Find Hidden passwords in Firefox

Whenever you log in to a website using your username and password, you'll be prompted by Firefox whether you'd like Firefox to remember this password.




If you click on Remember, the next time you visit the website, it'll automatically enter the username and password for your convenience.

Now, back to the topic. Let's say you saved your GMail password in Firefox. After months or years gone by and you don't remember the password you set for my GMail. You started to panic and desperately need to get back your GMail password.

Don't worry, here's how you can find the hidden GMail password in Firefox.

Firefox is much better than Internet Explorer in terms of managing "remembered" logins. In Internet Explorer, there is no built-in feature where you can manage or view your saved login information. That's why you need third party tools to reveal the passwords hidden under asterisks. As for Firefox, you can access remembered passwords with a few clicks.

To view your remembered passwords in Firefox browser, go to Tools, and click on Options. Go to Security tab and click on the Show Passwords button. A remember password dialog box will appear. Click on the Show Passwords button again and a new column with password will appear.





With this feature, you won't need any tools to reveal the hidden passwords under asterisks. This topic has nothing to do with cracking or hacking. It's a feature that's included in Firefox browser.

There's a tool I found called FirePassword designed to decrypt the username and password list from firefox sign-on database. It works on similar line as Firefox's built-in password manager but it can be used as offline tool to get the username/password information without running the Firefox. It is DOS based and the manual says that FirePassword requires only 3 files which is key3.db, cert8.db and signons.txt. This 3 files can be found in Firefox profile directory.

All you need to do is place the 3 files together with FirePassword and run FirePassword.exe. Weirdly, I am able to decrypt all my username and password by copying ONLY the signons.txt file. Looks like it's not necessary to include the other 2 files.



You can export the decrypted username and password into text file by running this command "firepassword.exe > logins.txt".


Note: If a "master password" is being used and you don't know the master password, you won't be able to view the remembered passwords in Firefox and also use FirePassword to decrypt the the username and password list from firefox sign-on database


Download FirePassword

How to clear Google Search history

One of the main reason why some people would like to clear their Google search history from web browser and Google Toolbar is to maintain their privacy. If you own your own desktop or laptop which is used only by you, then it's fine. But if your computer is shared with a few people, sometimes it's just not nice to let them "accidentally" find out what you were looking for. An example below would be embarrassing.
Clear Google Search History

Here's how you can clear Google's search history from Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The below instruction A and B is for deleting search history from the Google home page search box. This is if you use either Firefox or Internet Explorer and manually type in Google.com address to perform the search.

A. Internet Explorer 7
1. Go to Tools menu
2. Select Options
3. On General tab, click on the "Delete..." button from the Browsing History area.
4. Click "Delete forms..." button from the Form data area.
Remove search history
5. Click Yes to confirm.

B. In Mozilla Firefox
1. Go to Tools menu
2. Select Options
3. Select the "Privacy" tab
4. On the Private Data area, click on the "Clear Now..." button.
5. Make sure the "Saved Form and Search History" is checked and click on the Clear Private Data Now.
Clear Visited Link

The below instruction C and D is if you have Google Toolbar installed on your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser.

C. Internet Explorer with Google Toolbar
1. Click on the Google logo on the Toolbar to access the drop-down menu.
2. Select the "Clear History" option.
Clear Internet Explorer Google Toolbar Search History

C. Firefox with Google Toolbar
1. Click on the Google logo on the Toolbar.
2. Select "Clear Search History" option.
Clear Firefox Google Toolbar Search History

As you can see, clearing search history from Google Toolbar on Internet Explorer and Firefox is slightly a bit different. Not sure why they made it that way... Although it seems easy to clear Google search history, I did not immediately knew where to clear Google search history in Firefox Google Toolbar. I was searching through the options and the drop-down but I missed clicking the Google logo where the "Clear Search History" option is.

Bypass Website Registration

You're browsing the web and you click a link to an article on a site (let's say nytimes.com) but instead of getting the article you get a screen asking you to login or register. Most of the time I don't really use my real information to register. I can easily use a temporary disposable email address to sign up and then verify my membership in order to be a member of the website. I think the biggest reason why most of us don't like registering to view full contents is we don't want to give people our real information away. Imagine if every site in the world required registration to access content! That'd really be annoying and the whole world has your info!

Here's a very useful website which "shares" logins so you don't need to waste your time in registering an account to access a website that requires compulsory registration.

Avoid website registration
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times). All of the username and password listed on BugMeNot are added by users. So if the first login don't work, you can try the second one. If you can't find a working login for a site then you can register with that site using fake details and then do BugMeNot a favor by adding to the list for other users to use.

To find login for a website, just visit BugMeNot.com, type the website address and click on the "Get Logins" button. It will then show you the list of logins found with username, password and also the success rate. If you see a low percentage of success rate, chances are it won't work. So don't bother wasting your time in trying to use that login.
Search BugMeNot login

Some websites such as pay-per-view which require users to pay money to access the site, banking and e-commerce websites can be blocked from BugMeNot system by easily submitting a request form. At least we know that BugMeNot is not a website that shares all sorts of hacked passwords. It's for our own convenience.

Currently BugMeNot has logins for 162679 sites. Unfortunately, there is no way to view the list of websites that has logins on BugMeNot. You can only do a search from BugMeNot website.

To make Firefox users life easier, there's a great plugin that works with BugMeNot. Simply install the plugin, then visit any website such as New York Times website and click on the login. You'll then see a form which ask you to input the Member ID or E-Mail Address and Password. RIGHT CLICK in a username or password text field to see the option "Login with BugMeNot". Click on it and it'll automatically search for logins from BugMeNot and automatically input into the text field.
Login with BugMeNot

You can access some of the options in BugMeNot extension by going to Tools -> Add-ons and click on the Options button when you highlight BugMeNot. By default, all four options are unchecked and in my opinion, it's the best setting already.
Bypass Website Registration

Please note that BugMeNot's Firefox extension is NOT created by BugMeNot. It is created by Eric from RoachFiend.

Download BugMeNot Firefox Extension

Preview Firefox Tabs using Tab Scope

This thumbnail preview extension for Firefox lets you see what's behind each tab just by hovering your pointer over it. Not only that, you can also navigate using the thumbnail popup (back, forward, reload, stop). You can scroll and click on links in the preview as well. That's tons of functionality that you didn't have before! This one's a must-have.

Install

Make Googling Faster in Firefox

Firefox 2 has a little Search Box built into the browser into which one can type in ones search queries without going to the search engine website. Usually, the default behaviour for the Search Box is to send its query to google.com. When a person does so from a PC in India, the google.com servers automatically redirect the search request to a google.co.in server for localized results.

Now that’s where our problem is. This redirection causes a noticeable and irritating lag which is entirely useless (and unacceptable!). I would be quite fine with results from google.com instead. So is there a way to make the Search Box send its query directly to the google.co.in servers ? Turns out there is !

The Search Box is not very configurable from within the browser itself. The only thing one can do is to add or remove more search engines or change the default serach engine.

However, if you take a moment to navigate to the Firefox 2 installation directory (probably C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\) you’ll see a directory “searchplugins” in there with a file corresponding to each of the installed search engines.

In Firefox 2, the files are .XML files. Google.xml is what seems to be interesting for us at the moment. Open it ! But if you open it with Notepad, the line breaks will not show up properly. So use either Wordpad or Editplus or something similar if you are on Windows.

In case you are using an older version of Firefox, you’ll see an image file which contains the icon for the Search Engine and a .SRC file. Open Google.src in this case.

I’ll proceed assuming that you have the ‘latest and greatest’ version of Firefox, Firefox 2. But the same idea is easily applied to older versions.

Now there are many things in Goolge.xml, but just look at the line with the URL tag,



Aha ! Change “google.com” in that line to “google.co.in” ! Save the file. And it’s done !

Restart Firefox. Type in a query into the Search Box and feel elated at the reduced latency of your searches. No more redirection is involved from the google.com servers. Yay !

Now for some bonus info. We saw that older versions of Firefox had an image file for the icon and a .SRC file for configuration info. But in the newer version, there is a single .XML file. So where did the icon go ?

The icon is now embedded in the .XML file. But mixing binary image information with textual configuration information can be problematic. So how does one store the icon along with the rest of the configuration data ?

Base64 Encoding can be used for doing that. This kind of encoding is often used to convert binary information into a form that can be stored and transferred in a manner that is compatible with normal text. If you see the contents of the .XML file, you’ll see an tag which contains the Base64 encoded icon.

Ok. So this does seems a little too easy to be labelled a “hack” at all. But nice enough for majority of the people out there. Maybe I’ll put in something more l33t for all you h4X0rs out there…but that’s for another day.

Until then, enjoy the faster search results !


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Customize Firefox to your memory needs

Limit RAM usage:

If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us.
1. Go to about:config by typing about:config in the address bar.

2. Select "browser.cache.disk.capacity". It is set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.

Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized:

This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go.
1. Go to about:config

2. Right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean.
3. Name it "config.trim_on_minimize" and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

Stun your friends using Firefox

This is a cool Firefox cheat which would possibly stun your friends by embedding a Firefox window within a Firefox Window. Just enter this code into your Firefox address bar and hit Enter:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

I tried it on my browser, it looked awesome, but the performance of the browser was not upto the mark. Anyways, who cares? You could try sneaking into your friend’s browser and setting the above address as his homepage, it will surely drive him nuts!

No More Next Page in Google

An average Googler would probably spend some time navigating through pages in Google, but not anymore. Thanks to Google Auto Pager which beautifully fetches the results from the next page and append it to the bottom the first page, saving both time and pageloads. Similarly, there is another Greasemonkey script which does the same for Google Image Search Results.

Assuming that you have already installed Firefox and Greasemonkey addon, click here to install Google Auto Pager script and click here to install Google Images Auto Pager script. Now that you’ve installed the script, check it out by performing a Google search. By default the script is not active, inorder to activate the script simply double click on the search page.

Integrate Google Talk With Firefox and Opera

Now you can use Google Talk in the panel / sidebar
while browsing with your favourite browser.

You dont need to have the GTalk client installed at all.

1. Go to Bookmarks ---> Organize Bookmarks
2. Click New Bookmark.
3. Paste the following URL in the address (URL location) field.
http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

4. Enter any name for the bookmark like GTalk.
5. Select the option for adding in sidebar or panel.
6. Click OK and you are done.

Google Talk talkgadget requires Adobe Flash Player 8 or above.

Works in both Opera & Firefox.

Make Firefox still faster

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.


NOTE: This trick only works for broadband users not for dialup


Increase Internet Speed

Automatically Backup Firefox Bookmarks

I constantly need to reformat my hard drive to reinstall Windows. This is because I do a lot of software testing. After many installation and uninstallation of softwares, Windows will start to have weird errors and it's performing very slowly. It's nearly impossible to fix and the only way to have a fast system is to perform a clean Windows installation.

Before reformatting my hard drive, the most important task I need to perform is BACKUP. I need to backup my files and email. One thing a lot of people missed backing up is "bookmarks" or "favorites". I browse a lot of websites a day and I bookmark interesting or useful websites for future references. There was once I forgot to backup my bookmarks and it was disastrous! I couldn't find back the websites. Now, I ALWAYS remember to backup my bookmarks. To be on the safe side, here's a good way to AUTOMATICALLY backup your Firefox bookmarks.



he Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer is a Firefox extension which automatically synchronizes your bookmarks with foxmark's server. Then Foxmarks works silently in the background to keep your bookmarks up-to-date on all your computers. You only need to install the extension, create an account, and by default it will automatically synchronizes your bookmark whenever you shutdown Firefox. This way, you'll never lose your Firefox bookmarks ever again!

After you've installed Foxmarks, you can access the Foxmarks configuration from Firefox Bookmarks menu. Nothing much to do there because the default settings is perfect.



A very good feature of Foxmarks that is you can access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via http://my.foxmarks.com/.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer slogan is "Simple. Solid. Free. And ready to use" which is very true. Truly a very simple yet powerful extension for Firefox.

Install