With mobile browsing so popular now, web app developers need to make sure they know how well their apps perform with internet connections that aren’t as fast as the ones many people have at home. Remember too that even in 2010 many people around the world still use dial-up connections or other methods that are much slower than broadband. Here’s a review of a Firefox plugin, Throttle, that makes it easy to simulate slower connections speeds when you are testing your app.

Recently it became possible to drag images right into your Gmail message if you were using Chrome, but I just found out today that I could drag an image into an e-mail using Firefox as well. Maybe the rest of the world knows this, but if you haven’t tried it yet it’s a nice little timesaver/incremental improvement.

Controlling or even monitoring what your children see on the Internet was never going to be easy. Not surprisingly there are many Firefox parental controls available in the form of add-ons for the browser to make it easier to keep tabs on where your kids are surfing or to restrict them from visiting sites that you deem inappropriate. Here are five of the better content filters available for Firefox, and they are all very easy to set up. Hey, you’re paying the bills.
Except as noted, these extensions are all free of charge with appeals for donations.

The FoxFilter add-on you a choice of using either custom keyword filters to block inappropriate content or block specific sites that you designate. Comes with a list of porn related keywords. Many children are computer-savvy enough to uninstall/reinstall a Firefox extension so there is password protection.
$10.00/per year for the deluxe version (no ads).

Glubble for Families: this extension is probably appropriate for families with younger children, as it involves making a “family page”, which is private, that lets you stay on top of the sites that your children are visiting, and approve or disapprove sites. It features photo upload/sharing functionality called the Family Photo Timeline, as well as chatting and games. Glubble also uses Ask for Kids, a search engine designed for children.

ProCon Latte: this add-on gives you two ways to filter Internet content. First, it replaces inappropriate words with asterisks, although it does not by default block access to sites containing these words. For that however, you can use ProCon Latte to set either a blacklist, which will block specific sites that you designate, or a whitelist, with which you specify only sites that may be visited. Note that you can use this extension to block any kind of site (gambling, etc.), not just porn. A password is required to change settings.

LeechBlock is interesting because it’s designed to do a lot more than block children’s access to objectionable websites: it’s to help you block your own access! If you find yourself updating that Facebook page every five minutes you can use Leach blocked to create sets of sites that do not want to be able to access, specifying dates and times of day when you want to deny access. If you’re unable to quit entirely during these periods, you can even designate an amount of time each hour where access is allowed. It’s probably a productivity tool as much as a Firefox parental control tool.

BlockSite is designed to remove the option of visiting certain websites entirely. You can also use a wildcard character to restrict access to sub-domains as well. If you stumbled across links to these sites while you surf this plug-in will disable the hyperlinks, leaving only text. You may also import a list of undesirable sites that you want to block. Block site is currently being updated for use with the most recent version of Firefox.

Parental controls for Firefox are a first, easy step toward having some say in the internet content your children consume, if it’s your browser of choice. If you have a Firefox add-on that I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments.

In case you haven’t heard, yesterday Firebug 1.5.0 was released by Joe Hewitt, Rob Campbell and the rest of the gang at the FirebugWorkingGroup. New for this release, which is apparently a big one, is an enhanced Inspector, improved HTML editing and a lot more. Digital Media Minute did a very popular Firebug tutorial screencast a while back, by the way.

Year-end is as good a time as any to post a list from Lifehacker of some of the most popular Firefox extensions and themes of the past year. I installed Vacuum Places Improved and FireFound– check them out.

Mouse dominance won’t go away overnight, but soon it won’t be the only way, and things are going to change quickly. Windows 7 will offer good support for touchscreen hardware, and take a look at early multitouch support on Firefox. Instead of just mouse events, web developers will have a whole bunch of new tools to work with, and obviously users will have all kinds of new games and interfaces– it’s exciting stuff.

Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.

From that master of life-hackery Tim Ferriss of all people, here’s a small tip for making a screengrab of an entire page (or any part of a page that you need). I shoulda known there was a Firefox extension.

Digital Media Minute has a popular screencast on debugging JavaScript with Firebug, the popular Firefox plugin. Now there is FirePHP, a debugger for PHP which extends Firebug with an API for PHP web app developers. Six Revisions has a nice overview of the functionality. The jury is out on whether it compares favorably to xdebug and Eclipse PDT, for example.

Digital Media Minute did a post a while ago about the location of the Firefox cache.
To change Firefox cache location, add the “browser.cache.disk.parent_directory” preference (by editing your configuration) and enter a folder path. When you specify this preference, a new directory, “Cache” will be created at the path you have set.

These other two preferences must set as follows (edit configuration):
Set “browser.cache.disk.enable” to ‘true’ to store cache on the hard drive. (The default is true.)
Set “browser.cache.disk.capacity” to a positive integer equal to the max hard drive space in KB to use for cache. (Firefox default is 50000 KB)

Also, for Windows, the path separator must be 2 backslashes (for example “C:\\Path\\To\\Parent”), if the “browser.cache.disk.parent_directory” value is set in prefs.js or user.js file rather than about:config.

We have written about upcoming changes to Firefox before, but here’s a fairly big one: the Jetpack browser API, announced today, is Mozilla’s response to developer input as to potential improvements to the current Firefox browser API, specifically the process of creating Firefox extensions.

A primary goal with Jetpack is that only basic web development skills (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) will be needed to create add-ons.

Development is still in the early stages, but other improvements will include: no browser restart for installation, improved debugging tools, improved packaging, etc. Some are already asking if a new browser API will divert development resources away from Greasemonkey, but clearly it opens up extensions development in Firefox to many people who might not have previously been capable. Stay tuned.