If you are like many peo­ple online you are prob­a­bly using Mozilla’s Fire­fox as your web browser of choice. If you aren’t using Fire­fox then this post won’t directly related to you. How­ever if you are… read on.

Do you save pass­words to fre­quently vis­ited web­sites in Fire­fox with this dia­logue drop down menu?

If so, do you uti­lize the Fire­fox mas­ter pass­word, which can be set here:

I would greatly advise using a mas­ter pass­word. By doing this you are pro­tect­ing your­self from some­one walk­ing up to your com­puter and log­ging into a web­site with those saved pass­words, as Fire­fox will prompt you for this mas­ter pass­word dur­ing a ses­sion of Fire­fox or after your com­puter wakes from sleep. This is the first step to amp­ing up secu­rity on your mac. How­ever, not hav­ing a mas­ter pass­word allows any­one who can gain access to your com­puter the abil­ity to copy and view ALL of your pass­words. Let me repeat that. If you don’t have a mas­ter pass­word set, some­one else can go on your com­puter and look at all your passwords.

This is sim­ple done by click­ing on the Saved Pass­words from the above screen and then click­ing the show pass­words as shown below. If you don’t have a mas­ter pass­word set, Fire­fox will dis­play all pass­words, but if you do have a mas­ter pass­word set, then Fire­fox will ask for the pass­word before doing so.

I highly advise that you make sure you have a Mas­ter Pass­word set in Fire­fox, oth­er­wise if your com­puter or even your hard drive falls out of your pos­ses­sion you are at great risk.

Per­son­ally I always have main­tained a mas­ter pass­word, that is until I began using the app, 1Password, which we will cover in a future post.

Happy Birth­day to the Mouse.

The com­puter mouse turns 40 via Macworld.

Stay tuned for our favorite mice used by us here at About This Mac

If you like to twit­ter (What is twit­ter?) on occa­sion and would like to be noti­fied when­ever there’s a new post up on About This Mac, hit up this link and click follow.

We prob­a­bly won’t use it for much more than just new con­tent noti­fi­ca­tions, at least for now. So if you’re already sub­scribed to the RSS feed then you’re prob­a­bly good to go.

For those of you that have a white mac­book and have had it for any length of time will notice the dis­col­oration of the palm rests. What once was a bright clean white mac­book as turned to a rather ugly look­ing colour. This can be an issue when you are show­ing off your amaz­ing Mac­book to your PC using friends. If you are like me you tried to use a vari­ety of clean­ers, windex, etc to clean it, all of which did noth­ing to solve the prob­lem. One of the best solu­tions is to go pick up a MR.CLEAN Magic Eraser. You will want to turn off the com­puter when you do this. Then apply the Damp Magic Eraser to the affected areas and wipe clean with a sec­ond cloth so as to remove the chem­i­cals and to dry it off. This should do the trick. Check out this before and after shot.