Collusion - Track Your Online Footprint with Firefox

Ever wanted to know who is tracking you online in real-time? Wanted to be able to choose who should be able to track your online footprints and who should not be able to stalk you? Mozilla and Ford Foundation has come up with a new add-on for their Firefox browser which would do just the same - Collusion.

Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers. Want to know exactly what I am talking about, here's a demo.

Interested? Download the Collusion add-on for Firefox from here. Click on the Add to Firefox button. This add-on does not require a restart, but to see it you might need to press Ctrl+'/' and then click on the Collusion icon from the add-on bar. On Mac, go to the View menu, then the Toolbars menu, then check "Add-on Bar".

After that all you need to do is keep browsing the web. As you do that the graph on the page on your Firefox browser would keep growing. Here each circle represents a website, sites with a halo are the sites that you have visited, site in gray are the ones that you haven't visited and an arrow from one to another means that the former site has set one or more third-party cookies to inform the latter site about your visit. You can hover over the circles to know more about each sites.

Firefox is working on adding more features, such as the ability to click on any node in the graph and tell Firefox to block third-party cookies to that site. Along with that they are also working on visualizing other methods of tracking besides third-party cookies. If you would like to keep an eye on their progress, file a bug, request a feature, or get a copy of the source code, please go to this site.

Now enjoy the visual sonata of Collusion. And don't forget to befriend us on Facebook.

Prism 1.0 Brings Web Apps To Your Desktop

Google really wants everyone to use Chrome, very recently it had even placed ads on TV to promote its browser. But Firefox is here to stay, more so after the release of Prism 1.0 from the Mozilla Labs.

Prism is aimed towards converging the internet and your desktop. It transforms web applications like Gmail, Facebook or YouTube, which until now could only be accessed through the browser, into a desktop application. The best part is that these applications would run separately and not inside your browser. So even if for some reason your browser crashes, these applications would continue to run normally.

Moreover, these application created by Prism would also be able to use some of the nifty features of your operating system. For example, you would be able to minimize these applications to the system tray, auto-start them at startup, they can be configured with popup alerts for certain events etc. So the next time instead of wading through a mass of browser windows and tabs just to find your email client, you can simply click on the Gmail app icon from your system tray.

Prism 1.0 can be used both as a Firefox extension and as a standalone application. When used as a Firefox extension, simply click on the Tools menu and select Convert to web application from the website which you want to convert into an application.

To get started with Prism simply click here. And if you want to learn more, just check out the video Mozilla recently released on how to create a Prism app:

Backup Firefox Passwords (Manually)

Every once in a while there arise a need to re-format out computers. One of the main reasons being that, over time our system becomes slow due to code rot. And during these situations, our main concern remains data backup.

Now data backup is still rather easy, you can simply burn all your data on a CD or a DVD with the help of a CD/DVD Writer and a Burning Software. But what about backing up the username and password of all the sites that you have setup on Firefox? If you are worried about this then I have got good news for you. Taking a backup of these is just the matter of a few minutes.

All you need to do is, go over to your Firefox profiles folder on your computer. You would be able to locate your Firefox profile folder from here. Inside your Firefox profile folder there would be another folder with a random name. Inside that folder select the files key3.db, signons2.txt and signons3.txt and take a backup of those files (preferably on a CD/DVD). The next time you install Firefox after formatting your computer, simply go over to your Firefox profile folder once again and paste those 3 files. Wasn't it simple? If you want, you can also transfer them to your laptop or any other computer where you want to have all the username/password data for your Firefox profile to be available.

Now if you are worried about how to take a backup of your bookmarks or export them to another browser, since Firefox 3 saves it's bookmarks as a JSON file by default, then here's how you can do that. And if you are a first time visitor, then subscribe to my RSS feed.

How To Locate The Firefox Profile Folder

Being able to locate your Firefox profile folder can be a bit tricky, yet it's very useful to know it's whereabouts. Here are the locations of your Firefox profile folder on different OS.

Windows 95 (without Desktop Update)
C:/Windows/Mozilla

Windows 95 (with Desktop Update)/98/Me
C:/Windows/Application Data/Mozilla

C:/Windows/Profiles/<Windows login/user name>/Application Data/Mozilla

Windows NT 4.x
C:/Winnt/Profiles/<Windows login/user name>/Application Data/Mozilla

Windows 2000 and XP
C:/Documents and Settings/<Windows login/user name>/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles

Windows Vista
C:/Users/<Windows login/user name>/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla

Unix
~/.mozilla/

Mac OS X
~/Library/Mozilla/

~/Library/Application Support/

You can also consult this Mozilla Knowledgebase article for further details.