There are a lot of ways to fix issues with your browser, but they often require you to delete all your data—stored passwords, cookies, form history, and other things that take awhile to build back up. Firefox's Beta and Aurora channels now have a new feature called "Reset Firefox", which lets you start fresh while still keeping some of your old information.

Firefox Reset essentially starts you off with a new profile, then migrates some of your data back from your old profile. This includes:

• Cookies
• Browsing History
• Saved Form History
• Saved Passwords
• Bookmarks and Bookmark Backups

These are usually not the kind of data that cause problems, so there's no harm in restoring them. It does not restore your extensions, preference tweaks, or about:config hacks—but it makes it easy to print out a list of them before you reset the browser. Then, you can start adding those back in one by one. As soon as you notice the issue that was plaguing your browser before, you know what the culprit is and can then move on accordingly.

To reset Firefox, just head to about:support and click the "Reset Firefox" button in the top right-hand corner. If you want to save your list of extensions and about:config tweaks, you should click the "Copy to Clipboard" button or print the about:support page first (mine listed most of my tweaks, but not quite all of them). When you reset, it'll let you know what it's going to restore, then quit Firefox. When you open it back up, you'll have a clean slate from which you can start rebuilding.

Right now this feature is only in the Beta and Aurora channels of Firefox, and Mozilla says the Beta channel is the only one that's been tested and known to be stable. It'll make its way to the other channels soon, but for now, you can hit the link below to read more, see Mozilla's support page for detailed information, or hop on over to about:support and try it out for yourself if you've bee putting off a profile reset.

The New Reset Firefox Feature Is Like Magic | SUMO via GHacks

Occasionally, you need to share a password with someone. Maybe it's a shared office-wide password, your family's Amazon login, or maybe you just want to share a Netflix account with your roommate. Rather than sharing it over email, you can more seamlessly and securely share passwords in just a few clicks with LastPass—and even prevent the person on the receiving end from ever seeing the password itself.

Obviously, both you and your friend need to be using LastPass to share passwords via LastPass, but as we've talked about many times before, it's just about the easiest, most secure way to deal with passwords on the internet (so if you aren't using it, you probably should be). Assuming you both have accounts, it only takes a few seconds to share a password with someone. Here's how it works:

1. Open up your LastPass vault by clicking the LastPass button in your browser and choosing "My LastPass Vault". If you aren't on a computer with LastPass installed (but you have a LastPass account), you can access your online vault instead.
2. Find the site who's password you want to share, and click the "Share" link on the right-hand side of the row.
3. Type your friend's email address in the box at the top of the Share window. You should use the email address that they use to log into LastPass. You can choose to "share" the password with them, which lets them log in but hides the actual password, or "give" them the password, which allows them to read the password and then use it outside of LastPass, if they prefer.
4. Once you share the password with them, they'll receive an email letting them know. They can then log into their LastPass vault to see it in a new folder called "Pending Shares". If they accept, they'll then be able to log into that site using LastPass as normal.

If the original user deletes the shared password, it'll also be removed from the sharee's vault. In addition, if the original user makes any changes to the password, he or she will have to manually re-share the password unless they are a LastPass Premium user, in which case they can check a box on the Share page to automatically push all changes to the sharees.

Note: While this is a great way to securely share passwords, it's important to note that the "share" feature—the one that lets you give someone access without seeing the password—isn't 100% secure. LastPass explains:

Savvy end users could potentially access the password if they capture it using advanced techniques during the login process, but LastPass will never be able to access this data because it has been encrypted using their public key. It is also possible to obtain shared passwords using another password manager. LastPass recommends that you ensure that you've used a generated password specific to this site you're sharing, and not sharing any passwords that you're uncomfortable with the recipient obtaining.

So, while it's a good way to keep the password mostly hidden, it's still not advisable to share a password with someone you don't trust, or for a site that contains particularly sensitive information (like your email). Still, for a lot of situations, this is just about the easiest way to share your password with someone without sending it over email or text message. Hit the link below to read more.

Sharing Passwords | LastPass User Manual

Chrome/Firefox: Non-US users know the pain of having services blocked from them pretty well, and YouTube is no exception. If you're tired of stumbling on videos you can't watch, ProxTube will fix the problem by unblocking all US-only videos for anyone to see.

ProxTube is essentially an extension that automatically routes your YouTube traffic through a proxy server in the US, so YouTube thinks you're visiting the site from a US location. It's not unlike our method of watching the BBC player from another country, it just automates the process for you. Just install it and start browsing YouTube.

All of us Lifehacker editors are US-based, so we couldn't give this a vigorous testing, but it seems to have a pretty big following. If you give it a shot, let us know how it works for you in the comments.

ProxTube | via Reddit

Dear Lifehacker,
My cable company's web site doesn't work in Chrome, and it's really annoying. What's going on and how can I fix it?

Sincerely,
Broken Browser

Dear Broken,
A web site may not work properly for a lot of reasons, and sometimes those reasons aren't immediately obvious. Luckily you can hunt down and fix a lot of these problems yourself. Here are a few things you should try before throwing in the towel.

Change Your User Agent

Some web sites will tell you they don't work in a browser like Chrome, but all that normally means is that they haven't updated their "works with" checks in a very long time (if they don't support Chrome, they probably haven't updated since Chrome was released). If that's the case, all you need to do is trick that web site into thinking you're using another browser, and you can do this by changing your browser's user agent. A user agent is just a string of text that tells a web site what browser you're using. So, in this case, by changing Chrome's user agent string to Firefox, you can make that web site think you're using Firefox and let you through.

Changing Chrome's User Agent

To change Chrome's user agent, you can either download the User Agent Switcher extension (which makes the process quick and easy), or do it without any extensions by going to Tools > Developer Tools > Settings > Override User Agent. This will only change your user agent while you have the Developer Tools window open, so don't close it until you're done with that web site.

Changing Firefox's User Agent

On Firefox, you can download the User Agent Switcher extension for quick changes, or change Firefox's built-in setting, which is a bit more involved. To do this, type about:config in the address bar, promise Firefox you'll be careful, and create a new string by right-clicking on the page and going to New > String. Type in general.useragent.override for the string's name, and a user agent string as the value, which you can find on the internet. For example, the user agent string for Chrome 19 is:

 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.9 Safari/536.5 

Again, this method is a bit more roundabout, but doesn't require any extensions installed.

For more info on user agent strings and how to change them in your favorite browser, check out this how-to from our friends at How-To Geek.

Open Your Browser with a New Profile

Sometimes, your problem can be a bit more complicated, and you'll actually see rendering errors on the page. For example, I recently found that I couldn't view Lifehacker's reader polls in Firefox—the poll portion of the page just wouldn't show up. To determine whether this was an issue with Firefox or an issue with my particular setup, I opened the page with a new Firefox profile and discovered the problem was on my end.

Creating a New Profile in Chrome

To open Chrome using a new profile, open up a Windows Explorer window and type in the following file path:

Windows Vista/7:

 %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\ 

Windows XP:

 %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\  

Mac and Linux users should open up their respective file managers and go to Go > Go to Folder or its equivalent, and type in the following paths:

OS X:

 ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/ 

Linux:

 ~/.config/google-chrome/ 

Once you're there, find the folder called "Default" and rename it to "Backup Default". When you reopen Chrome, it'll open with a clean slate, after which you can check the problematic web site and see if it renders correctly. If it doesn't, then Chrome is to blame, and you'll have to use another browser to access it for the time being. If it does render correctly, then your particular Chrome setup was the problem, and you'll want to keep that new profile and reinstall your extensions one-by-one (in case one of them was the problem). You can delete the old profile if you no longer need it by deleting the "Backup Default" folder. Check out Chrome's help page on profile management for more info.

Creating a New Profile in Firefox

To open Firefox using a new profile, open up a Command Prompt in Windows (or, if you're on Mac/Linux, a Terminal window) and type one of the following commands:

Windows:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Firefox\firefox.exe" -P 

OS X:

 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager 

Linux:

 ./firefox -profilemanager 

Be sure to replace the file path in the command with wherever you installed Firefox or Aurora.

If you entered the command correctly, you should see the profile manager pop up. Click "Create Profile" and give it a name. You should be greeted with a clean Firefox slate, after which you can check the problematic web site and see if it renders correctly. If it doesn't, then Firefox is to blame, and you'll have to use another browser to access it for the time being. If it does render correctly, then your particular Firefox setup was the problem, and you'll want to start fresh with that new profile and reinstall your extensions one-by-one (in case one of them was the problem). You can delete the old profile from the Profile Manager if you no longer need it. For more info, check out Mozilla's help article on the profile manager.

Open The Problematic Site In Another Browser

If creating a new profile doesn't help, it's probably an issue with that browser, and you can't fix the problem yourself. Instead, you'll just need to open that page in another browser from now on. It's kind of a pain, but there are a few things you can do to make it easier. Firefox users can download the Open With extension, which will let you right-click on any link and open it in the browser of your choice. Chrome users don't have a comparable extension, but you can always open up Firefox and drag the URL from Chrome's Omnibar into Firefox's tab bar. This is a quick way to open your current page in another browser.

Sincerely,
Lifehacker

P.S. Got any of your own tips for troubleshooting broken web sites? Tell us about them in the comments.