  From Firefox’s Menu Bar, select Tools and then Add-ons.  Once that comes up, you want to go to the “Themes” tab. Both Firefox themes and Personas will now be displayed here.

Click on the Firefox Persona you wish to uninstall, and click the “Uninstall” button. You will be asked to verify the uninstall, and then it will be gone for good.  You can also switch to a different Persona you have downloaded by clicking on that Persona from this screen, and selecting “Use Theme”.

Get More Personas Help: Other Personas Tips, Articles and Tutorials!

The master password in Firefox is used to add another layer of security to your password system.  What would happen though if you setup a master password, got in an accident, were in a coma for six months, and then once you awoke you couldn’t remember what your master password was set to?  I’ll help you reset or recover your Firefox master password with one simple tool.

Recover the Firefox Master Password with FireMaster

FireMaster claims to be the first ever tool built to recover the lost master password in Firefox.  In all honesty, you are really hacking yourself – because the tool uses a combination of techniques such as dictionary, hybrid and brute force to recover the master password from the Firefox key database file.  Desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures.

You can pick up your own version of the digital download here.

Resetting the Master Password in Firefox

When you reset the master password in Firefox, you will remove all the stored password information – so that is not a very good route to go, if you really need that login information back. 

With that warning said – point your browser towards:

chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul

Copy and paste that into your address bar, then hit the Enter key. upon doing so you will be asked if you really want to reset the master password, and remove your stored information, passwords, private keys and more.  Click the Reset button to reset the Firefox master password for good.

So there you have two route to take next time you awake from your own six month coma. The best route of all to take would be do not forget your password, but if your finding this from a Google search – it might be too late for sage words.

Navigation Bar Keyboard Shortcuts

Choose Your OS: Windows | Linux | Mac OS

Alt + Left Arrow or Ctrl + [ = Go Back a Page

Alt + Right Arrow or Ctrl + ] = Go Forward a Page

Alt + Home = Go to your Homepage

F5 or Ctrl + R = Reload a Page

Esc = Stop a Page from Loading

Ctrl + P = Bring up the Print Options

Ctrl + Y = Launch the Download Window

Ctrl + H = Open Your History in the Sidebar

Ctrl + B = Open Your Bookmarks in the Sidebar

Ctrl + T = New Tab

Ctrl + N = New Browser Window

Ctrl + X = Cut

Ctrl + C = Copy

Ctrl + V = Paste

As a bonus, here are a few of my other favorite keyboard combos that you might want to memorize.

• Ctrl + F5 or Ctrl + Shift + R = Reload the Page (overriding the cache)
• Ctrl + F = Find (then use F3 to find again)
• Alt + (1-8) = Select a Specific Tab (if you have eight or less open)

Have a favorite that didn’t make it onto the list?  Leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.

The Traditional Way

The way you usually uninstall add-ons from Firefox is to go to Tools and then Add-ons from the menu bar.  In the next Window, you should see your extensions (if not, hit the “Extensions” tab at the top).  Now click on the one you wish to remove, and hit the button labeled “Uninstall”.  You can do this several times if you need to get rid of several add-ons.  Now, simply restart Firefox and your add-on in question should be removed.

Try Removing the Add-on via Safe Mode

Close out Firefox, and start up using Firefox’s safe mode.  Try to use the traditional steps above then to remove the addon that is bugging you.

Checkout Add/Remove Programs

This might change some (depending on what version of Windows you are using) but these general directions should get you to the right spot.  Click on the start menu (or windows globe) and go to the control panel.  From there, you want to go to the “Add/Remove Programs” settings.  Scroll down this list and see if you see the extension in question here that you can not remove via Firefox.  Some toolbars and add-ons install themselves here, rather than the traditional add-ons menu from inside of Firefox.

Last (but not least) Remove the Add-on Manually

You can also remove add-ons manually, but I would leave this as a last resort.  You will need to navigate to your Firefox profile folder.  Once you make it there, look for a folder called “extensions”.  Inside of that folder, you will see more folders with names that look like random ‘bit of text thrown together.  Each folder represents an extension that has been installed. Go through each folder, and look for install.rdf.  Open that up in your standard notepad program and it should tell you the name of the extension you are looking at.  If you can’t find it, search the install.rdf for the phrase “em:name”.  After that, the name of the extension should be given.  You may also find a few themes inside this folder too.  Once you find an install.rdf that matches that addon you want to remove, you can delete that extensions entire folder.

As you noticed, this pretty much covered things for the Windows people to some extent.  If any Apple or Linux fans want to let me know how they do things, please drop in a comment and share with the group!

In the address bar, type in about:config, and then hit enter.

At the warning, click the button that says, “I’ll be careful, I promise!”.  Now you are ready to do some configuration changes.  We want to setup a new option though, so right-click anywhere inside of the about:config screen and then go to New > Integer.

For the preference name type in:

browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds

Now, for the value, you will need to add your time up by seconds.  For example, if you wanted it to be reloaded every two minutes you would type in 120 (because there are 120 seconds in two minutes).  The smallest number you can put in here is 60 seconds.  If you put in anything lower, Firefox will slap you in the face – and then say, “Oh yeah, you wanted to put in ’60′ right?”.

You can also reload a Live Bookmark manually to by right-clicking it and choosing “Reload Live Bookmark”.  However that isn’t nearly as fun as diving into about:config.