Some, you may have seen many times, such as the typical 404 or 408 error, to others that seem obscure such as the 503 error.

In most cases, you can simply refresh the page again by hitting the F5 key on your keyboard, while other errors will have you scratching your head in confusion.

So the next time you do come across a browser error while surfing the Internet, here are some tips on how to deal with them along with an explanation of each error.

404: Not Found – The most popular and frequent browser error message you will see. This type of error message can be customized by the site''s Webmaster, and may appear as The page cannot be found, or
Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage (if you use Internet Explorer browser).

No matter what the error message says, the 404 error always means that the page you are trying to reach can not be found.

Resolution: Try pressing CTRL+F5 on the keyboard to refresh the page and bypass your browser cache. If this fails, check the URL for any syntax errors. Sometimes if the link was clicked on from a different website (than the target site) the link itself may be incorrect. In this case, go to the website where the page exist and seach for the web page.

408: Request Timeout – The 408 Request Timeout browser error typically means the request you sent to the website took longer than the site's server was prepared to wait. In other words, your connection with the web site "timed out".

More often than not, this is a temporary error, usually due to the site that you are trying to view may be slow to respond or there is a problem with the network connection between you and the remote site..

Resolution: A simple page refresh (CTRL+F5) will fix the problem (resources become availabe on the server of the site you want to view). If not, verify that the connection between you and the Internet is still functioning by trying to connect to another site (such as Google or Yahoo).

If you can reach other sites, give it some time and come back later to the original site and see if they fixed the problem.

400: Bad Request – This browser error means that the request you sent to the website server was somehow malformed therefore the server was unable to understand or process the request.

Resolution: More than likely the URL was typed wrong or the link (that you clicked) points to a URL with some kind of mistake in it. Try verifing the that the URL is correct or go to the website and search for the page.

401 – Unauthorized – There is no guessing what this error means…the request requires user authentication. resource.

This is typically seen on Corporate networks with a proxy server or with sites that protect their content and require a user account and password to access.

Resolution: Make sure you have access with a valid user account and password. If you are not sure, contact your Network administrator or the site's Webmaster for assistance.

NOTE: A 403: Forbidden error message can also indicate authentication access is needed. Typically this browser error message will appear when trying to view a web site directory listing that you are not allowed to view.

500: Internal Error – This error message indicates that there is something wrong at the Web site itself (for example the site's server is not functioning correctly or it's unable to provide you with the requested Web page).

Resolution: In this case, it's best to contact the site's Webmaster or administrator, or try again later in the hopes that they have noticed the problem and fixed it themselves.

Failed DNS Lookup or Host Unknown – If you come across DNS errors, it always means that the Domain (www.google.com) can't be converted into a valid Internet address.

DNS in this message stands for Domain Name System.  Addresses on the Internet take the form of a string of numbers. For instance, www.watchingthenet.com is the domain name of this Web site and it's IP address is  207.218.240.194. If the DNS servers your computer or router is pointing to (for name resolution), cannot resolve the name to an IP address, you will see this error message.

Resolution: Check that the Domain you typed is correct. If you did, wait a few seconds and try again. You can also use http://network-tools.com DNS Lookup tool and verify that the domain is valid. If it is, try connecting using the IP address of the Domain.

Bad file request – This error indicates you've requested a page that contains a form with a feature your browser can't support.

Resolution; Unfortunately there is not much you can do other than contact the Webmaster of the error message and ask for assistance.

503 Service Unavailable – This error message will appear when the remote server hosting the Web page is not active.

Now, this message does not mean that the site is permanently unavailable. It may indicate the site is very busy, the web page is being updated or maintenance is being performed (site is temporarily unavailable).

Resolution: Your best bet is to try the page later. Also check the connection between your computer and the Internet is still accessible by connecting to Google or Yahoo.

As you can see, most  browser error messages are simple to fix, once you understand their causes. There are many more errors that can occur, but for the most part, these are the most common errors you will come accross while surfing the internet daily.

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One annoying feature is wasting un-necessary real estate to include a new tab button on the tab bar.

All the button does is add a new tab when clicked, which is really not needed since you already have three options to add another tab, with the easiest method by pressing CTRL+T on the keyboard (the other two ways are double clicking on an empty tab bar area or right clicking on the tab bar and selecting New Tab).

A fourth method is not needed (yet another reason why Firefox is bloated).

Fortunately Firefox is customizable and removing the tab button requires a simple fix.

Removing the tab button requires adding a line to the userChrome.css file in your Firefox profile folder.

• First you will need to navigate to your Firefox profile directory and look for the chrome folder.

On XP, navigate to: \Documents and Settings\[yourusername]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile.default]\chrome

On Vista and Windows 7, navigate to: \Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile.default]\chrome

If you had previously customize Firefox, more than likely you have an exisitng userChrome.css file already. If not, just create an empty file named userChrome.css

• Next, open the file using Notepad and add the following line:

.tabs-newtab-button {display: none;}

NOTE: If you already had an exisitng file, then just add the line at the bottom of the file.

• When finished, save the file and close it.

• Then close and re-open Firefox.

If everything was done correctly, the tab button should now be gone from Firefox's tab bar.

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Instead, all you can do is clear or change the allocated space that is reserve for the cache along with modifying some offline settings.. To see these settings, click on Tools \ Options from the menu, then click on the Advanced and Network tabs.

This is some what surprising since there are several benefits with moving the cache location, such as better browsing performance, faster video loading, more disk space for the cache or just being able to get to the darn cache directory.

By default, Firefox cache directory is buried deep under your user profile folder. You can easily view the location by typing about:cache in the address bar (for more information, see – How To View Contents Of Firefox Cache Location).

So, how can you move the disk cache to another hard drive location?

It's actually simple.

• Just type about:config in the address bar (location bar) and click on the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button (to acknowledge the warning message).

• On the config page,  right click anywhere on a blank space and select New \ String.

• In the New string value box, enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory for the preference name and click OK.

• Then for the string value, type the new location for the cache directory and click OK. For example: C:\ffcache or D:\Firefox\diskcache to move it to another hard drive.

NOTE: Firefox will create the folder for you along with the sub-folder called cache.

Now close Firefox and re-open it.

You should see the new folder on your hard drive and verify the location by typing about:cache on the address bar (location bar). If everything looks good, you can delete the old cache directory (if you want to).

One thing you should be aware of with creating new strings and values in about:config. You cannot delete them.

Instead, you just need to modify the value. So if you want to move the cache directory to another folder or to it's original location, just modify the value of the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory by re-editing using about:config.

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Free services such as TinyURL, is one example of how you can create a tiny (short) URL when posting on web sites that tend to cut off long URL's.

The problem for the visitor who visit web sites that display short URL's, is that they have no clue to where the link will take them once they click on it.

Now there are solutions available, such as TinyURL, that offer a preview feature or plugins for Firefox that will translate the URL to the real address of the link. And while all these solutions work fine, either they require installing a plugin (which don't work if you use Internet Explorer) or are time consuming.

Instead there is a better solution that works with any browser that you are using and requires no installation.

LongURLPlease.com has a nice solution in the form of a boolmarklett, that will display the real address of the URL link on any web page with one click.

All you need to do is visit LongURLPlease.com and drag their bookmarklet to your browser's toolbar.

Now, when you visit a web page that has a funny looking URL, just click on the Long URL Please bookmarklet and you should now see the real address of the link.

No more guessing where that link is going to take you into cyberspace after clicking on those funny looking URL's (obviously not all links will be converted to the real address, but most will).

If you do use Firefox and prefer to use an addon, Long URL Please does offer one. Just visit their site and look for the button Install Firefox Extension on their home page.

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I noticed since I upgraded to Firefox 3.02 a short while ago, viewing videos from YouTube and other video sites slowed Firefox down to a crawl, leaving me with no other choice but to close Firefox. Even that became a frustrating experience since Firefox would utilize CPU utilization at one hundred percent, and trying to bring up Task Manager to Kill the process (firefox.exe) took forever.

Since upgrading Flash from version nine to version ten, I have not experienced any slow downs and life has been good (knock on wood).

To check which version of Shockwave Flash is installed, open Firefox, then from the menu click on Tools \ Add-ons.

In the Add-ons window, click on the Plugins tab and look for Shockwave Flash.

If you running a version lower than 10, you will want to upgrade. To do so, go to Adobe site and follow the instructions for downloading and upgrading to the latest version of Flash Player.

When completed, open Firefox and check the version of Flash (it should be similar to the above screen shot) and view some videos. You will notice a difference after viewing a few videos.

Now this solution may or may not work for you. Currently I am running Firefox 3.04 on Vista (SP1). If this solution still does not work for you, the quickest way to troubleshoot is to first run Firefox in Safe Mode. When launching Firefox in Safe Mode, all Extensions (Add-ons) and Themes are disabled.

• To start in Firefox in Safe Mode (instructions are for Windows PC's)

• If Firefox is running, close it.

• Click on the Start \ All Programs and navigate to the Mozilla Firefox folder.

• In the Mozilla Firefox folder, select Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode).

• Firefox should start up with a Firefox Safe Mode dialog.

Now view some videos and see if Firefox slows down. If it does, then the probable cause is an Extension (Add-ons) or Theme. To troubleshoot which is the cause, refer to Troubleshooting extensions and themes on Mozilla web site.

While running Firefox in Safe mode, Plugins are not disabled (only Extensions and Themes). So if you are still experiencing problems, try disabling Plugins by following the steps below:

• Open the Add-ons Window by clicking the Tools menu and selecting Add-ons

• Click on the Plugins icon at the top of the Add-ons window.

• Click each plugin in the list and then click Disable.

• Test for your problem.

If the problem does occur, it's time to upgrade all the plugins in your list to the latest version by visitng the site for each plugin and follow the instructions for upgrading.

If you problem still exists after doing everything that I have outlined above, your best bet is to post your problem in the Mozilla support forums for Firefox.

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Fortunately you can easily add more search engines to the available list by clicking on the pull down arrow (next to the search box) and selecting Find More Providers…

A page will display, listing search engines and categories such as Web Search and Topic Search that you can choose from.

Now that's helpful, but what if you want to add a search provider, from your favorite web site, such as Watching The Net?

…that's even easier to do. Here's how…

Using the same method as above, click on the pull down arrow (next to the search box) and click on Find More Providers…

To the right you will see a yellow Create Your Own… form.

Now to add a customize search engine to the list, we'll add one from WTN by first opening up Watching The Net in another tab in IE.

Next, enter TEST (in all capital letters) in WTN's search box (below header) and click the Go button.

On the search result page, copy the URL from Internet Explorer's address field…

…and paste it in the field in step 3 of Create Your Own… form. Also don't forget to give it a name in step 4. Then click on the Install button, followed by clicking on the Add Provider button to confirm adding the new search engine (in the pop up window).

That's it! To make it the default search engine, just click on the pull down arrow (next to the search field) and click on Watching The Net.

If you want to add any other search engines from your other favorite sites, just follow the same steps from above.

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Have you ever accessed a web page and notice that the content is the same on the page as a day or two ago? Or maybe you manage a website or are a blogger and need to test a change that you just made, but you don't want to go through the hassle of clearing Firefox's entire cache each time just to reload the page without accessing it in it's cache directory?

Instead, you can use one of Firefox's keyboard shortcut to to bypass checking the cache and force it to reload the page as if you never visited the site in the past.

Just press CTRL + F5 on your keyboard to have Firefox override the cache and reload the page.

By doing so you can quickly see any updates to a web page, but still benefit from having your cache contents available when browsing the Net.

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One usability feature that I really like is with tab browsing and the capability to automatically group tabs by their source. If you open a search page and then right-click and select to open new pages from the search results list, all open tabs (from the same source) will have the same color code on the tab. This will make it much easier to keep track of specific pages when many tabs are open.

Another improvement with tabs is with crash prevention, where one buggy tab can cause all other tabs to be shutdown. IE 8 now implements a feature called tab isolation that prevents this from occurring since all tabs run in separate processes and eliminates one tab from effecting all other open tabs.

Other improvements include smarter search features such as being able to select different search engines on the fly and perform search related tasks directly from a web page, privacy and security enhancements, along with better compability functionality.

For an in-depth overview of these features in Internet Explorer 8, check out ZDNet article "Internet Explorer 8 gets a massive makeover". Also don't forget to check out IE 8 screen shot gallery that accompany the article.

If you want to play around with the second beta release if IE 8, you can download it from Microsoft site at the following location – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/

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The fast way to see if it really is an add-on that is causing a problem, is to disable all add-ons.

To do this you'll need to start up IE with out any add-ons enabled, which can be accomplished using one of the  several methods shown below.

The easiest way on XP is to right click on the IE shortcut on your desktop, by selecting Properties then Start Without Add-ons.

But for Vista, by default, there is no IE icon on the desktop. So there are two options.

Using the Accessories Menu

The first option is to click on Start \ Accessories \ Internet Explorer (No Add-ons). IE will then open with all add-ons disabled.

You can also open IE from the Systems Tools menu on XP.

Modify Registry

The second option is to add the the IE icon to your desktop using a registry tweak.

Open regedit.exe by using the Start menu search or Run box, then browse to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel

NOTE: Follow the below steps exactly as specified and do not make any changes other than specified while in the Registry. Always create a System Restore point or backup of you Computer when making configuration changes.

• Look for the key named "{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}" on the right side.
• Then set the value to 0. If the key does not exist, you will need to create a new 32-bit DWORD value with the same name.
• Close regedit when finished.
• If needed, right click on the desktop and select Refresh to make the IE icon appear.
  

NOTE: If you are using the Classic Start menu, you should create this value under the ClassicStartMenu key instead of the NewStartPanel key.

You should now see the IE icon on your desktop and can select to start up IE with out add-ons enabled (as shown above).

If you decide later, and want to remove the icon, just set the registry key value to 1 and refresh the Desktop.

Then There Is Always The Command Prompt

If you don't want to mess around in the registry, or navigate through menus, you can easily start up IE from the command prompt using the following command as shown (make sure to include the quotes):

"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore" -extoff

Internet Explorer will now open with all add-ons disabled. If the problem you were having does not occur, the next step is to disable each add-on one by one (Tools \ Manage Add-ons \ Enable or Disable Add-ons…) until you find the culprit.

Once you do, leave it disbaled and contact or go to the developer site and see if their are any problems reported.

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It turns out there are three locations, known as device's that makes up the cache used by Firefox. They are Memory cache device, Disk cache device and Offline cache device.

In case you are unfamiliar with the "cache", it is a location that Firefox uses to store web pages, images, etc, that's used to speed up loading and displaying web pages. So instead of downloading a page from a web site server, if the page has not changed, Firefox will check it's cache and load the page if it exist.

Now, you may not care much about what's in the cache, but if you are having problems and need to check the content of the cache, Firefox provides a command that will display all locations.

All you need to do is type the following command in the location bar (address bar) and press enter.

about:cache

You will then see the following page with information about the three cache locations and how much space is in use.

What's useful about this information is that it shows you how much is in use and the maximum allowed storage, in addition to listed the directory location of the each cache (except for the Memory cache device). You will notice Firefox reports the size as KiB which stands for Kilobytes.

To view the contents of a cache, click on the List Cache Entries link.

To see more information about a link, click on it's URL. (To view the link actual web page or image click on the link on the second page.)

You will notice for the Memory cache, that images and your profile images (chrome) are stored, while the Disk cache is a mixed of pages, images, etc.

You can separately clear the Disk and Offline caches by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+DEL and selected which items you want to delete.

But you can't clear the Memory cache. To do that you need to close Firefox and re-open it.

Instead of doing that, if you are troubleshooting a problem you can force Firefox to bypass the cache and reload the page by pressing CTRL and F5 or press the SHIFT key and click on the Reload button on the navigation toolbar.

While Fireox's cache is not glamourous, knowing how to view it's information can sometimes resolve strange problems with displaying web pages and keep you surfing the Net trouble free.

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And it seems there is no light at the end of the tunnel with the latest security update to version 3.01.

With Firefox, you can view all past crashes to help with troubleshooting problems. Just type the following command in the location (address) bar and press enter.

about:crashes

Fortunately for me, I have not had much problems (and try to stay away from loading too many plugins), so I have no crash reports to display.

But having this available can help with troubleshooting current and past Firefox problems. If needed you also have the option to remove reports by clicking the button.

Which makes me curious as to why it's now available (built-in) with version 3 and not with previous versions. It almost seems like the Mozilla developers were expecting troubles with this version.

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If you made the leap to Firefox 3 and find yourself searching your Windows Live Hotmail settings to enable the preview pane, you can stop looking. The bad news is that Hotmail's Full Version is Incompatible With Firefox 3.

After logging on to your Hotmail mailbox the following message is displayed:

"You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies".

Unfortunately clearing your browser's cache and cookies does not resolve the problem. Neither does switching to the full version.

According to a post on Slashdot, the fault apparently lies with Hotmail, not the new version of Firefox (since the preview pane still functions with Firefox 2).

So for now, Firefox 3 fans are out of luck until it is fixed. In the meantime, you still can access your Hotmail mailbox, just with out the preview pane.

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One big improvement with Firefox 3 compared to previous versions, is with selecting multiple areas of text on a web page. In previous versions, if you wanted to select multiple text areas, you needed to find an add-on or deal with the limited built in functionality.

Now with Firefox 3, you can easily select multiple discontinuous areas at once, select an entire paragraph, or select multiple words.

Selecting Multiple Areas Of Text

With this new option you can make an initial selection as usual and keep adding text chunks by pressing the CTRL key (Command key on Macs) while making additional selections.

Just highlight an area, then move your mouse to another area of text that you want to select, press the CTRL key and drag the mouse over the area of text.

After selecting the text areas, right click on an area and select copy (or press CTRL+C) and the text will be copied to the clip board where you can paste it in a text file, document, etc…

Select An Entire Paragraph

When you have a need to select an entire paragragh, just move your mouse pointer to the beginning of the paragraph and triple-click. The entire paragraph will be selected.

Unfortuanatly you can not continue to select other paragraphs using the CTRL key.

As a work around, what you can do, is select the largest paragraph by triple-clicking, then use the CTRL key (and drag over the paragraph) to select other paragraphs.

Selecting Multiple Words

While you can single click and drag to select multiple words or an area of text, double-clicking and dragging will select each word, one at a time.

At first you may not realize why you would ever need to use this functionality when you can just single click and drag over an area text.

But it will come in handy when you just need to select text at the end of a line, where single-click and dragging has the tendency to continue selecting text on the next line when you don't want it to. Double-clicking and selecting word by word gives you greater control in those situations.

While Firefox 3 main features will over shadow small improvements made to the browser, you will find the new functionality with selecting multiple text areas, a big improvement for every day usage.

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One thing that frustrated me the most with Firefox 2 was trying to view security information for individual sites.

You had to look in multiple locations to view cookie, password and permission information for a site, where some of the information is mixed together with other sites. Or, end up degrading performance on Windows computers by using using add-ons to accomplish the same task.

Fortunately those days other thanks to Firefox's 3 Site Identification feature.

Site Identification provides one click site information that displays Identity verification (who actually owns the site) of a site, by clicking on the site favicon in the location bar.

To dig deeper for information about a site, you can click on the More Information button where all information about the site is neatly displayed together, without the clutter, and organized into four tabs: General, Media, Permissions, and Security.

Clicking on the Security tab, will display updated Privacy & History information such as if you previously visited the web site, if the site dropped any cookies on your computer and any passwords that were used.

Note that this information is current only from the time you last cleared your browser history.

If any information exist, you can view cookie and password information by clicking on the View Cookies and View Saved Passwords for that site only.

More information can be found in the Permissions tab, where you can make configuration changes allowing images to load, block or allow pop-ups, configure cookie settings and if Extensions and Themes should be allowed or blocked.

The Media tab let you control if individual Images and background objects should be allowed or blocked. While the Address section list all URL's used to display images and is great way to view what connections to other web sites are being made to display images when visiting a site.

While you can find the same settings, configurations and information in Tools\ Options area, Firefox's Site Identification feature is a major improvement and provides better management for customizing individual site information out of the box.

But there is one feature of Site Identification you may not immediately notice. When visiting a site that uses SSL encryption (HTTPS), Firefox no longer displays the padlock lock icon. Instead the web site favicon will display one of three colors:

• Grey – indicates no identity information
• Blue – indicates basic identity information
• Green – indicates complete identity information

You can find out more information on how Firefox handles site security and specifics of each indicator by reading Mozilla's Deb Richardson article – Firefox 3: Site Identification button.

In the meantime, the latest version of Firefox is a major improvement over it's previous version, and a big time improvement for Windows users with performance.

So what are you waiting for? Upgrade to the latest version at Mozilla.com or you can run Firefox 3 Without Removing Version 2.

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Need a way to keep track of time when scheduling meetings at work or when calling family members who live in another time zone? Firefox add-on, FoxClocks is the perfect solution.

FoxClocks lets you keep an eye on the time any where in the world, including your local time, by putting small clocks that you choose, in your status bar.

With FoxClocks, you can choose from a set of useful time formats or create your own custom formats.

To install, go to FoxClocks add-on page at mozilla.org and click on the Add to Firefox button.

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