Firefox Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 32. Work with Filtering Systems

Keep your web experience neat and tidy by
integrating properly with other Net watchers.

Security programs can interpose themselves between Firefox and the
network; this is especially common in organizational environments.
There are few such tools on Linux/Unixwhere tools do exist,
they are generally called
firewalls
or
daemonsbut
they are common on Windows. This hack reports briefly on what works
and what doesn't.

In general, Firefox works with such tools well. There are many
reports in the Mozilla community [Hack #97] about particular
tools' successes or failure, but
here's a summary: best practice requires that you
have the latest minor version of your filtering tool installed if you
want to interoperate with Firefox successfully.

You'll find a list of common
filtering
tools at http://yaggy.web1000.com/webads. Here are
some brief comments about such tools:

Ad blockers

At least the following Windows tools have been
reported interoperable:
AdSubtract,
atGuard, and
adKiller.
The popular Firefox extension AdBlock prevents
advertorial content from being downloaded, and once that feature is
enabled, no other ad-blocking tools should be required.

Security monitors

Tools like ZoneAlarm
may
complain about Firefox when it is first installed. Firefox
occasionally communicates with itself via sockets, and this is what
ZoneAlarm picks up. Configure
ZoneAlarm to permit this, or tell the users to
allow it when prompted. I know people who believe in Norton Internet
Security and other Norton tools, but I personally have never had any
success with them.

Download tools

Heavyweight download tools take care of big
downloads, such as movie clips and game demos, for you. Most of these
tools are well integrated with Firefox. I recommend Free Download
Manager (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org).

In addition to these tools, Firefox proxies [Hack #15] can be used to redirect web
requests to filtering proxy servers as required.