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Mozilla and eBay International AG today announced they are working together to improve the online auction experience for people in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Together, Mozilla and eBay are collaborating on new technology and approaches to enable eBay users to stay up to date with their auctions more easily from within Firefox regardless of where they are on the Web.

“We are excited to work with eBay to improve the online auction experience with Firefox,” said Christopher Beard, vice president, marketing and product management, Mozilla. “Firefox provides a robust platform for integration with leading Web services, which we’re pleased to extend through our partnership with eBay.”

“We are thrilled to be working with Mozilla and to explore a great opportunity that benefits both our communities of users,” said Harald Eisenächer, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, eBay in Germany. “Our work together will help the great community of Firefox users more easily use eBay and stay up to date with their auctions.”

Mozilla and eBay will provide more details on their collaboration in the second calendar quarter of 2007.

Have a favorite website that still thinks its 1999? Resizes your browser window into a small awkward space? It can be annoying. You have that big display, and you should be able to use it. Thankfully you can prevent this. Just go into Tools-> Options and select the “Content” tab. Then click on the “Advanced” button across from “Enable JavaScript”. Uncheck the “Move or resize existing windows” checkbox. Now you don’t have to deal with this.

The Mozilla Calendar Project released Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 today, a major update to their free, open source calendar extension and calendar client. Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 offer a major user interface update, event invitations, printing improvements and better integration with Mozilla Thunderbird.

Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 are immediately available for Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems in 22 languages as free downloads from the Calendar Project homepage.

Now when you download Firefox, you can use a master password: this allows you to use one password to provide security, but without needing to remember all those others you have. To set one go into the
“Tools” menu and select “Options” and click on the “Security” tab. Now check where it says “Use a master password”. You’ll be prompted to create one. It will even show you how good your password is.

Some of you may know this one, but some may not. You can middle click (press the mouse wheel) on any link to open it in a new tab. To close a tab, just middle click on the tab. This is often much faster than going to the red “X”.

By default Firefox only shows the tab bar when multiple tabs are open. This is done to keep the UI simple, and maximize the space available for the page itself. Other browsers such as IE 7 keep the Tab UI visible at all times. If you prefer this, you can change it by going into Tools -> Options and clicking on the “Tabs” tab. Then check the box next to “Always show the tab bar”.

If you’re changing browsers, or if you simply like having more than one on your system, there’s an easy way to pull your other browsers’ settings into Firefox. When you use the program’s handy import tool, Firefox will grab the options, bookmarks, history, passwords, and other data from browsers like Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera. It’s a real time-saver.

The Import function pops up during the initial installation of Firefox. Pick the browser you want to import your settings from, select what settings you want to import, and that’s it. You’re done. If you skipped this step when you first installed Firefox, just choose the Import function from the File menu.

But if you truly want to capture the fresh-from-scratch experience of switching browsers, you may want to uncheck the Cookies, Browsing History, Saved Form History, and Saved Passwords. Internet Options and Favorites are helpful to have when starting out, but this might be a good opportunity to do some spring cleaning of your stale old saved information.

Just another reason to download Firefox.

Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, use about:config to add the Intefer preference browser.cache.memory.capacity, and set the value:

-1

(default) Determine the amount of memory cache dynamically.

0

None.

n

Memory capacity in kilobytes. For example: 4096.

To disable the memory cache completely, use about:config to set the preference browser.cache.memory.enable to false.

This advanced tip makes it possible to run Firefox from removable media, such as a USB memory stick. This will allow you to run Firefox with your personal settings from any computer, even those that don’t have Firefox installed. It has only been tested on Windows XP/2000. The basic instructions are as follows:

1. Copy the Firefox application folder and your profile folder to the removable medium. In this example we will use R:\Firefox for the application folder and R:\FFProfile as the profile folder, assuming the drive letter for the removable media is R:.
2. Create a simple batch file called R:\Firefox.bat with the following line:

   start Firefoxfirefox.exe -profile FFProfile

3. Optionally, disable the disk cache to reduce the amounts of file writes to the removable storage by using about:config to set browser.cache.disk.enable to false.

The reason why a batch file is needed instead of a simple shortcut is that a shortcut uses absolute paths, and since the actual drive letter for the removable media may change depending on which computer it is plugged into, the relative path used in the batch file is guaranteed to work anywhere.