Wednesday 12 December 2012

HackBar Not Showing in Firefox

How to display the HackBar in Firefox

My preferred browser for the Internet is Google Chrome. I moved to Chrome because of it's speed and simplicity as well as the fact that like most people, when I got disillusioned with IE and moved to FireFox I installed so many plugins that it became so slow to load and has gone through periods of hanging and high CPU and memory usage.

Therefore I have decided to use FireFox for certain development and debugging when I want to use plugins. Plugins such as the Colour Picker ColorZilla, the Web Developer Toolbar, the Modify Header plugin or any number of others I have installed. I then keep Chrome plugin free to keep it fast for browsing.

I did try Chrome out with plugins when they first started supporting them but I soon decided I didn't want to turn Chrome into another FireFox by overloading it with plugin checking at start up which has happened with FireFox.

So Chrome is plugin free and fast, FireFox is useful and handy, full of plugins and tools and good for development and although IE 9 is fast and probably just as good nowadays I am guessing most developers won't go back to it after Microsoft taking numerous versions to just standardise their code and CSS after years of complaining from the masses.

One of the plugins I use on FireFox a lot is the HackBar.

Not only is it useful for loading up long URL's, quickly Base64 decoding or encoding strings as well as URL Encoding and Decoding but it has numerous other features if you want to test your site out for XSS or SQL injection vulnerabilities.

However I usually find I use it mostly for quickly encoding and decoding strings and sometimes I find myself having to put really long ones in the box and extending it so much the viewport becomes unusable. I then find myself disabling the add-on.

However on more than a few occasions now when I come to re-enable the HackBar by right clicking in the menu bar and ticking the option for HackBar OR using the "View > HackBar" menu option. I then find that it doesn't display as expected and hunting around for it is of no use at all.

You can try disabling it in the Add-ons section or even un-installing and re-installing it but even then it might not appear.

However I have found that a quick hit of the F9 key will make it show. Simples!

So if you are ever having issues trying to make toolbars or plugins show that you have de-activated try the F9 key first before anything else.