With the User Account Control enabled by default starting from Windows Vista, installing most software and drivers will prompt the UAC window requesting for permission to copy files into protected areas in your hard drive. The Google Chrome is one of such software that doesn’t require UAC elevation when you install or update it because it is installed in C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local (%LocalAppData%) folder. It is by design that the AppData folder doesn’t require any notification when a change is being made in that folder. As for Firefox, it is installed in Program Files folder and making any changes in that location requires higher permission which is why you get the UAC window prompt.

Starting from Firefox 12, it is capable of installing updates silently without prompting the User Account Control window by using the Mozilla Maintenance Service. If you’ve updated to Firefox 12 from an older version,the Mozilla Maintenance Service will be installed by default and the same goes to the new installation if you selected the Standard setup option. You can find the Mozilla Maintenance Service program (maintenanceservice.exe) installed in the following path C:\Program Files\Mozilla Maintenance Service\ together with an uninstaller (Uninstall.exe).
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Mozilla Firefox has been around for over a decade and has built up a huge following of loyal users in that time. It used to run Internet Explorer close for top Windows web browser but these days has slipped to distant third behind Internet Explorer and more recently Google Chrome. There’s a lot to like about Firefox with the thousands of available add-ons, but also it’s had it’s fair share of problems with various performance and memory related issues over the years.

An area where Firefox fell behind is making the browser a full 64-bit application to work better with 64-bit versions of Windows. A well coded 64-bit application should theoretically perform better and more efficiently than it’s 32-bit counterpart on a 64-bit operating system, usually at the expense of a bit more memory. Internet Explorer has had a 64-bit mode for several years, Chrome also has a version that was released in 2014. Firefox was the only major browser to not have a 64-bit version, until recently.

Since version 42, Firefox has an official 64-bit version that you can download and install instead of the 32-bit version, although it’s currently not available on the main Firefox download page and is a bit hidden away in the Mozilla release pages. With this long awaited release, the question now is, does the 64-bit Firefox perform any better than the 32-bit version?

To find out we’ve put Firefox through a number of well known benchmarks and a few of our own to see what the differences are between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. We’ve included Waterfox which takes the Firefox source code and compiles it with 64-bit optimizations so it should run more efficiently and faster on 64-bit Windows computers. For comparison Firefox Nightly 64-bit has also been included to see if test versions are improving in speed and efficiency.
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The Mozilla Firefox browser has been on quite a fast release schedule for a little while now, and a major new version pops up every six weeks or so. While newer versions generally bring security improvements and bug fixes, they also come up with new features which all adds to the size of the overall application. This can also increase the memory usage and versions today can use quite a bit more memory than those of a year or two ago.

One of Firefox’s great strengths are the thousands of extensions available, and some of the issues you might find with the browsers faster releases are that some of the extensions you use are not updated or fully compatible with the latest version, so you can’t use them until they are. You might also notice that after time and heavy usage, the Firefox databases increase greatly which starts to slow things down, although optimizing Firefox memory and SQLite databases can help, it’s nice to have a fast running and snappy browser.
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Developing a web browser such as Firefox is not as easy as it seems. It requires a team of brilliant programmers to work together putting up an efficient and fast web browser that is free for us to use. For the Firefox web browser, one of the major improvement on performance is having fewer naked files. Since Firefox version 4, a lot of files, especially the javascripts that used to be in the components folder, are being packed into one file called omni.jar and this effectively reduces 30-100x disk I/O. Omni.jar has been renamed to omni.ja since version 10 to prevent Firefox from being corrupted.

This improvement has caused some problems to some users who prefer to modify the core Javascript files for customization instead of using add-ons or extensions. If they’re using an older version of 7-Zip such as 9.20 to open the omni.ja file, 7-Zip will report an error saying “Can not open file omni.ja as archive” although it has been reported that the omni.ja file is actually a ZIP file.

A simple workaround is to rename the omni.ja file extension to .zip and Windows will be able to open and extract the files. They can then modify the files according to their needs, repack them into a ZIP file, and finally rename back the file extension to .ja. Although this method works, it is not recommended due to additional optimization being done on the original omni.ja file which can yield an additional 2-3x reduction in disk I/O.
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One of the very useful features found in the Mozilla Firefox web browser that isn’t implemented in Google Chrome despite many requests over the years is the ability to warn the user when closing the web browser with multiple tabs opened. This feature is very useful because there are times when we tend to accidentally click the X button located at the top right of the window which will terminate the Firefox program. It would be disastrous if one of the tabs has an important webpage that is based on session and cannot be restored by reloading or refreshing the page.

By default, attempting to close Firefox with multiple tabs opened will show a warning “Confirm close” window with the message “You are about to close X tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?”

Clicking the Cancel button will keep Firefox running but if you’ve accidentally unchecked the option “Warn me when I attempt to close multiple tabs“, Firefox will no longer ask for your confirmation and will instantly close the program. In this article we’ll show you how to restore back the warning on exit when multiple tabs exist.
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One of the biggest problems with Firefox that still remains today is it can get terribly slow after using it for a few months or even years. Similar to the Windows operating system that feels fast after a clean installation and then the performance slowly degrades as you use it. This is the same as Firefox where the files in the Firefox profile folder get bigger and it takes longer to process. If you browse a lot of websites everyday and never clear it, chances are you’ll experience frequent and lengthy pauses in Firefox.

This is because the places.sqlite file that is used to store bookmarks, downloads and browsing history has grown to a file size that your hard drive requires more time to process the information in the database. Clearing the browsing history definitely solves the problem but you’d lose all the websites that you’ve visited and also the very convenient autocomplete feature that saves the the trouble of typing the full URL. Another solution is to store the Firefox profile in memory through RAM Disk software to dramatically speed up the processing of sqlite databases by 10 to 20 times.
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Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are the most used web browsers today. One of the most impressive features found on both of those web browsers is the amount of available free extensions or add-ons that you can download and install to modify the existing behavior of the browser or even add new features such as a FTP client (FireFTP), download manager (DownThemAll!), or advertisement blocker (Adblock Plus) without requiring a dedicated third party software. Currently there is more than a whopping 12,000 extensions that can be installed on the current Firefox.

Although the extensions are very useful, the constant browser updates which are released every month can cause some of the extensions to stop working if they are programmed to only run with specific versions of Firefox.

This is actually a safety feature to allow the extension developers to fully test and verify that their extension is compatible with the latest Firefox and not crashing it. However there are times when it reports that the extension is incompatible with Firefox or you cannot install because the Add to Firefox button is grayed out with a text saying not available for Firefox. Here we have 4 ways to force the installation of incompatible extensions in Firefox.
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Just like any web browser, Firefox allows you to print the webpage that you’re currently on for offline reading or storage. There are a couple of ways how you can quickly and easily print from Firefox, either using your keyboard by pressing a combination of shortcut keys, or by using your mouse. Fortunately all major web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera all use the same hot key to activate the print dialog box which is CTRL+P.

For Firefox, there are other places where you can activate the print dialog if you’re not comfortable in using the default hotkey. We’ll also show you how to configure Firefox to print silently without the confirmation dialog box and also how to print/save as PDF which is not found in Firefox but available in Chrome by default.

5 Ways to Print from Firefox

1. Firefox Menu
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Normally when you login to a website, you will notice that your Firefox or Chrome web browser will prompt you to remember or save the password. This is a very useful feature from web browser that offers the convenience of automatically logging in to websites without manually typing the username and password. Some users are concerned about the safeness in saving their password but they can rest assured that they will stay safe when it is encrypted with a master password.

You may have noticed that your web browser does not seem to ask you to save the password for certain websites such as PayPal, online banking websites like Citibank and etc. This is not due to a possible faulty password manager but rather that the login page containing a piece of code that is used as a standard to tell the web browser not to prompt the user to save the password for security reasons. Here is the HTML source code of the PayPal’s login webpage that has an autocomplete=”off” added to the password input box.

If you are looking for ways to bypass the autocomplete=off and force your web browser to save the password on all websites, here are a few workarounds.
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Every web browser comes with a password manager that lets you save the password that you used to login to a website so that there is no need to manually type the username and password each time you want to login. Other than convenience, a password manager also allows you to use a unique password for every different account which is so much safer. The only question we need to ask is how secure the password manager because a hacker gaining access to your password manager is probably as bad as you using the same password.

Since Firefox is one of the most used web browser today, let us take a look at how safe is the password manager by trying to reveal the password saved in Firefox and also the possibility of bypassing, resetting or cracking the master password.

When a password is saved in Firefox, visiting the login page will automatically fill in the login details on the form and the password is normally hidden under asterisks/bullets. Although the password is hidden, it can actually revealed using one of the five methods that we have posted in another article.
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