Sunny Wu’s Blogging Zone

I have been using Mozilla Firefox for a few years already. One of the best feature which Firefox excels in is that it allow developers to create “add-on”, a small software that add new features, and this leads to innovation in Firefox customization such that a lot of great useful add-ons are improving the Firefox Internet browsing experience. Locationbar² is one of them. It provides multiple useful features:

Increase the location bar readability

Using an example below, normally, an address is shown like this:

With Locationbar², it is improved to this:

Basically, the website’s domain name is shown more obviously, with the grayed out subdomain and spaces to separate with the rest of the address. It also hides out the protocol name (like http, https).

However, this will not affect you from copying the address - once you put your mouse pointer on top of the address bar, you will be presented the address in the usual format.

Easier phishing detection

Phishing is a Internet scam that basically misdirect people to give out confidential information to “fake” websites. I will use the following example to highlight how Locationbar² can help users to detect fake website.

I got this email today “from” Westpac” which wants me to login to its website to confirm some info:

If I click the “Click here” link, it opens a seemingly innocent looking banking login web page:

But if you notice the address bar:

It clearly shows that the domain name of this website is “form2700.com”, not the typical “westpac.com.au”. It uses “online.westpac.com.au” as a sub-domain name which pre-pends the real-fake domain name. Without Locationbar², it can easily mislead a user by the word westpac and also the not-so-obvious “form2700.com” website, like:

That’s why this is an excellent feature for phishing detection.

Mouse-click to select the whole address

Go to File Menu->Tools->Addons->Locationbar2 Preferences, and tick the “Click selects all” box, whenever you click your (left) mouse button on the address bar, the address will be automatically selected and you can do a quick “Ctrl-C” or choose “Copy” from the Edit menu to copy the address to wherever you want, e.g. to your Email client or Word document.

I find this option very convenient for address copying.

Conclusion

I would recommend anyone to try this out, especially for the casual computer users, who may need to be more aware in terms of verifying the web pages they are directed is whether legitimate or not. Also, there are other customizable settings which can be used to improve the address formatting that any users can manipulate to their liking.

You can download this plug-in here.

If you have not had Firefox installed, you can get it below, accompanying with Google Toolbar, for the ease of use of various Google Services:

Disclaimer: I will get referral commission if you download and install Firefox on your computer if you download Firefox through the link above. Just a referral experiment to see if anyone will find this entry useful enough to get Firefox