Slashdot reported Sunday that, during a routine round of Windows updates, some computers received a Firefox plugin from Microsoft, without their knowledge or consent.

For the uninitiated, Firefox is a freely available, open source web browser. It has become a very popular browser as Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been losing market share according to a couple of companies who keep track of these types of statistics. They determine these statistics using, among other metrics, your user agent.

Or at the very least is trying to tell us we're backwards! I went to a support article on the Microsoft Website using Firefox and the page was shifted to the right rather than the left! Here is a screenshot (it is pretty large...dual monitors). When going to the same page using IE, it was fine. I sent this to a friend and he experienced the same thing....

With the release builds of Firefox 2.0 available on their FTP servers come many new features, including "Live Titles."

Perhaps the number one reason Firefox is so popular is due to the Adblock extension. Adblock filters out advertisements from websites. To download Adblock, go to the Adblock page located in the extensions portion of the Firefox website. Once you install Adblock, you'll also want to install the Adblock filterset.G Updater which is an extension that updates the advertisements to block automatically!

An extension extends the functionality of Firefox. These are generally downloaded through their secure site, which can be tricky to find the most useful extensions. My goal is to make it easy to find and use the best extensions for Firefox. Extensions can do many things, from installing useful tools to blocking advertisements to adding entertainment.

To get extensions for Firefox, you click on the Tools menu, then click Extensions. This will bring up the extension manager, a simple interface which allows you to manage your extensions. Click on Get More Extensions.

With the increasing popularity of the free browser Firefox, I have decided to start this tutorial for users of other browsers.

I have run into a couple of problems with Blockbuster's online movie rental program. It is virtually the same as NetFlix, only it's a bit cheaper and they give you one free movie rental a week. But I have found a couple of problems, aside from the longer turn around times in shipping the movies back and forth.

I've noticed another odd behavior in FireFox while using the XMLHttpRequest object. When posting to a page on a server that requires authentication, the first post will go through just fine. But the second post, without refreshing the page, will cause the server to want authentication. I'm not sure if this behavior was present in the previous version and this behavior his not present if the object is querying a page using get. Using post works fine using IE 7.

The latest version of Firefox seems to have broken the XMLHttpRequest object. Specifically, if the asynchronous flag is set to false, the object will no longer function. I haven't done much research into this. I just wanted to jot a quick note. Set the asynchronous flag to true and everything should be fine.