Firefox 3 - Advanced Site Information

Published by: Codrut Nistor, in Tips & Tricks

July6th2008

I know most people consider Firefox to be the best browser out there because of those countless addons available for it, of which a lot are pretty good, but with Firefox 3, things may look a bit different. Why? Well, Mozilla has learned a lot from the past, and features available only in various plugins, until now, have been added to the browser. To me, this is a great move, because I would rather have a good browser "out of the box," rather than an amazing one, but after installing 30 plugins...or something like that, but I am sure you got the idea. Well, today I'll tell you all you need to know so you can get the most accurate information about the page you're visiting right in Firefox 3!

As you can see above, accessing the Site Information window is pretty easy - just left click the site icon, if any, or the blank one, as we see here, then press the More Information button. Now, we should see the Page Info window, pictured below.

In the General tab, you can see the size of the current page(good idea to send a print screen of this one to your ISP, when a 10kB page loads in 30 seconds and they claim it's not their fault), encoding, last time the page was modified, address, type, as well as Meta tags and their contents. If you press the More button, you're going to be taken to the Security tab, as you can see in the image below...

As you can see, nothing is perfect, because I surely did not visit SoftDistrict today 258 times. Anyway, if you're paranoid, you can check every cookies stored by a certain site on your computer, or view your stored passwords for it - if you managed to forget them, and also delete any information you had that could help you do any recovery. Even more, if owner information is public, it should appear here, but from my own experience, not many sites display any owner information.

The Media tab shows all the media files in the current page, allowing you to save each element you need, as well as to choose to block all images located on the current page.

The Feeds tab has a name saying it all. Apart from simply viewing the link and type for all the Feeds available on the current page, you can also subscribe to them. Sweet!

At last, we have the Permissions area. <-125x125 Button - right->The options here will only affect the current site, but they could prove extremely useful, especially to those not using the NoScript plugin yet. With the help of the options available in the Permissions area, you can block images from loading, popup windows, as well as disallow cookies and the ability of a page to install extensions of themes to your browser. Not bad at all, don't you think?

This is all for today, and I am hope you'll be happy with all the things you can do with a single left mouse button click on a tiny button. Let me know what you think, I am anxious to hear what's your opinion! ;)