13 security and privacy tips for Firefox(Part 1)

1. Delete items from address bar history

While it’s very handy to have your recently visited pages autocompleted as you type, it’s not always desirable. Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited. You can highlight and delete these at will, for maximum privacy.

2. Protect your PC from malware

You don’t have to visit the seedy side of the web to pick up a virus - even the best social networking sites regularly host all kinds of malware. But you can reduce the chance of infection by installing NoScript. This handy add-on blocks Javascript, Java, Flash and other executable content from running unless you explicitly allow it, and is a great way to keep yourself safe online.

3. Speedily search for images

Browse Google images and your results are split into blocks of 21. But use CoolIris and you’ll get all your results displayed on a 3D photo wall, a much faster and easier way to find the images you need. It only works with some sites, unfortunately, but as these include Google, Flickr, Picasa, Yahoo, Photobucket, Facebook and MySpace then you’ll still have plenty to browse. Especially as it searches and displays YouTube videos, too. Give it a try.

4. Easily open multiple links

Sometimes your image searches will lead you to forums or websites with large thumbnail galleries. You could do the right-click “open link in new tab” thing for every thumbnail, but it’s much easier to use Linky. Just select the thumbnails you want to view, right-click an empty part of the page, and click Linky > Open All Image Links In Tabs to open them automatically. A real time-saver.

5. Watch videos in your sidebar

Organising your images is easy. Videos? That’s more of a challenge, but YouPlayer can help, at least with the big sites (YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and Metacafe). Drag and drop video links into the playlist and you can play them in your sidebar, without having to revisit the original site each time. It can download videos, too, but if that’s your main interest then we’d recommend a more specialist tool like Video DownloadHelper.

6. Keep your bookmarks online

If others make use of your PC occasionally then you might not want them to see your more, hmm, specialist bookmarks. Use StartAid and you can save your favourite sites online, instead. The service imports your existing bookmarks so it’s easy to get started, and you can then access them from any convenient PC.