Flock Can Convert Your Fx Extensions

I use Flock for all my feeds but am disappointed that I could not get my favorite extension CoLT. Tonight I had done a search on the Flock Extensions site and this what was displayed:

No results were found for your search query.

Please try another or just upload a Firefox extension to convert it so that it will work with Flock.

When you click the above link you will be taken to an upload utility where you can either upload the Firefox Extension XPI file or the URL for the XPI file you want to convert to Flock. The site does have this warning in very large text: This is under heavy development right now and may not work!

I am happy to report I was successfully able to get CoLT to convert over to Flock which will make copy and pasting complete (text & URL) links in either HTML or BBCode format so much easier. On the Flock Extensions Page, this is being promoted as a future feature:

Very soon you will be able to add your favorite extensions and we’ll convert them on the fly for you. Extensions written for other platforms can still be used in the Flock browser, but there is no guarantee that they will work correctly.

Fx Not Accessing Secure Sites

A while back I posted about The Firefox 2 SSL 2.0 Tweak. Still some folks continue to have issues with Firefox not being able to access secure sites. SSL (Secure Socket Layers) is a protocol that secures communication over the Internet, which most banking sites and online stores require to send sensitive information. Here are some things to check if you are still having issues:

1. Since SSL requires Firefox to use a loopback connection, check to be sure your firewall is not blocking INCOMING connections to Firefox. This is by far the most common reason for this issue. I had this happened to me one morning, I couldn’t get on to my bank’s or communications provider’s bill-pay sites, but I could access everything else. For some odd reason my firewall program stopped allowing incoming connections to Firefox.
2. Check your SSL settings (see link in item #7 for detailed instructions). Make sure “Use SSL 3.0” and “Use TLS 1.0” are both checked
3. Using a manual proxy? (see link in item #7 for detailed instructions) Be sure “Use this proxy for all protocols” and “SSL proxy” are set to correct values.
4. Also be sure “Do not use OCSP for certificate validation” is checked (see link in item #7 for detailed instructions).
5. Clear your cache. (see link in item #7 for detailed instructions). This many times will fix several problems.
6. Boston University has created an SSL Test site, which will check to see if cookies and JavaScript are enabled. It also checks to see if SSL encryption works and if SSL addresses match non-SSL addresses. If your browser passes then there may be an issue with the site itself.
7. Review the mozillaZine Knowledge Base Article: SSL is Disabled. This provides detailed instructions for items 2-5 and details a couple more possible fixes.

A couple new features…

I’ve added a couple new features to the right side bar:

• Posts of Interest: These are posts which are great reference guides and contain a wealth of Firefox information. Currently there are only two posts included: Firefox 2.0 Tweaks Guide and Fx Year In Review. More should be added in the future. Note: If there is a post you feel should be included let me know, it is easy for me to overlook some posts.
• Latest From The Guru: Lists the last 5 posts in order as they appear in the blog (not necessarily as they were published). On rare occasions in order to give a particular post that day top priority, I will publish later posts with an earlier time stamp. Also there are times I have server issues with WordPress and sometimes a post does not appear for a few hours and some new posts may have already been added. Look here to make sure you haven’t missed any posts.