1. The first task is to create a user for our test version of Firefox. Click on the System (Gnome Menu) -> Administration -> Users and Groups.
2. Click on Add User.
3. Type in ‘fftest’ for the user name and choose a password. Then, click OK.
4. Fire up a terminal, su into your new user and go to your home directory by typing the following commands.
   

   su fftest
   cd ~

5. Download Firefox 3.0b2:
   

   wget http://ftp-mozilla.netscape.com/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0b2/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2

6. Extract the archive.
   

   tar -jxvf firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2

7. Type in this command to tell Firefox not to use an existing session.
   

   export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1

8. Start Firefox
   

   ./firefox/firefox

9. If you get an error like this…
   

   Xlib: connection to “:0.0″ refused by server
   Xlib: No protocol specified

   (firefox-bin:5160): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

   …that means that you need to let the ‘fftest’ user launch applications that interface with the current GUI. In order to do that, you will need to fire up a new terminal that is under your desktop user, and type in the following command:

   xhost +local:fftest

   Then start Firefox again.

   ./firefox/firefox

10. You should now see the Firefox start page.
    
    This Firefox session is completely independent from your current version, you can run them side-by-side.
    
    
11. Repeat steps 7-10 to run Firefox 3.0b2 in the future. When you are done testing, just delete the user ‘fftest’.

If you find any issues or problems with this tutorial, please contact me or post a comment.  I always want to ensure that I’m posting accurate instructions.
Reference: http://www.captain.at/firefox-run-different-versions.php

Method 1: Plus Addressing

Plus addressing is a method that allows you to attach additional text to your email address. For example, if your email is you@example.com, you can also use you+test@example.com or you+anystring@example.com. When you register on websites, make a sort string that represents that site. Keep a list if you need help keeping track. Then, if you start getting spam on that email, block it, and then send a nasty letter to that webmaster because you know they were giving away your email address to spammers.

The good news is that this feature is already enabled if you can use it. You just have to know if you can. The best way to know is to just try it. Try sending yourself a test email and see if you receive it. I know this method works with Gmail users.

Method 2: Default Address on Your Own Domain

If method 1 doesn’t work for you, I will admit method 2 is a bit more of a long shot, but it works just as well. What you will need is your own domain (works for people with their own website).

I will give you instructions on how to do it using cPanel, but I’m sure it works in other environments.

1. If your domain name is example.com, create a master email address. Do not share this one. (we will say master@example.com for this example)
2. Now create a subdomain (email.example.com for our little tutorial).
3. Find “Default Address” under your Mail options on your site’s control panel. You will see that unrouted mail sent to your subdomain will fail and bounce.
4. Click the “Set Default Address” link and set the default address for your new subdomain to go to that master email address that you created.
5. Now, your email is anything@master.example.com where “anything” is anything you want.

Same goes for the plus addressing. Set your email address for each of the websites you register at. Now you know who’s spamming you and can easily block them.

How They Do It

As we all know, people have a choice of what browser they want to use when surfing the Internet. Those include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Netscape Navigator, and many others. When each browser surfs the Internet, the browser sends its User Agent to the server before it receives the page. This is so the server knows what browser and platform the user is on in case it needs to format the page specially for that browser. For example, my User Agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.6 (Ubuntu-feisty)

From that I can determine that my operating system is Linux (for the i686 processor), but more importantly for this topic, I am using Firefox version 2.0.0.6. With this information, they are able to determine what browser you have and serve you the appropriate page, or might decide they don’t want to serve you the page at all.

Is it right?

To put it bluntly, no. In my opinion, it is never right to block a visitor based on the browser they are using.

Effects on site:
Obviously, you are cutting a portion of the Internet users from your site. Most people would take all the traffic they can get, so blocking a browser would be an example of turning away traffic – which is bad.

Effects on end user:
Look at it from an end-user’s standpoint. Do you really want to open up your Firefox browser only to find that it’s blocked because of stupid add-ons that Firefox does not even endorse? Then open IE and go to another site where you are blocked again because they say IE doesn’t follow standards? And finally using Opera on another site, but your blocked yet again because they took the name of the webmaster’s second daughter? No Internet end-user is going to want to have half a dozen browsers open at once just because of the webmaster’s personal preference on what they think their visitors should use to view their site.

Conclusion

I have considered blocking IE once because of all the extra work it takes getting the site to work in IE, but I later realized that it’s not the visitors fault, and it will be them that will be going through the inconvenience of switching to a different browser. They will most likely leave the site and never come back.

1. Web Developer – This is a toolbar that provides tons of extra information on the web page as well as tools that allow you to disable JavaScript, meta redirects, CSS, and more.
2. del.icio.us Bookmarks – I use this instead of Firefox’s bookmarks because I can access these from any computer.
3. DownThemAll! – This allows you to download everything on the page with one click.  That could be all images, all exe’s, all mp3′s, anything you and your knowledge of reg expressions can do!
4. User Agent Switcher – Use this to get into areas that might otherwise block you.
5. Adblock Plus – Regardless of all the bloggers & webmasters that are against it, I still use it. 90% of the ads out there are annoying…so I block them.
6. CSSViewer – View the CSS properties for each element by simply hovering your mouse over it.
7. Fasterfox – Speed up your browsing.
8. StumbleUpon – WARNING: huge time waster…but soooo cool.
9. Link Alert – This puts a little icon by your cursor when you hover over a link that goes to a file, secure connection, etc.
10. Tabbrowser Preferences – This allows you to tweak how your browser deals with tabs.
11. Screengrab! – Take screenshots of a whole page or any part of it.
12. MeasureIt – Measure the dimensions of anything on the page.
13. Image Zoom – Zom into images.
14. ShowIP – Show the IP(s) of any domain.
15. View Formatted Source – If a site has crappy HTML format, this will make it neat again.
16. View Source Chart – View the source for specific sections of the page.
17. FEBE – Back up all of your extensions so you don’t have to install them one by one again.
18. GooglePreview – See the preview of the sites in the Google search results.

This tutorial is going to be using the Gimp. If you don’t have it, I recommend you go to GIMP’s website and get yourself a copy – it’s free. Since most of you are probably using Windows, go on over to the Windows Installer page to get an easy-to-install bundle.

1. Create a new blank image with the size of 390×700 (390px wide by 700px high). Be sure that you create it with a white background.
   
   
2. We want to make sure that we have the entire image selected, so click on Select > All.
3. Click on Select > Shrink. Insert 2, and click OK.
   This will shrink your selection by 2 pixels.
4. Now, let’s round the corners. Click on Select > Rounded Rectangle. Insert a radius of 8, and leave Concave unchecked. Click OK.
5. Fill in that entire selected area with a gray that suits you. This will be the border.
   
6. Now we are going to shrink the selection again. Click on Select > Shrink. Insert 2, and click OK.
7. Now fill the selection with white. Your image will now look like this.
   
8. Click on Select > Shrink. Insert 4, and click OK.
9. Use the gradient tool to make your favorite background in the currently selected area. Because the whole image won’t be displayed, don’t gradient fill the whole thing. In other words, only make the top 1/4th or so gradient. Here is what mine looked at this point:
   
10. Once you are happy with the background, you can clear the selection, and add your text header and logo if preferred. Once I did that, my image looked like this:
    
11. Now, we are done with that image. Save it as “login-bkg-tile.xcf”. Then save a copy as “login-bkg-tile.gif”.
12. Now, open a new image that is 390×25.
13. Copy the bottom 25 pixels from the first image, and paste it into this image.
    If you copy more than 25px high, that’s OK. Just make the bottom of the pasted layer flush with the bottom of the image, and let the top overflow.
    
14. We are done with that image. Save it as “login-bkg-bottom.xcf”. Then save a copy as “login-bkg-bottom.gif”.
15. Now, go to your server and open the (wordpress_dir)/wp-admin/images directory.
16. Backup login-bkg-tile.gif and login-bkg-bottom.gif by saving them to your local computer.
17. Upload the new images to that location.
18. Your done! You may have to clear your browser’s cache to view the new page.
    Be sure to keep a local copy of these images! You will have to re-upload them every time you upgrade WordPress.

Here are my original .xcf files of my login images.

wordpress-images.zip

First, I don’t understand that the owner of whyfirefoxisblocked.com thinks that Mozilla is responsible for the extension and actually encourages people to contact Mozilla about it. Here’s the reality to that false statement, taken from Mozilla’s site:

“Mozilla is providing links to these applications as a courtesy, and makes no representations regarding the applications or any information related there to. Any questions, complaints or claims regarding the applications must be directed to the appropriate software vendor.”

The owner of whyfirefoxisblocked.com carelessly states that Mozilla is responsible, which Mozilla states they are not on the extension page itself.

Why Blocking Firefox Doesn’t Work

Let me start of my reasoning with two major flaws that applies to most every type of filter – honest people are offended by it, and the target people get around it. In this case somebody using Firefox without Adblock will not get the right to use their browser on the sites they want, and the people that do use Adblock can easily get around the filter by changing their user agent. That in inself is reason enough not to block all traffic from that browser.

Also, the people all for blocking FF apparently did not notice that Adblock Pro is available for MS Internet Explorer as well.

I was blocked! What can I do now?

If you were blocked just from using Firefox, don’t worry, they can’t really keep you out. The first thing you need to do is download the User Agent Switcher. Then, after restarting your browser, click on Tools > User Agent Switcher > Internet Explorer (or other browser if you wish). That’s it, you’re in!

If you want to make it more interesting, I suggest you get more creative with your user agent when browsing these specific sites. Change your user agent to say something like “IUseABP_YouCantBlockMe”, or maybe link to this article or others that are out there. Be creative and let these site owners know that they can’t block us!

UPDATE (Aug 24): It would seem that Danny Carlton of JackLewis.net has found a tricky way to detect weather if the browser is IE or not by using a JavaScript method, but don’t worry. It took me all of 30 seconds to figure out how to get around that, too. Along with setting your custom user agent, you will also have to download the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Once you install that and restart your browser, click on the Disable button on the toolbar and disable JavaScript & Meta Redirects. That will prevent him from redirecting you to the inaccurate “I Hate Firefox” page and also keep you from being redirected to his “you must enable JavaScript so I can redirect you to my ‘I Hate Firefox’ page”.

Using my methods, you can access these sites using Firefox (Screenshot 1) as well as Internet Explorer with Adblock Pro (Screenshot 2).

If ads are blocked on my site, how am I supposed to pay the expenses?

Well there are a couple of methods to either getting your ads noticed or earning revenue some other way.

• Kindly ask people to disable it on your site, and only use non-intrusive ads.
  Pretty much the only ads I don’t mind seeing are Google’s text ads. They are non-intrusive and are relevant to the page. If you, the site owner, assure me that your ads aren’t annoying, I will disable it for your site. The reason I have Adblock running is because I’m tired of seeing banners like the one I posted below. This is my textbook example of “annoying”.
  
• Have paid sponsors and list them as normal links or images.
  Adblock shouldn’t block them as it can’t tell the difference between those and normal links. Plus, it’s probably better for you to take out the middle man and offer ad space yourself. PracticeBoard is one example, and their ads aren’t even blocked on my browser.
• Have a donation button, and say something like “Since you see no ads, how about $5 for the useful information?”
  I pay sites like wunderground.com $10 a year to not show the ads even though I know AdBlock blocks them anyway. I understand they have to eat, too.

So to sum this all up…

Blocking Firefox is fruitless because 1) not all Firefox users use Adblock, and 2) not all Adblock users use Firefox. By blocking Firefox, you show that you don’t know how to design a website that is appealing to your visitors the way it is. I suggest that you, the site owner, take another hard look at your website and take some tips mentioned above in making your ads more appealing and less intrusive.

P.S.

I should also note that a rumor is going around that the site was hacked. Although it would be funny, the original site (whyfirefoxisblocked.com) is alive and well. People were just confusing it with a similar domain, whyisfirefoxblocked.com.

(80410418) Communication with the server failed. A DNS error has occurred.

A friend of mine had that problem on a wireless network a bit ago, and not being a hard core gamer, it wasn’t easy for me to figure out because I’ve never used one of those things before (so sue me).

I had no idea why this error was coming up because it found the DNS servers when it was auto configuring, but it wasn’t working. Since the existing DNS server didn’t work, I decided to change the DNS servers to the ones provided free of charge by OpenDNS. Head on over to their site and write down the server IPs, then go to Sony’s Help Page for help on setting up the network in infrastructure mode if you need help with that.

If that doesn’t work, always remember to Google your error codes as it will almost always lead to a solution.

To reproduce that screen, all you have to do is log into your cPanel account, and click on the change password link. As of 11.8.0, it has that little contradiction. In my humble opinion, you shouldn’t write your passwords down. If you have to store them in something, use an encrypted password storing program.

Editors

Netbeans – All Platforms

All the tools software developers need to create cross-platform Java desktop, enterprise and web applications. Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, as well as Solaris. It is easy to install and use, works right out of the box — and it is open-source and free!

Bluefish – GNU/Linux Only

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.

PSPad – Windows Only

This is one of the nest editors available on the Windows platform.

Notepad2 – Windows Only

Another great text editor for code, etc.

Scintilla – Windows Only

Yet another text editor for Windows and other platforms.

Notepad++ – Windows Only

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

MySQL Tools

phpMyAdmin – All Platforms (PHP & MySQL Required)

phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields, manage privileges,export data into various formats and is available in 52 languages.

MySQL Query Browser – All Platforms

MySQL Query Browser is the easiest visual tool for creating, executing, and optimizing SQL queries for your MySQL Database Server. The MySQL Query Browser gives you a complete set of drag-and-drop tools to visually build, analyze and manage your queries.

MySQL Administrator – All Platforms

MySQL Administrator is a powerful visual administration console that enables you to easily administer your MySQL environment and gain significantly better visibility into how your databases are operating. MySQL Administrator now integrates database management and maintenance into a single, seamless environment, with a clear and intuitive graphical user interface.

File Transfer

gFTP – GNU/Linux

Typical FTP transfer program; comparable to FileZilla. gFTP supports FTP, HTTP, SSH2, and FSP.

Filezilla – All Platforms

This is a powerful FTP client that is way more stable than using IE.

Server Software

Web Developer Server Suite – Windows

I haven’t used this suite itself, but I have used all the included packages on my Linux servers every day. Although this is Windows only, you don’t need something like this to set it up on a *NIX server because of all the package managers available.

Apache – All Platforms

With a market share of over 59%, Apache is the most popular software for serving web pages on the HTTP. Plus, it’s free software!

MySQL – All Platforms

The database system I use every day.

PHP – All Platforms

Web scripting language no server should be without.

PHP Backend Scripts

These scripts do not function on their own. They are to be used in your programming to make it easier and help you to avoid reinventing the wheel.

TinyButStrong

TinyButStrong is a library that enables you to create HTML pages dynamically. It’s a Template Engine for the PHP language. It enables you to easily display information from your database, but also to seriously harmonize and simplify your PHP programming.

htmlMimeMail

This is a PHP class which allows you to easily send email from your PHP scripts with attachments, HTML and embedded images.

lastRSS

This is a simple yet powerful PHP class to parse RSS.

Snoopy

Snoopy is a PHP class that simulates a web browser. It automates the task of retrieving web page content and posting forms, for example.

TextilePHP

TextilePHP is a PHP implementation of the Textile shorthand syntax. Textile is used to create valid (X)HTML output without using HTML markup. It was originally developed by Dean Allen of textism.com, and several different versions (in several different programming languages) have been created.

GeSHi

GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project. GeSHi aims to be a simple but powerful highlighting class.

PHP & MySQL Front-end Scripts

phpBB

Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

WordPress

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Pivot

Pivot is a web-based tool to help you maintain dynamic sites, like weblogs or online journals. Pivot is released under the GPL so it is completely free to use. It is written in PHP, and does not require additional libraries or databases to function.

activeCollab

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free!

Gallery

Gallery gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you’re running a small personal site or a large community site.

MyBackup

Enhance the power of phpMyAdmin’s export feature, and backup your database(s) and web files automatically using scheduled cronjobs. This script is great if you need to regularly backup your database and/or website files to a remote location, too, since you can FTP your backups to another server, or email them.