Printing webpages is sometimes very painful experience. What to do when the webpage you want to print is not so “print friendly“? What to do when you want only a portion of the content to print instead of the full webpage? How to remove all the ads, useless navigation links and other unwanted content before printing to save toner and page?

Well, Print Edit add-on for Firefox is an answer to all these questions and more. It basically enhances the basic Print Preview functionality by adding an Edit button to it.

After installation of the plugin, restart Firefox. Now, visit any website which you want to Print it after using Print Edit. Click Print Edit in the Firefox File menu under Print sub menu or right-click on the page and select Print Edit or from within the Print Preview, click the “Edit” button in the toolbar.

Once in editing mode you can select and deselect elements, hide and delete elements. After you select a section, it gets outlined by a blinking-broken-red line border. You can even select many sections at once and do the tasks.

If you are an advanced user, you can even decorate the page by doing some advanced tweaking through the Format drop-down option. Using Format you can resize the margins, change alignment, change list style, change border and so on. Once you’re done formatting the page, click Preview to see the result. If you’re happy with it, print away. If not, you can always click Edit again and continue tweaking it.

The fastest way to use this add-on is to just select the content area you want to keep and click Delete Except. As you can see the result of Delete Except in the screenshot below.

You can download Print Edit from Firefox Addons website.

[Firefox Add-ons via Rock Your Firefox]

Is it too much if one is asking for one’s own privacy on the Internet these days? First, we had normal browser cookies, then we had more persistent Flash cookies and now the Evercookie that can provide everyone from advertisers to malware authors with useful information about the sites you have visited and more. Evercookie, an open source JavaScript API developed by security researcher Samy Kamkar, when implemented by any website stores a user ID and cookie data in eight different places. This makes evercookie a more persistent cookie form than Flash cookies or normal browser cookies.

Its goal is to identify a client even after they’ve removed standard cookies, removed Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and others. This allows websites to track user behavior even when users have enabled private browsing because an Evercookie stores data in locations outside of where standard cookies are stored, an Evercookie can rebuild itself unless users go through a number of steps to completely clear and reset their local storage.

Generally, the Evercookie JavaScript API will make use of the following storage mechanisms if supported by the web browser.

• Standard HTTP Cookies
• Local Shared Objects (Flash Cookies)
• Silverlight Isolated Storage
• Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached
• PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out
• Storing cookies in Web History
• Storing cookies in HTTP ETags
• Storing cookies in Web cache
• window.name caching
• Internet Explorer userData storage
• HTML5 Session Storage
• HTML5 Local Storage
• HTML5 Global Storage
• HTML5 Database Storage via SQLite

“Simply think of it as cookies that just won’t go away,” reads the evercookie FAQ.

ArsTechnica has posted an article “It is possible to kill the evercookie,” that shows different ways to protect yourself from evercookie but Firefox users can protect themselves by just using a simple add-on named “Anonymizer Nevercookie.”

Anonymizer Nevercookie eliminates the manual steps required to completely remove Evercookies. It does so without removing all the necessary cookies that you may actually want to keep, such as those for browsing history and remembered logins. When Anonymizer Nevercookie is engaged along with Firefox’s private browsing mode, it quarantines an Evercookie and removes it after the browsing session.

Quick Start Guide to use Anonymizer Nevercookie add-on:

1. After installing the add-on, launch Firefox browser again, go to Tools > Start Private Browsing
2. A new browser window will open. It will be branded with a blue Navigation Menu bar.
3. Use this window for your private browsing session.
4. To leave private browsing mode, close the private browsing window and in the parent Firefox window go to Tools > Stop Private Browsing.

Note: Leaving private browsing mode will release Flash and Silverlight cookies from quarantine and make you trackable again, so don’t end private browsing mode until you are finished your private session.

Important: If you haven’t used Firefox profiles before, you will probably notice a Profile selection prompt when starting Firefox after installing the extension. This is because the extension creates a temporary profile for each browsing session. If you don’t wish to see this prompt, select the default profile and check the box marked “Don’t ask at startup”.

Xmarks is a bookmark sync browser add-on that lets you synchronize all your bookmarks, passwords and other data over several computers, across almost all popular browsers. I am a Xmarks user myself and use it to sync my bookmarks across all the browsers that I use. Sadly, this awesome bookmark sync service will be shutting down service on January 10, 2011.

According to the blog post update on the official Xmarks blog, from today Xmarks will start sending notifications to its users (I still haven’t received one) that the service will be shut down in 90 days. The reasons for the shutdown are explained in detail in the blog post. It can be understood that the main reasons behind shutting down Xmarks are funds running out and Xmarks being unable to find a viable business model or a buyer.

Xmarks (founded in 2006 under the original name Foxmarks) started out as a Firefox plug-in that lets users sync their bookmarks on several computers. Later, Foxmarks rechristened as Xmarks, as it extended support for other browsers and added more functionality, such as browsing recommendations and password syncing.

Xmarks claims it serves around 2 million users across 5 million desktops, and still adding nearly 3,000 new accounts per day (their registration page is still online). You may be wondering, then why Xmarks is seeing the end of the road?

Well, when big players like Google, Opera and Mozilla starts providing sync service and with most of the features that Xmarks offers, free, it becomes really difficult for startups like Xmarks to survive.

A quote from Xmarks CTO and Co-founder Todd Agulnick:

“For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down.”

Its not like the Xmarks developers never tried. They tried various ways to make a profit out of its business, including a “smarter search” idea based on data gleaned from its anonymized collection of 100 million bookmarks. “If you were looking for the Web sites in a particular category, the results were shockingly complete and entirely spam-free,” Agulnick said. They also launched a 99-cent iPhone app to extend sync to Apple’s devices and had begun work on an equivalent for phones using Google’s Android OS. Though the iPhone app will continue to work with bookmarks cached on the phone, but the Android app will never be released.

It is really sad to say good-bye to such a good service. You can easily understand this even if you are not a Xmarks user, when you see comments by users willing to pay for the service, at the official announcement blog post.

Xmarks Alternatives

If you are presently a Xmarks user, you should check Xmarks’ guide to alternatives for advice on the best way to keep your data.

Browser Sync Alternatives

While you may have to give up cross-browser sync when Xmarks goes away, there are a lot of good browser-specific sync options available:

In that page we found two suggestions by Xmarks as its alternative for users who wants more than bookmark sync: Evernote and SugarSync. Xmarks seems to have tied up with the two to offer some exclusive plans for its users. SugarSync is offering free 2 GB storage space for all Xmarks users who signup through the link available here.

AVG Technologies has unveiled AVG LinkScanner for the Mac operating system. AVG LinkScanner for Mac is the first free AVG product designed for Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard and supports Internet browsers Safari 3.x, Safari 4.x, Safari 5.x and Mozilla Firefox 3.x and higher.

According to AVG research, 99 percent of all malicious threats are delivered through the web and cannot be stopped with traditional antivirus software. These threats can come and go within hours and can live on familiar, big-name sites and even on third-party applications on popular social networking sites, without users even noticing. And with the growing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, the bad guys are using these sites as their main vehicle for spreading malware.

AVG LinkScanner has two key features to protect you:

• Surf-Shield scans the page behind any link you click on or any web address you type into your browser. If the page is infected, it stops you from opening it. (This happens so quickly that you don’t even notice it). AVG LinkScanner works in real-time and checks for active threats before you land on a page.
• Search-Shield scans search results and places a safety rating next to each link so you know where it’s safe to click. This applies when searching with Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Like AVG’s extremely popular free LinkScanner for Windows offering which has more than 95 million users, LinkScanner for Mac allows users to surf, search, email, shop and use social network programs online with the confidence that the pages they visit are safe and the places they choose to visit online are safe to enter personal and private information. LinkScanner updates continuously with data garnered by AVG’s industry-leading research team and user community, checking each web page a user visits in real-time before it opens on the Mac, warning users to refrain from opening them if LinkScanner detects threats.

AVG’s Free LinkScanner for Mac product protects users against the ever-increasing online web-threats by dynamically scanning the web pages before they open in your Mac to see if they are genuine sites. If it detects something suspicious, LinkScanner notifies the user that the web site is malicious. LinkScanner for Mac is available for free and included as part of all AVG anti-virus and Internet security products for Windows.

It can be downloaded for free here: http://linkscanner.avg.com/Mac

Google has recently released a Web browser add-on that will stop the browser from sending information to the Google Analytics service.

To provide website visitors with more choice about how their data is collected by Google Analytics, we have developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.

Mainly websites use Google Analytics service to know their site’s traffic pattern and to optimize their website further for their visitors. When a person visits a site, Analytics creates a cookie on the person’s computer. Cookies are small data files used to record information about how a person interacts with a website. You can easily remove cookies from any browser.

Google’s new Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on when installed in the supported browsers, basically tells the Google Analytics service that information about the website visit should not be sent to Analytics.

Other add-ons that were available to Firefox users before Google’s official Analytics opt-out add-on is released to block Analytics are Adblock Plus add-on and NoScript add-on. They both can be set to prevent Google Analytics from receiving any information from the browser. Another add-on called OptimizeGoogle, entirely blocks the Google Analytics cookie in addition to modifying other aspects of Google’s behavior, including blocking Google advertisements and modifying the user ID cookie Google assigns to users of its search engine so that they can surf anonymously.

Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-on does not stop Google from putting other cookies such as Google DoubleClick cookie, which tracks the Web pages a person visits and then serves advertisements related to that content.

The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8), Google Chrome (4.x and higher), and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and higher).

Mozilla today announced the release of Weave Sync add-on version 1.0 for Firefox. The plugin is now generally available to seamlessly bridge your desktop and mobile Firefox experiences. Using Weave Sync add-on from Mozilla Labs, you can now securely access all of your personal data across all supported devices, making your Web experience instantly more personal and useful.

Weave Sync synchronizes your bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs between different computers that run Firefox. Mozilla ensures your data privacy by encrypting all the data before transmission to the end-to-end client.

How to use Weave Sync?

To use Weave Sync, you have first register for an account with Mozilla. The plugin automatically prompts you to create an account after the first installation. If you are worried about your privacy, you can also use your own server as a repository for the data. Note that your data that you transfer to Mozilla’s servers is always encrypted.

Why use Weave Sync when you are already using XMarks?

XMarks is the most popular bookmark syncing tool used. XMarks supports Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer, unlike Weave Sync which is only compatible with Mozilla’s browsers. Even though XMarks can sync bookmarks between these browsers, Weave Sync syncs more than just bookmarks, it can sync passwords, browsing history, etc. In the future versions of Weave Sync, Mozilla plans to allow users to also sync add-ons and other browser customizations.

Yesterday my friend called me up asking for a free download manager so that he can download some large files without any problem. I suggested him DownThemAll! Firefox plugin instead of an standalone download manager. I didn’t suggest him any standalone free download manager as most of them comes with ad bars for displaying ads.

Created by Federico Parodi and Stefano Verna, DownThemAll (or dTa as it is also known) is one of the best Firefox extensions. DownThemAll is easy to install, use, and works as described. Better yet, it’s free and is available for Windows platform, Mac OS and Linux. DownThemAll is the only Firefox plugin you will ever need if you want maximum control over multiple, large downloads. This small download manager is also powerful enough to speed up, queue for later, and batch download sets of files from the web based on patterns you define in one click.

You may use it download the links or images contained on a Web page. You can download all links and images, manually choose individual or multiple items, or select links and images through a variety of preset and customizable filters. DownThemAll also contains a download manager and download accelerator that the creators claim “increases speed up to 400%”. The possibilities are endless. Highly recommended for all your download needs!

Which download manager do you use or is your favourite? Have you ever used dTa? Share your thoughts below!