Google redirect to incorrect country domain: Fix on Firefox

Google servers identify the country of the googler and redirect to the relevant country domain. They may be using the IP of the request to locate the country before the redirect. However there are situations many googler getting redirected to incorrect country domains. For example, even though our requests are generating from Sri Lanka, most of the time we are redirected to another country (Taiwan) domain. Some misconfigurations at the routers or at the ISP may cause this issue, which makes it harder for a general browser user to get that resolved. This automatic redirect mechanism does not depend on the browser used.

Following is a quick fix to this issue. However this will only work on Firefox browser, sorry friends if you are on another browser.

Install Redirector extension

Redirector is a small extension available for Firefox, and it supports most of the versions ranging from 2.0 to 3.0.*. (we are using latest Firefox; 3.0.3). You can freely install it from here.
If you are a newbie to Firefox extensions; just click the "Add to Firefox" button in the web page and click "Install now" in the pop up box. You must restart Firefox, to complete this installation.

Now you will see a small icon in status bar (bottom right corner) as shown here. This is the redirector extension we installed above. You can enable/disable this extension just by clicking on this icon.

Configure a redirect

Right clicking on that Redirect icon will display a settings panel. Click "Add.." button to add a new redirect.

Now we have to fill 3 options in this new redirect box.

1). Include Pattern: Here you must try the incorrect Google country domain url. As our incorrect country domain is Taiwan, we set the following as "Include Pattern".
http://www.google.com.tw/*

2). Redirect to: This is the place where you specify the correct country domain url. As we live in Sri Lanka, following is the redirect url for us.
http://www.google.lk/$1

3). Pattern Type: Set this to "Wildcard".

It's done, quite simple. Now the Redirect settings box will look somewhat similar to the above image.

Now try and load Google home page, and it will display the country domain home page you set in the redirect settings.

Chrome or Firefox - which browser to choose?

Chrome is the newest baby in browser family or the next competitor in browser war. What ever it is, Google released their browser named Chrome. But Mozilla Firefox is the most popular browser in the world right now and Google was the major supporter for Firefox. Even while supporting it, they have built their own browser free and open source. Here we are looking at the two browsers and trying to compare them to decide whether to switch to the new one or not leaving our old but fascinating friend Firefox?

Interesting features

1. One Process per each tab
Tab is not another thread running inside the browser process; there is a separate process per tab. Even if one tab crashes, the rest of the tabs will be running as nothing happened; which was not available in Firefox. This is one of the most interesting features.

2. New tab is filled with useful links
For a new tab in Firefox, you can load a predefined page, a blank page or a predefined set of page links (using an extension). But you would be much happier to see a set of links that you dealt with in recent past; Chrome comes exactly with that. The new tab will show a set of links;

• Most visited pages
• Recently closed
• Recently Bookmarked

I do not think the last one will be much useful, but the other two will be pretty handy.

3. Rich Location bar
Location bar in Chrome is a combination of location bar & search bar. You can directly type a url or a search keyword, also it comes with suggestions.
Using separate location bar per each tab is also an interesting move, each tab looks like individual browser instances; while in firefox you have single location bar shared by all tabs.

4. Speed
Stephen Shankland at CNet has posted an article on speed, and it tells most of the details. However Brendan at MozillaZine has published another set of testing statistics. So we'll have to check some statistics done by an independent party to get a clear view. Anyway Chrome is starting up so fast compared to any other browser.

Some complains

Since Chrome is still in beta, this may be a good time to suggest some features or improvements. Following are some complains that we have.

1. No warning in closing
When multiple tabs are opened Firefox is used to show a warning in closing the browser, but Chrome does not and closes immediately. Since people can accidentally close the browser better to add it soon.

2. Displaying different fonts
Some of the fonts are not displayed smoothly as Firefox used to do. Above image shows how the same content is displayed in two of these browsers.

3. No XML viewer
May be it is not a must to have a XML viewer in a browser, but we are used to it. Firefox and IE both have good XML viewers, but Chrome lacks it. Similar to this Opera and Safari also do not have this feature. Many people happened to work with XML files every day and having an XML viewer in the browser is an added advantage.

4. Security issues
Chrome has exposed to a set of known security issues by using an older version of WebKit, which had already been fixed. Anyway we expect Google to fix it soon.

Main Concern

Above all of these our main concern is the lack of support for extension development. We are used to live with some great extensions with Firefox, which we are not experiencing with Chrome. Since it is still in beta version, we should wait for extension support. However no API is released for extension development, users will have to wait longer than expected to see some useful extensions. There are so many extensions that makes our lives easier and better. Few of them are;

• NoScrip
• Adblock
• Gmail Manager

What are the other reasons that you are not switching to Chrome straightaway?

QuickTime security issue fixed with Firefox 2.0.0.7 new security release

Firefox 2.0.0.7 has released a new security release again. As addicted users of FF, we are really happy how Firefox progresses. When ever some issues are fixed, they provide us with a new release. Also user does not need to think twice in installing the new release as it does not add more issues to your existing installation. When Internet Explorer (IE) 7 came out users had issues; also still we have so many issues with IE7, but not with Firefox.

With this release they fixed the bug related to QuickTime; "Code execution via QuickTime Media-link files".

QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser with arbitrary command-line options. When the default browser is Firefox 2.0.0.6 or earlier use of the -chrome option allowed a remote attacker to run script commands with the full privileges of the user. This could be used to install malware, steal local data, or otherwise corrupt the victim's computer. Read more

We really appreciate quick response to security issues like that.

New Firefox release 2.0.0.6 - Security update

A new version of Firefox, 2.0.0.6 has been released today. This is another security update. And they released the 2.0.0.5 version just 13 days ago. That's why I really love Firefox. When ever an issue is reported, they work on it and provide us with a new version so that we are on the safe side always. And this is not the case with some other browsers where people have to wait months and years for some fixes. So thanks guys for all your dedication on making a better product.

Read the release note for more info.

Extend Firefox Contest - Winners

Extend Firefox Contest winners are announced, a set of great developers are appreciated. Congradulations to all.

Grand Price

Best New Extension Overall:
Reveal by Michael Wu

Best Upgraded Extension:
Web Developer by Chris Pederick

Best Use of New Firefox 1.5 Features:
Firefox Showcase by Josep del Rio

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Extension Evaluation

Reveal Extension

Reveal allows you to see thumbnails of pages in your session history and quickly find the page you want. Reveal also includes a magnifying glass to help you see everything. Try it now - it comes with a quick tour of all features. Screenshots do not fully capture the experience of using Reveal.

As Reveal is an extension that I'm not familiar, I installed and experienced it.
It is really easy to use, as a small tutor comes with it so that anybody can easily pick up the idea. Thanks and Congradulations Michael Wu.


The thumbnails of my browser looked like above.

Related Topics:
Extend Firefox Contest finalists

Source
addons.mozilla.org

Extend Firefox Contest finalists

The finalists of the firefox extension contest has been announced!!!

There are many extensions that I am using very much. So here are some comments about some of the extensions that are selected for the final contest.



Adblock by Ben Karel

Block ads including Flash ads from their source. Right click on an ad and select Adblock to block ads. Hit the status-element and see what has or hasn't been blocked.

Now there's another good enhancement for ad blocks named Adblock Plus.
It provides the ability to get the ad list managed at Filterset.G. (For that you need Adblock Filterset.G Updater extension).

Firefox Showcase by Josep del Rio

View open Tabs and Windows with Showcase. You can use it in two ways: global mode (F12) or local mode (Shift + F12). In global mode, a new window will be opened with thumbnails of the pages you've opened in all windows. In local mode, only content in tabs of your current window will be shown. You can also right click in those thumbnails to perform the most usual operations on them. Mouse middle button can be used to zoom a thumbnail, although other actions can be assigned to it.

This is a pretty useful extension which shows thumbnails of all the pages that you have loaded currently. I like this extension.

What's missing?
I think one of the greatest extension is missing in the finalist list. It is the Tab Mix Plus.

Tab Mix Plus 0.3.0.4, by CPU

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

This is one of the greatest extensions I have ever used as it provide so many features to manage tabs.

Related Topics:
If you think Internet Explorer is great, read this

Firefox Browser

The Firefox browser is an excellent browser among the availables today. I found an interesting article that compares the Firefox browser and the IE browser (Internet Explorer).

So of the interesting features are;
- Tabbed browsing
- Popup blocking
- Prevent scripts from doing various things
- More control over text zooming
- Block images from third party sites
- Cross-platform
- Open Source
- Huge range of extensions and ease of installing extensions

Read all the 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.

I installed some more extensions for Firefox today which are listed below.

- CustomizedGoogle
Adds a selected set of search sites like yahoo, ask jeeva,.. to your google search result page. Also provide an easy customization.
- Tab X
This is an extension I was looking for. This adds a close button to each browser tab which is not availble in default Firefox.
- Gmail Notifier
Browser notifies for new mails. Still only the new mail arrival is shown, but showing the mail headings would improve the extensions popularity.
- Resize Search Box
Another feature that I was expecting from the default Firefox installation, how ever now I can resize the search box at the top right corner.
- Show IP
This shows the IP of the site.
- Flash Block
Allows the user to decide whether to play or stop the flash contents in the site.

What is your idea on these extensions?