a4apphack

Mozilla Firefox considerably a fast browser but the more we use it the more slower it will become, this includes a great reduction in the start time. The reason is fragmentation of profile databases. A free tool SpeedyFox is designed specially to resolve that problem.

Using Speedyfox is easy.

1. Download SpeedyFox
2. Run the program and click on ‘Speed Up My Firefox’ button, thats it!

TIP! : For Portable Firefox Users

1. Choose Custom from the Profile dropdown.
2. Browse to ‘PortableFirefox\Data\profiledir’ on your portable drive
3. Now Click on the ‘Speed Up My Firefox’ button

Download SpeedyFox :

Go To SpeedyFox Homepage

In the previous post, Secfox Part 1, we had seen how to customize the environment in FireFox to get better ease of use and more workspace. Now its time to fill in the addons.

This post has two sections, the first explains how to obtain details of any website (Information Gathering) and the second deals with analysis and understanding of HTTP raw header information.

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SecFox is nothing but a customized version of Firefox which is intended for performing web application security tests and audits. Using SecFox reduces time and effort we would have put if we had used any other browser along with tons of free + commercial tools used for testing the apps.

Firefox is an amazing browser whose features can be extended by installing addons or tweaking the browser itself. This feature of it is utilized to the max for building a powerful hacking/testing tool, SecFox.

This articles(split into sections) details the process of creating SecFox and also includes the usage of various security related firefox addons with relevant examples and screencasts.
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This post talks about utilizing faviconize tab extension with other greasemonkey scripts and addons to effectively reduce the cluttering due to too many tabs in your firefox. Free yourselves from the tabs panic.

Note : You need to install Faviconize Tab before you proceed with following the below mentioned addons.

If you have faviconize tabs installed and know about it, then skip to Faviconize All Tabs Section

Faviconize Tabs

Faviconize Tab is a wonderful addon which can be helpful for the users who browse heavily with firefox. This addon provides an option to reduce the size of the tab to the favicon of the site reducing clutter.

Before Faviconize

After Faviconize

Download page for Faviconize Tab :

Faviconize All Tabs

I love using Faviconize Tabs and was thinking why is this not a default firefox feature and why in the world would I need to see ‘Site Name – Some Crap Text‘ (Like ‘Gmail – Inbox(3123) – xxx@gmail.com‘) in the tab title to know that its gmail’s tab, if I can simply understand that it is the tab for gmail from the favicon displayed in the tab.

So we can faviconize each tab and keep it simple. But the prob is, every time I have to faviconize any tab, I need to right click and select faviconize and I have to repeat for all the tabs… Is it so? Not really..

Go to Faviconize Preferences and in the Auto Faviconize, put ‘*’ as wildcard. Now every tab you open will be faviconized

Gmail FavIcon Alerts 3

But now you might ask me that the long title in the tab, Gmail – Inbox (No of Unread Messages), is very useful. Atleast you can get to know if you get a new mail, which is not possible with a faviconized tab. But there is an useful greasemonkey script which displays unread count in the tab and also the incoming chat indication in the tab…

Unread Messages

No Unread Message

Incoming Chat

Download Page :

GReader FavIcon Alerts

So what about Google Reader? Fortunately we have something for that too…

Unread Message Count

Unread Message greater than 1K

Download Page :

NOTE: You need GreaseMonkey installed to setup the above to scripts

Tree tabs

So you dont like the tabs on the top or do you think that you need to know from whether you opened this page (Parent page)? Then treetabs is there for you…  Its self explanatory, check the screenshot.

Download page :

Faviconize tabs +(Gmail +Greader) Favicon Alerts +Tree Tabs =  Ultimate Clutter Reduction in Firefox…

To classify the feeds subscribed at Google reader, based on certain rules, Google Reader Filter can be used. Its a simple GreaseMonkey script for Firefox, which means we don’t need to install any addons to activate it. Once this script is installed we can specify the conditions based on which the highlight/exclusion is applied.

Refresh Google Reader and click on filter settings button on the right top and enter your rules in plain text. For specifying advanced rules, few of the RegEx chars can be used.

* Here Trial|Shareware|Demo|Adware in the Excludes section implies that any one of the keyword match from the four specified will exclude (greys out) that post

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After uninstalling any software which had temporarily installed for testing purpose, will leave some traces in our PC as registry modifications or in the form of flat files in the OS folders. These unwanted files consumes disk space and might ultimately slow down our PC. WhatChanged is a tiny tool which is a must have for people who install and uninstall softwares frequently.

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While trying to extract large files (say in GBs) with 7zip (Or any compression tools) and you don’t have enough space in your C drive (or whereever your OS is installed), you might probably notice something like this….

And what you do is clear the temp files or search for some less important applications which you can uninstall. But you would ultimately fail by not finding the required space. The solution is to change the working folder used by 7zip. By default the working folder will be the root drive where OS is installed.

Change the temp folder is easy, Open Options from Tools Menu and select Plugins tab, now click Options and then Folders tab. Now change the temp folder as shown below.

And commandline options for geeks, the command is

7z x _FiletoExtract_ w_WorkingDir_ o_OutputFolder_

x : Denotes extract
w : Working Folder/Temp Folder (e.g. wD:\tmp\)
o : Output Folder (e.g oD:\Files\)

For more options check here

Note: Changing tempdir is not the feature available only in 7Zip, but its mentioned here because 7Zip is the most popular archivial tools available in the market.

Some of us use Truecrypt for storing our files in an isolated partition and might be less concerned on its security (Update: check the details at the end of this post). For example, my thumbdrive has a single encrypted file created with Truecrypt which I always mount it in W: drive, which helps me to run many of the non-portable apps in portable mode. Another possible reason, to sync various frequently used folders between different PC’s by creating a truecrypt volume and transferring only a single file so that you never missing anything while syncing and the copy can be done whole lot quicker.

But it will be a tedious and boring task to repeatedly follow a sequence of steps to get your volume mounted. But we can find out a simple solution for this…

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Zorro is a tiny app (less than 100KB) which blacks out the unwanted portion your screen helping you to remove any distractions from your screen. This can be useful while playing online games or watching YouTube videos where you would want to concentrate only on what you are looking at.

Zorro ScreenMask in Action

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AppKeys is a suit of applications built based on AHK scripting language which can be invoked by using various keyboard shortcuts. The shortcuts can be modified by editing the ahk scripts. Running this ahk file will consume very less amount of memory and can run each command almost instantaneously. This suite of apps replaces dozens of applications which needs to be installed otherwise to do the same operations.

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