Altering my web site's Firefox New Tab page tile - html

I opened up Firefox this morning and was presented with the "New Tab" page. One of the tiles that appeared on this page was Mozilla's MDN site.
Unlike all the other tiles (which were merely screenshots of the web site), the MDN tile has a custom tile which advertised the MDN.
Looking at the HTML source for MDN I couldn't see any META or LINK tags that would suggest how they are achieving this?
I've Googled around but can't see any documentation about how I would go about customizing tiles for my own web sites so they display as pretty as MDN on this page..?
I was wondering if there was a standard mark-up for this so it would also work with Google Chrome's equivalent start page?
Looking on the Mozilla help page for Firefox users, you can see that tiles in their screenshots are not merely screenshots, but where can I see the web designer documentation for this..?

This is not under the control of the site.
See this bugzilla ticket:
Can a website specify their own enhanced tiles via some meta tag?
Right now no. There's been discussions around that, but there's
initially some worse privacy aspects where Firefox would need to
connect to a site to get that information potentially triggering
cookies similar to bug 1037673.
How enhanced tiles are implemented is the content comes from
cookieless https requests to mozilla servers, so there's lower privacy
risks of some types of tracking.
Another ticket has been opened requesting the feature.
You would need to make a deal with Mozilla to get special treatment for your site on their servers.

Related

Provide link to open in different browser

I have a webapp which is running perfectly well in most browsers, but I'm still trying to work out a few bugs which is preventing it from working correctly in iOS Facebook's in-app browser. Until I've got these sorted, I'd like to provide a message to give users the option to open the link in Safari.
The solution I have for now is to use javascript to detect the browser's user agent (similar to this question), and if it's the Facebook in-app browser, provide a message that the webapp is optimised for Safari and give instructions to copy and paste the link into Safari.
My question is this: is there a way to make a <a> tag open in a particular browser? I have seen questions like this one which seem to point to using target="_system" for Cordova apps, but is there a method to do this with html only?
There isn't a way to do this for Safari (using just HTML, anyway). For other browsers that have custom URL schemes, you could do it. For example, for Chrome you could have your link point to googlechrome://www.website.com.
The definitive answer: No, this is not possible.
As Andrew M mentioned, some browsers have some methods that do some things similar, but a pure html method to open a link in a generic browser does not exist.

WebGL in Chrome works second time but not first time

WebGL does not work in the following three scenarios:
(for the 'test webgl' site used get.webgl.org)
1 Start chrome, Google search for the 'test webgl' site, click on the link in the search result.
2 Go to the 'test webgl' site from a link in an email.
3 Start Chrome from a short cut or command prompt, "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" http://get.webgl.org/
This only happens when Chrome is not already running. In other words WebGL does not work when chrome starts up. However it does work if chrome is already running.
The best demonstration is scenario number 3, above. This starts chrome and goes to http://get.webgl.org/ and Webgl does not work. Then do exactly the same again but this time with chrome already open and Webgl works.
Would very much appreciate feedback or a solution, thanks.
Have also created various test sites in html, javascript and webgl, in order to find a work-around. For example if webgl is not available then allow the user to click on a link to open the page in a new tab, this does not work. However if the user opens a new tab then loads the page, webgl is detected and works.
In short, if a customer opens chrome and searches for your website (that has webgl content). Then clicks on the link, webgl will not work. It does not seem reasonable to then instruct the customer to open a new tab and then go to the same website a second time. So far have not been able to find a solution so that it just works without the customer having to fiddle around.
I realize that this may be a chrome issue as it does not occur in firefox, however am trying to find a javascript solution rather than waiting for chrome developers to fix it.
Thanks for any suggestions.
(Windows XP Pro, Chrome V36)
Hi Mack,
Thanks for your reply. The majority of visitors to my web site have XP and Chrome. I should imagine that this is true for quite a lot of peoples, websites.
Problem 1 The first fallback I had on my website was to detect if webgl is supported. If yes then continue as normal. If no then display a help page. This was simple and worked, however, google crawlers do not handle the javascript very well, therefore always index the webgl help page, rather than the home page.
Solution 1 Managed to fix this by having a popup box appear when webgl is not supported, giving the user a choice of whether to continue or go to the help page. The conditional code that processes the user response is arranged so that if the user is a google crawler then it simply 'falls through' and displays the html content of the home page, and not the help page.
There are lots of web sites that seem to have this same problem, including get.webgl.org, in other words, if you do a google search for a website, and that site contains webgl detection and fallback code, the search result always shows the fallback content, rather than the authors intended main content.
Problem 2 Now that I finally have the home page listed correctly by google, found that am still losing many customers, as they are starting chrome, searching google for my site 'suit yourself shirts', clicking the link in the result and being told incorrectly that webgl is not supported.
Am very interested in your solution but do not quite understand how it works. Have tried detection then page refresh or load the page in a new tab or display a link for the user to load the page, but none of these methods seem to work. Seems like quite a fundamental problem that would effect many webgl websites. Would be very greatfull if you could explain your suggestion a little further. Thanks for your help, kind regards - Gary

How does Chrome Dev Tools console Access the resources of the website?

Early on I was doing some debugging and testing using the chrome dev tools(known as inspect element). I found out that on the Resources column of the dev tool, Chrome can always access the resources from the server and display them(links, videos, images....). Just wonder how Chrome does that. Is there any way to write a piece of code doing the same thing(access the server resources of other websites, not modifying them but displaying, stuff like, the link of the video currently playing on the website, which usually does not pop up until the play button is hit)?
DevTools doesn't fetch resources from a site. It fetches them from the browser.
There were similar questions already
How does webkit/chrome's WebInspector Resources Inspection work?
and
Getting Information from Google Chrome's Developer Tools
The Chrome Developer Tools has two parts frontend (html+javascript) and backend (C++) and there is an API which specifies the protocol between these parts. You can see the specification here. You can use it for writing your own app instead of standard DevTools frontend.
Also there is experimental debugging API for chrome extensions.
I think the Webkit WebInspector go over the hole source code and match all resources of the source.
So it match <link href="something.css"> and then it place something.css in the resource panel under stylesheets. And exactly the same thing for the other tags.
It's not hard to make regexes for this.

How can you tell exactly what insecure items are causing a browser to warn about mixed secure and insecure items?

In Firefox, I view my site and get no warnings about insecure mixed content.
Using FireBug, I can see that every request is https.
In Chrome, I get the https crossed out in the address bar.
I viewed source in Chrome and then ran this regex /http(?!s)/ but the only things it found were the href attributes for some external links and the doc type and http-equiv meta tags.
Using Chrome's Resource Tracking revealed all requests were https too.
This includes Google Analytics, jQuery from Google's CDN and Facebook like scripts.
Is there any specific tool I can use to show non https requests, or anything further I can try?
I found that I get the "mixed content"-warning in Chrome even when there is no mixed content, if sometime during the session mixed content was already encountered on the domain.
(Also mentioned here: Why is Chrome reporting a secure / non secure warning when no other browsers aren't?)
In Chrome's Developer Tools, the Console tab shows the resources that it won't load because they unsecure.
You can add the "scheme" column to the Chrome developer tools network tab to show which requests were sent over http or https:
Press F12 to show the developer tools
Switch to the Network tab
Right click in the column headers and select "Scheme"
Reload the page to show which elements are loaded over http or https
In situations like this where it's helpful to see exactly which protocol is being used to load resources, I would recommend Fiddler2 as a browser-agnostic solution that can show you exactly what traffic is occurring on each request.
From the site:
Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.
Edit: In-browser debugging tools are becoming really good so this third-party tool may not be as useful as it was when this answer was first written.
Open up the Web Inspector and find the yellow triangle (warning) in the top right. Click on it and it will display all security issues.
In 48-th version of chrome they added a security panel. Using it you can quickly identify the mixed content resources:
Do you have the HttpFox plugin for FireFox? That'd work, I think.
Among other things, it reports on the URL, Method, Result Code, and bytes of all the assets that a web page requests. It's what I've used to trap the occasional non-HTTPS graphic, etc. I'm sure the other suggested tools would do the same...
You can use SslCheck
It's a free online tool that crawls a website recursively (following all internal links) and scans for nonsecure includes - images, scripts and CSS.
(disclaimer: I'm one of the developers)
I know this post is old, but I ran across it and had the same issue. I clicked on the Chrome menu (top right corner), scrolled down to Tools> and selected Developer Tools. Clicked on the Console tab and it told me exactly what the problem was... the favicon was served over http, not https, but of course it was not in the page source code. Corrected the problem in my CMS, which loads the favicon without code in the page... and no more error!
Note that 'mixed content' and 'mixed scripting' are detected seperatly. Check this site for the meaning of the icons in Chrome: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/95617?p=ui_security_indicator&rd=1 (click 'see details' link).
Grey icon = mixed content, red icon = mixed scripting.

What plugins improve Google Chrome as a web developer's browser?

The usual recommendations for a web development and debugging web browser are Firefox/Firebug or Safari/Web Inspector.
But I like Google Chrome, and would like to use this as my primary development browser. What plugins or tools should I get to optimise my web programming experience with Chrome?
Google Chrome's own "Firebug" is very good, just right click and inspect element to bring it up.
Frame two pages is helpful.
Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar is good too.
The Development and Coding Search (Chrome extension) is one of many Chrome extensions for developers. See the featured web development extensions for more developer-friendly extensions.
Pendule has a lot of good bits and bobs under one extension/icon. Few things I like about it...
View generated source
Colour picker
Ruler
Validator
There are probably tons of alternatives, but it's the best I've seen so far.