Today, let me show you how to easily prevent this from happening. Oh this depends on which browser you are using.

Internet Explorer

Click on the drop down arrow next to the Printer icon on the toolbar. Select the Page Setup menu item.

In the Page Setup window, you should see the “Headers and Footers” setting which specifies what are to be printed in the headers and footers. The codes “&u&b&d” will eventually print the URL of the page, as well as the printing date. You can simply delete off the codes such as “&u&b&d” which is in the footer section to have a blank footer.

You can of course modify the codes to print out different stuff in the headers and footers. Here is a list of the codes:

• &w - Window Title
• &u - Page URL
• &d - Date in short format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &D - Date in long format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &t - Time in regular format as shown on the clock (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &T - Time in 24-hour format
• &p - Current page number
• &P - Total number of pages
• &b - right align the next text. (following &b)
• &b&b: Centered text (between &b&b)
• && - A single ampersand (&)

There you are, pretty straight forward and easy for Internet Explorer. Now, how about Mozilla Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox

On the File menu, click on Page Setup. Then in the popup window select the Margins & Header/Footer tab.

Here you should see that it’s very easy to change the margins, and of course the header and footer options. All the options are in the 6 drop down selection lists, no messy codes to play with as in the IE browser. If you want to get rid of the URL, just select blank in the drop down list.

There you are, some quick tips for Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. Don’t ask me how to do this in other browsers such as Opera, because I haven’t played with them that much yet.

It says “Congratulations on Shipping! Love, the IE Team”. IE Team loves and congratulates the Mozilla team for the release of Firefox 3?

Haha… the cake may look cute and hilarious. But it wasn’t true, it’s just a hoax.

New Look

The moment I fired up Firefox 3, I immediately think it looks similar to Internet Explorer 7. For one thing, Firefox 3 tabs looks identical to the tabs from Internet Explorer 7. However, I really like the new bookmarks menu. When you open the add bookmark menu, it’s displayed in a small box which doesn’t take up a lot of space. I found this great because the bookmarks menu in Firefox 2 took up the whole screen just to add a simple bookmark. Also, in Firefox 2, some of the folders in my bookmark menu weren’t displayed.

Better Security

I didn’t realize this feature until a couple of weeks ago. When I first fired up Firefox 3, I realized multiple addons which I installed in Firefox 2 and transferred to Firefox 3 weren’t running. It turns out that Firefox 3 used one of its new security features. Since the program is brand new, multiple Firefox 2 addons doesn’t run under Firefox 3. Rather than dealing with random crashes, or lost data, Firefox 3 automatically turns off all incompatible addons. As an added bonus, Firefox 3 even finds updates for your current addons. Another example of Firefox 3’s security system includes notifications of suspicious Trojans disguised as harmless downloads, and Maleware/Virus protection. Although its Maleware/Virus protection isn’t as advanced as Avast, or Norton, it’s great as a second layer of protection.

Downloads Resume Feature

One annoying feature in Firefox 2 for me was the termination of downloads whenever Firefox closes. I can’t remember how many times I have to restart a download all over again simply because Firefox has to install an update or crashes on me for no apparent reason. Well, the creators feel the same way I believe, so they added this ability where your download will resume from where it left off even if Firefox closes on you. Genius!

Better Looking Websites

As you may already know, many websites today use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets as it’s normally called). CSS can do a lot of things and its biggest advantage is that it can turn a dull looking website into something fancier in a few lines of codes. Firefox has always been great in reading the CSS codes in a website, and Firefox 3 is no exception this time. But Firefox 3 can read CSS codes better than Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer combined! This is great for website developers who want to test their upcoming websites.

What I Hate About Firefox 3

Alas, with everything great, there’s always something bad that comes with it. An example of this can be found in Firefox’s numerous glitches. There are small, but annoying glitches in Firefox 3. For example, every time I log into my AOL account, a message keeps popping up saying “the service has been temporally disabled, please try again” even though AOL loads perfectly. Also, for some odd reasons, if I close Firefox 3, and reopen it too quickly, Firefox 3 says that “Another Firefox program is open, please close it before starting again”.

Another thing I hate is sometimes Firefox 3 will exit your current program just to let you know of an update (when I was working on this article, my program closed on me to show the status of my Twitter account).

Anyway, although Firefox 3 doesn’t really feature anything revolutionary, and it still has some annoying glitches, it’s still one of the best Internet browsers I’ve used thus far. It fact it has improved quite a lot compared to previous versions of Firefox.

Now, share with us what do you like and hate with Firefox 3.

These tie up 99% of the browser market but that doesn’t mean you have to be restricted to only these applications. There are a number of very viable alternatives, some built on the Trident or Gecko rendering engines and others from scratch.

Of the Mac browser alternatives I have recently discovered two recently which impressed me the most:

Shiira

Shiira is a Japanese based browser with the goal “to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari” (not too difficult in my opinion).

Keeping that in mind, Shiira is very similar to Safari in basic functionality and offers a lot of the same features but also offers a lot of enhanced functions and general usability improvements. Like Firefox, Shiira is open source and has been built upon WebKit (an open source application framework that provides a foundation upon which to build a web browser) and with Cocoa (Apple Inc.’s native object-oriented application program environment for the Mac OS X operating system) and runs on Mac OSX 10.4 and higher.

Comparisons of speed, stability and performance between Safari and Shiira are about equal, I’m not sure how it compares to recent updates to Safari but the general impression I get is it’s hard to tell. The last update for Shiira was in January this year.

Shiira shines when you get to appearance customizations as it comes with two themes (Aqua and Metal) and plenty of options for tabs, appearance, icons and moving the interface layout around.

If you use Safari already I can’t see one reason not to use this instead, but I guess it’s all just personal preference. Definitely worth a look anyway.

Camino

A little more well known, Camino is built upon the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine, which is also used by Mozilla Firefox. As such Camino can benefit also from developments such as the recent release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0. The advantage of using Gecko is quite significant compared to other browser’s such as Shiira which are developed by a very small number of people. Mozilla has a community of thousands of developers all helping to build a much greater browser.

Interestingly one of the Camino founder developers was later employed by Apple to work on Safari and it was his influence maybe which gave Camino an early reputation of rapid page loading and speedy browsing. Its other founder was hired by Google and now works on the Google Firefox team but also develops Camino in his 20% time.

In my opinion, Camino can make a very good browser as a Safari or even Opera replacement. On the other hand, Firefox 3.0 boasts better OS integration but for real integration Camino does a fair better job.

It will be interesting to see where these browser go in the future, they still have plenty of opportunities as Firefox managed to gain amazing success in a market dominated by Internet Explorer with 90% or so market share.

Firefox 3 has been discussed not too long ago, you can read it here. Looks like here in Kongtechnology.com, we are a Firefox lover! Well, personally, I love Firefox for its ease of use, customization, and speed. It definitely beats Internet Explorer. As for Safari and Opera, it’s a matter of preference. The three are on an equal ground I reckon, only difference is that there are features specific to one browser, for example, Speed Dial on Opera. Yet, my choice would still be Mozilla’s Firefox.

Along with the new Firefox 3, I’ve decided to write a practical guide to enhance your experience with Firefox. These tips and tutorials will help you browse far more efficient, faster (and not from browser speed point of view only), and not to mention the multitasking factor. With these few tips, you’ll get used to browsing multiple sites, while still running a stable browser.

Firefox Post Installation
After the initial installation of Firefox, let’s make a few tweaks. This is my personal preference though. It’s up to you whether you want to follow it or not, these steps are completely optional.

First go to Edit - Preferences. Go to Privacy tab, then under History, change the saved history page to a lower number. I changed mine to 7 days. This is to help shave some unnecessary space used by Firefox.

I also choose to disabled the “Remember what I’ve downloaded” option, for the similar reason.

That’s about it. Not much huh? Piece a cake! Of course, for a complete tweaking, there are heaps of advanced tweaking guide available. However, if you don’t feel to comfortable, then these small tweaks should do. Firefox will perform brilliantly with or without the tweaks.

Plugins Parade
Now let’s install some plugins. What are plugins? These are “extra” components that could add more features to Firefox. There are a wide range of plugins available out there, from a simple bookmarks plugins, to a more complex plugins used by web developers and programmers. However, since this article is aimed for a day-to-day user, I choose only to include the basic ones, the ones I find pretty useful for daily needs. Let’s hit it then.

• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

  

  The first plugin I choose would definitely be Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a nifty plugin that lets you synchronize your bookmarks across different computers. All you need is to install Foxmarks on the other computer as well, and it will automatically update the bookmark with the one you stored in the server. Let’s say you were at work, and you found a good website for reference, you could bookmark it, sync Foxmarks, and when you got home tonight, the bookmark at home has been updated with the link you’ve included at work. Definitely handy and a must have plugin.

• Down Them All

  

  This one is useful when you want to download heaps of item on a page. Say you come across a page with 50 pics of your favorite artist, instead of right-click each and every one of them, you could just right-click once, choose to “Down Them All” and filter the downloads by file extensions (eg: JPEGs, GIFs, etc) and download them all. A real handy one for those of you who surf for pictures a lot.

• Download Status Bar

  

  I don’t like Firefox’s default download manager. It opens up a new window, and it won’t tell you how many percentage your download has gone when there are multiple downloads. Download Status Bar does exactly what it says. It lets the download bar go onto the status bar (bottom of the browser) and it will show you graphically how far your download has gone. Plus, there’s no need of pop-up download manager window. Hooray! What’s more is that whenever you close your browser, it will switch your downloads automatically to the default pop-up window, so you don’t have to cancel your downloads.

• Orbit Downloader

  

  Here’s an optional one. It’s not actually a Firefox plugin, but it can integrate itself with Firefox. I use this plugin mainly for downloading flv movies (YouTube, or similar video sites) and of course, Flash based media. Great for downloading Flash games to be played offline using a standalone Flash player.

Holy crap Batman! That’s FAST!
Browsing using Firefox is about speed. Not only the browser itself, but operational as well. These shortcuts will help your browsing efficiencies: faster, and cooler (once you get used to it, you could “accidentally” demonstrate to your friends how you browse so fast).

• Ctrl - T: Opens up a new tab. Useful for multiple browsing session. Be careful not to slip and open too many tabs though.
• Ctrl - W: Close the chosen tab. Can be used to quickly close whatever tab you are looking at if your Boss suddenly come (Haha!)
• Ctrl - Shift - T: Re-open the last closed tab. Useful to re-open the tab you close above.
• Ctrl - F: Open up a “Search on this page” form. I use this to search the term / words I was looking for on a page.
• Ctrl - Tab: Move between opened tabs.
• Ctrl - Left Click on a link: Open up that link on a new tab (and keep focus on the current tab)

These are basically the main shortcuts I am using on Firefox. Not much, but each of them has been proven useful and sufficient for day-to-day use. If you do have any other shortcuts though, feel free to drop them in the comments section.

So there you go, some tips and info for those of you who hasn’t been using Firefox to the full potential. For those of you who are thinking of switching to Firefox, Kitkat’s right, it’s the time to make the switch. Firefox 3 definitely has some brand new features. Watch and subscribe to Kongtechnology for more reviews and tips on Firefox 3. Browse fast, browse smart. (Psst.. Don’t forget to download Firefox 3!)

In addition to a chance to be part of the excitement, Firefox 3 will also improve your browsing experience with many new features:

• Smart Location Bar - Besides letting you type in a web site, as always, the location bar in Firefox 3 will also dynamically search your browsing history and provide you with a list of sites that match what you’ve currently typed. Both URLs and page titles from your history are searched, making for a very intuitive interface.
• Enhanced Security - In coordination with Google, Firefox 3 will warn you if you are about to visit a site which is know to supply malware and viruses.
• Faster and More Efficient - A key focus of this release has been increasing the speed at which you see your web pages, and decreasing the memory footprint of the browser. In a browser face-off, run by builder.au, Firefox 3 came out on top for efficiency.
• Easier Add-On Management - The new add-ons interface includes a search and browse system, directly inside the add-ons tab, instead of requiring the you to navigate to an external site.

If you’re really eager, you can download release candidates of Firefox today. The release candidate site has the latest downloads for various languages and operating systems. Before you migrate completely, check out the current known issues, to make sure you won’t be hit by any of them.

However, if you’re nervous and unsure about this upgrade, you can download the stand-alone version of Firefox 3 from PortableApps.com. They bundle up Firefox and it’s suitable for installation on a flash drive, but it can be installed on your hard-drive as well. The nice thing about this route is that it doesn’t touch your existing Firefox installation, you can install it, test it out, and delete the directory entirely if you aren’t happy with it.

For those of you who’ve never even tried Firefox, this is a great time to make a switch. Check out this face-off article for some reasons. They conclude that Internet Explorer 7 is the worst performing browser of those tested. Firefox 3 comes in near the top of the pack, beat only by Safari and Opera which both exhibit occasional compatibility problems on different sites.

Remember, Firefox 3 Download Day, June 17th… be part of record-breaking history!

A quote from Ars Technica

“Our plan starts with building a great product. Firefox has shown that if you have a great product that tens of millions of people love to use daily, doors open and more opportunities become within reach. So we’ll focus on the product,” wrote Ascher in a blog entry. “We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2.”

Eminent personalities heading Mozilla Messaging include CEO David Asher, Christopher Beard from Mozilla Labs and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. The alpha release of ThunderBird 3.0 is set to come out this year, hopefully by April. The actual plan to spin off a separate foundation for developing Thunderbird was mooted in July last year.

As compared to the browser space where FireFox faces a proprietary competitor (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), in the email client space there are some compelling open source email client software such as Yahoo’s Zimbra. Mozilla’s move in branching off the e-mail software division may be to perhaps emulate the success it has had with its Firefox web browser. The Firefox web browser has gained immense adoption online and the latest statistics from w3schools.com reveal that it has 36.5% share of the browser market as of February 2008.

It is yet to be seen if spinning off the e-mail client will make a dent in Microsoft Outlook’s market share. Let’s hope that Thunderbird 3.0 beats all expectations.

If you are interested, read the contest details. Basically, the challenge is to create the coolest, most interesting Firefox 3-inspired t-shirt design. The top 5 designs will be posted on the Mozilla Store for public voting to select the final winner!

Now, I understand that you would like to know what are the prizes! They are great believe me.

There will be five (5) winners, one first place winner, and four runners-up.

The first place winner will receive:

• recognition for designing the Firefox 3 T-Shirt featured in the Mozilla Store
• a free Firefox 3 T-Shirt with the winning design
• US$250 gift voucher to Amazon.com

The four runners-up will each receive a free Firefox 3 T-Shirt with the winning design and US$50 gift voucher to Amazon.com.

Do act quickly if you want to try your creativity, the submission deadline is on 16th March 11:59 PM PST. Last year, there was a similar contest to spread the Firefox browser through a contest code named Operation Firefox.

Anyway, I did in fact have a good proposal with which you might get a giant Firefox Fathead sticker delivered to you absolutely free of charge (FOC)! This Giant Firefox Fathead Sticker originally costs US$69.90 at Mozilla Store. Don’t even think about buying one yourself because the shipping cost could cost you a bomb! Weird enough, they don’t have this item in their Mozilla international store which might be cheaper on the shipping cost.

To get your free Giant Firefox Fathead Sticker, you just need to join Operation Firefox whose mission is to get Firefox installed on more computers worldwide. Wow, what a great mission and I am sure you would like to contribute for the better of the open source and free software community, right? You will need to submit a plan describing where, when and how you’ll install the giant 3.5-foot Firefox Fathead sticker, to make people take notice and check out Firefox. The better your installation, the better your chances of winning 1 out of the 50 giant Firefox Fathead sticker for free! Yes, they want 50 installations only.

To make the deal sweeter, out of the 50 chosen installations, the most creative ones will win away a new Apple MacBook Pro or Nintendo Wii!

What are you waiting for? Check out more information on Operation Firefox and submit your great plan today. How about stick the sticker on my face and then I station myself at one of the busy LRT stations in KL? I am sure I will get a lot of attention.

Below is a brief market share of all the major browsers:

Anyway, I think Firefox users are growing quite steadily. So, it’s only a matter of time before Firefox will overtake IE. Let’s see when will that happen.