BugMeNot.com is a popular extension for surfing websites that otherwise require registration. The only problem with BugMeNot approach is that if a website credentials are not available in the BugMeNot database, a user cannot enter the website.

However, most news websites, including ones that require registration, would like to see their content indexed by Google and other search engines. Therefore, as soon as they realize that a Google Spider is on their door, they open the gates for GoogleBot spiders to crawl and index their content. And if a normal human being visits the website using a web browser, he is politely redirected to the "Please register first" webpage.

Imagine wearing a mask of a GoogleBot spider before entering such a site. The webserver will think that you are from Google and will gladly let you in byepassing registration. This is exactly what the first Firefox trick does. It lets you switch the user agent so that the reg-only website is fooled to think that you are a web spider.

Download the Firefox user agent switcher extension here and add the following line :

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Sometimes Firefox 1.5 makes your computer crawl like a snail. You open Windows Task Manager and notice that the Firefox.exe process is taking couple of hundred of MB of RAM. The second trick is about preventing Firefox from consuming the entire memory of your computer by fixing a Firefox Memory leak issue:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

This memory-fix trick can also be applied to Thunderbird and Netscape browser.