It's up to you whether you take advice or not.
Firefox delivers a number of passive warnings and cautions to you in
the various toolbars of the browser window. Here's a
rundown of what those things mean.
This hack describes only the Firefox-specific icons that are
different from standard browser icons:
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This is the standard icon for a
Mozilla
Extension,
Plugin, or Theme. Extensions are small add-on pieces of logic (or
whole applications) that can be run or used as part of general web
activity. If you have installed one or more extensions into Firefox,
then something is going to work differently from the default
behavior.
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This icon sometimes appears at the bottom-right edge of the status
bar. It tells you that the web page you're looking
at has an
RSS
feed that complements its normal HTML content. You can hover your
cursor over the icon to see the status of the feed. Click on the icon
to capture the feed as a set of Firefox Live Bookmarks [Hack #33] . See
http://www.mozillazine.org for an
example.
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This icon sometimes appears at the bottom-right edge of the status
bar. It tells you that the web page you're looking
at has alternate stylesheets. You can apply any of the stylesheets
provided by clicking on the icon.
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This icon sometimes appears at the bottom-right edge of the status
bar. It tells you that the web page you're looking
at has blocked a pop up. Click on the icon to see details of the page
blocked, or to alter pop-up-blocking settings.
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One of these three icons sometimes appears in the top-right corner of
the menu bar. They indicate that there is an
update (a patch
or new release) for Firefox or for one of the extensions or themes
that you've installed. Beware that issues with color
and accessibility might mean these icons have been changed by the
time you read this. Each icon indicates a different severity. Red
means that a security problem with your browser has been detected at
the moment, and you should grab the recommended fix by clicking on
the icon. The other severities don't require any
action, but it's good practice to keep your browser
fully up to date. That makes these icons go away.
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A subset of these icons appears in the Mozilla Extension Manager and
Theme Manager dialog boxes. From left to right, they stand for
"uninstall from the local disk,"
"update from the Web," and
"configure options for a given extension or
theme." Hover over the icons with the mouse to
remind yourself what they're for.
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These icons sometimes appear on the Find toolbar at the bottom of the
browser window. The first one indicates that your search has been
unsuccessful. The second indicates that the
search
has just wrapped, which means you've just reached
the bottom (or the top) of the web page and the find process will
continue again from the other end.
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These icons sometimes appear
at
the right end of the Location bar, where the current
page's URL is shown. They can also appear at the
right edge of the status bar, at the bottom of the window. The
uncrossed icon appears when the web page you are viewing is served up
securely. That usually means that Secure HTTP
(https:) is providing the page. Secure HTTP uses
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to ensure that all information
between the web server and you is safely encrypted. The other icon
appears when you log into a web site using a password, but the
password is transmitted unencrypted to the web site. The icon
indicates that your login is not as free from prying eyes (network
sniffers in particular) as it might otherwise be.
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