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.

Mikul asks:

Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been run­ning really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not run­ning any­thing. Also, the bat­tery has been last­ing for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?

One thing you can check is the activ­ity mon­i­tor (if you use spot­light and search for Activ­ity Mon­i­tor). Change the lit­tle box up top to say “All Processes” and then sort the list by the CPU option. Chances are some­thing like Safari or Fire­fox is run­ning really high and when you’re shut­ting the lid to put it to sleep, that process is still run­ning even though you think it’s not, which is why the bat­tery isn’t last­ing as long as it used to. If it’s a pro­gram that you rec­og­nize (i.e. Safari, Fire­fox, iTunes) you can select it and choose the stop sign look­ing but­ton that says “Quit Process” and it will fully kill that program/application.

Click here to con­tinue read­ing about how to fix a loud fan/low bat­tery combo

I really like Fire­fox 3 and have always used it as my default web browser on both the Mac and PC plat­form. How­ever, the way that Fire­fox han­dles PDF files is some what of an annoy­ance. If you are like me you too will find it rather odd then that when in Fire­fox and you click on a web link to a PDF file it will auto­mat­i­cally down­load the file and then open the PDF up in Apple’s default Preview.app. Now the eas­i­est way to solve this prob­lem is the go ahead and start using Safari. How­ever, one of the rea­son I use Fire­fox is for the amount of add-ons, exten­sions and cus­tomiza­tion you can do in it. So as usual their is a Fire­fox exten­sion which adds this fea­ture. (I believe their is an exten­sion for pretty much every­thing) This sim­ple exten­sion adds the abil­ity to view PDFs directly into Fire­fox. You can down­load the Fire­fox exten­sion here.

Google has (finally?) added video and voice chat capa­bil­i­ties to their gmail ser­vice. To enable the ser­vice, just visit this site and down­load and install the plu­gin. You’ll have to quit your browser once it’s down­loaded before you can install it — but don’t worry, it will prompt you if you acci­dently leave Fire­fox open.

Then, it’s just a mat­ter of wait­ing for one of your con­tacts to have installed it them­selves so you can try it out!

You can tell one of your con­tacts has the video plu­gin installed because they’ll have a lit­tle video cam­era icon by their name in your con­tact list like this: