Firefox

I was at the 2nd WebSG (Web Standards Group Singapore) meetup on Wednesday (28 Feb 2007) where I hosted a short session on some Firefox tips. It’s all thanks the urgings and encouragement of Lucian (the organizer) that I finally got down to publicly sharing my Firefox knowledge ever since I wrote Firefox Secrets.

While I’m waiting for my gmail to start working again I thought I’d test out this little blog app for firefox.

Maybe everyone already knew about these, but I just stumbled on them a few weeks ago and found some more yesterday. You can have animated favicons in Firefox! The icons for each site on the Firefox tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16�16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:

Greasemonkey and Platypus are extremely cool to play around with, but how much do you actually use them? Are you OK with restarting Firefox every time you want to use Gmail Space? For faster performance, disable extensions you don’t use often, and uninstall those you never use.

A couple of days back, I noticed that a few of my colleagues were using Firefox. But.. both of them had no plugins installed and in fact, one of them was still using Firefox 1.0.1.

The best part of using the dot jp was in firefox if you type in a dot com IDN Domain it will resolve to the punycode. With the IDN dot jps Firefox never resolves to the punycode. It stays as a native Japanese term in the browser.

Fans of firefox always want to know how many downloads are occurring in real time by a counter. So came the development of counters and feeds. But I could not figure out to getting one due to the scattered data available. So this post is an effort to find how to place a firefox download counter on your site. Many of these tools are created by efforts of the hard working Firefox teams, supporters and fans. And as firefox nears 100 million downloads, add a firefox download counter to your site and let the world know. Get Firefox!

I was just reading, that there is a new free ebook out that has tons of Firefox tips and facts. This book comes from Firefox Facts You can download it from here.

pchere.blogspot.com updated the 50 best firefox extensions for power surfing.

I mainly use EverNote to stockpile info from the Net. Using the Firefox extension, I often save Web pages/articles to EverNote and categorize them using the programs' Keyword categories. I've created a number of filters so that when I save an article with certain keywords contained within it, it will automatically be saved to a certain category.

it is a cute eyecandy extension of firefox that lets you view thumbnails of all opened browser windows, giving you a visual overview. a single click on the thumbnail brings you to the tab instantly.

Chu Yeow is a software developer by day, a blogger by night, and a sometime freelance Web developer. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He keeps a well-read Mozilla-related blog titled redemption in a blog, where he posts the latest Mozilla-related news and Firefox tips, and reviews worthy extensions and random technical tidbits.

That's right....another new blog. I've been waffling around since June 19 when my "old" blogs had a hiccup (via a problem with ftp publishing gone haywire) as to whether or not I would resurrect my Firefox Tips blog. I have finally decided that I do want to recreate the blog, if only to have all of my favorite resources in one central location. This time around, the title of the blog is going to be different, and I actually have a plan about what I'm going to include and how the layout will be. That is way more organized than it was the first time around. If you have ever had the experience of losing data, grinding your teeth to powder and screeching in frustration, then eventually rebuilding your work to have it actually turn out better than the original was, you can appreciate how I feel about my new Firefox blog.

By now, I've become an avid blogger. A day is hardly complete without posting. I even decided to create other blogs, for different areas of interest (cooking, inspirational posts, and Firefox tips -- the latter of which is yet to be reestablished following a snafu in June.) Then I even decided to go looking for a free webhost, whereupon I found f2o. that led to my posting the beginnings of my personal homepage on the internet. That's a whole different adventure, but it dovetails into blogging because blogging was where I began to notice the possibilities.

As you regular readers may have noticed, we added a large amount of Firefox tips to the site today. This is because we have a new staff member, Scott Kingery, who has been running a Firefox tips site and also a Google Desktop tips site. After some negotiations, Scott has agreed to come onboard TipMonkies to help us continue to grow. If you’d like to learn a bit about Scott, you can check out his blog, Tech.Life.Blogged. Scott will be continuing his work from those sites here on TipMonkies so expect lots of great tips from him in the future. He will also be joining us on the podcasts occassionally to give us some of his tech insight. Welcome aboard, Scott!

With all of this innovation coming on the Mozilla/Firefox side, you have to wonder how far libraries could take all of this. I want to push a lot of this with our SWAN catalog and create various plugins and toolbars, highlight them all on a single page, and let SWAN members either point to it or copy the code onto their own sites. Rich Allen sent me a link to NOBLE's Firefox Tips and Tricks, which comes close to this. It even mentions Smart Keywords, including how to use this with EBSCO. My only quibble is that all of this is hidden from their home...

In response to recent post Easy Firefox 'open in a new tab,' dozens of Lifehacker readers wrote in more tabtastic (yes, I just said that) Firefox tips. In summary:

The feed for Firefox tips can be found at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/FirefoxHelpTipsAndTricks

Firefox tips

oooh, I can’t believe I’ve never come across this before!

Geeky heads-up for those who use Movable Type with Firefox: there's a Firefox extension called Spellbound that acts as a spell checker for any HTML entry box. The Movable Type "Entry Body" area is of course just another HTML entry box, so Spellbound provides a semi-integrated spell checker for your Movable Type posts! I'm sure many of you have noticed all the typos all over Electrolicious, and this should help the situation.

Anyway, one of the many things that makes Firefox so great is the use of extensions, which essentially are add-ons for your web browsing experience. Basically it is tiny pieces of code, readily available on Mozilla's site, that offer enhanced functionality not natively included in Firefox itself that you may find useful. I have around twenty extensions loaded in my installation of Firefox that I use on a daily, almost hourly basis. In some cases even more often than that. Some of them have become so ingrained in how I surf the web, and subsequently use my browser, that I couldn't imagine doing so without them again. Which is why I have historically been slow to adopt newer versions of the app. Like anything else in the world of software newer version of an app require updated revisions of 3rd party add-ons. Since most extensions are written by users of Firefox who recognize a need and respond to it by putting together a solution out of the goodness of their hearts, with little or no compensation at all, it takes some time for all those extensions I use to be updated to work with the latest and greatest.

Active and I couldn’t live without them:
SessionSaver .2 0.2.1.027 - “SessionSaver will auto-track and restore your browser exactly as you left it – every startup, every time. Not even a crash can faze it…” - this is my #1 extension and absolutely essential. Never browse without it. On a fresh install, this is my first download. Get it now.
Adblock 0.5.2.039 - does what it says. Pretty cool.
Download Manager Tweak 0.6.3 - makes it easier to control your downloads.
Add Bookmark Here 0.5.2 - Makes filing bookmarks easier.
FLST 0.7 - Brings focus to the last selected tab when closing the active tab.

Firefox Tips for Power Users: ten shortcuts tips like CTRL-K - jump to Google bar to search. Note: Mac users substitute Open Apple for ALT, and Command Key for CTRL. (via Lifehacker)

If you want to know more Firefox tips try Firefox Help and PM's Firefox Microsite. BTW, try the type about:mozilla on location bar to read a quote from The Book of Mozilla or read about it on Wikipedia.

Lots of great Firefox tips here.

Firefox straight 'out of the zip' is ok, but there's a lot you can change, modify and improve. From performance to looks to usability, Firefox tuning gives you the power to make a browser specific to your needs and taste.

There's some great extension recommendations that even I hadn't checked out before and even more stuff in the comments.

For those other Firefox users, or soon-to-be Firefox users, here is a Firefox Tips & Tricks primer.

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Firefox Tips:

A lot of people have written about Firefox’s features and advantages, so I’ll spare you that. Personally, one of the reasons I really like this browser is tabbed browsing and extensions. An MDI approach in browsers benefits users significantly, and Firefox put to good use this feature pioneered by Opera a few years ago.

Tabbrowser extensions is one of the most useful extensions I’ve ever gotten across, and enhances the already great tabbed browsing experience. However, as development continued and features crept in, it turned the once nimble browser into a somewhat sluggish and crash–prone tool. And so I tried Firefox without TBE, but the functionality was never the same. The only option was to go out looking for an extension (or combination of extensions) that would provide the functionality I missed.

I didn’t get started with Greasemonkey until tonight, but I can already determine just how useful but potent it is. You can modify pages, for better or for worse. Of course, the more rights you afford the user, the more responsibilities they inherently assume (and, if you’re dealing with novices, the more room there is for errors due to misconfiguration or misuse). The onus is on the user to ensure that the scripts they download and install are legal and safe to the user’s computer.

That's one cautionary note making the rounds along with a popular new extension for Firefox that lets people customize Web pages they visit without the knowledge or cooperation of Web publishers. The extension, dubbed Greasemonkey, lets people run what's known as a "user script," which alters a Web page as the page is downloaded.

That capability has gained the extension an avid following of Web surfers who want to customize the sites they visit, removing design glitches and stripping sites of ads. But the extension comes with substantial security risks and could stir trouble among site owners who object to individual, custom redesigns of their pages.

Following the release today of Google Maps I thought I would whip up a search bar plugin for Firefox. (Thanks to Joe for introducing me to writing search bar plugins.)

One of the great things about Google Maps is the simple query syntax:

Search for an address: type in as much of the address as you know at any level of resolution.

Marcia just let us know that she wrote a book with Chris Hofmann and John Hedtke. Called "Firefox and Thunderbird Garage", that's a book for users: "This book is meant to be an introduction to the many features of Firefox and Thunderbird".

Yahoo said Wednesday that it has released a test version of its toolbar for use with the Firefox browser. Click here to go to the download page.

The organisation said in a statement issued this morning that "unlike other recently released video search tools, an Annodex search delivers actual video content. Tools such as Google's beta video search work by searching a program's closed captioning text. The search results simply provide an excerpt from the text and a single still image from the program".

"In contrast, an Annodex search provides the user with a detailed summary of the video content, an interactive list of video clips, and hyperlinks to additional material".

Saferfox is a poorly named, but beautifully designed skin for Firefox. It's based on Safari for Mac, but is more than just an emulation of the interface. It's a complete skin rather than just a few visual tweaks.

The site is not in English, but you'll figure out how to dl it.

Merriam-Webster has launched five tools for Firefox to search their dictionary and thesaurus

Being a dedicated Firefox user, one of the few things that was still thwarting me was SharePoint. We use SharePoint internally for a ton of stuff, and it was a drag to have to fall back to that other browser. SharePoint pages look and work fine in Firefox, but I was having to reauthenticate on every single page, which really hindered my enjoyment of the experience.

I finally figured out how to get Firefox to do NTLM, which means I don’t have to deal with the authentication dialogs, thereby reducing my dependence on IE to one and only one application (Oddpost).

Pimpzilla is a theme for the browser Firefox. It's also probably the most tacky & overdone piece of GUI design out there, aimed solely for true internet-connaisseurs. If you are into fur and lot's of bling, this is the theme for you.

Today, the security firm Secunia has released 8 more security bugs it has discovered in Mozilla products, including Firefox and Thunderbird.

If you have downloaded the Firefox 1.0.1 update, you have nothing to worry about. The Mozilla 1.7.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.1 released should be out this week as well. The exploits "could be used by criminals to spoof, or fake, various aspects of a Web site, ranging from its SSL secure site icon to the contents of an inactive tab."

This announcement comes 1 day after iDefense announced a vulnerability is Mozilla 1.7.3 and Firefox 1.0 that would allows hackers to "create a memory heap overflow, which then allow remote code execution and a compromise of the system."

Previously-mentioned Google Suggest creates a dropdown of search terms and result totals as you type a query. If you use the search box in Firefox more often than the web page, developer Juan Carlos Navea’s GSuggest Firefox extension integrates Google Suggest right into your browser. GSuggest doesn’t let you arrow key down the dropdown of suggestions (you have to point and click). Besides that it’s fast and useful for the power Google-searcher.

You can get a free gmail notifier for Firefox by clicking on the link. One user's review of the notifier below. Firefox will support RSS feeds, so you could set up your mail as an RSS feed, too.

Google is cool! by Pinguin

December 24, 2004 6:59pm

"works fine but gmail is soon to have an rss for your inbox so you can see your inbox through live bookmarks" Doesn't work that well in FireFox. I think it should work in Thunderbird... I expect mail, so...

Here's an example of Firefox plugin that searches a specific website. Website designers might want to think about variations on this.

Thanks to Jason Ungerleider, there's a nice little Firefox search plugin for searching BoardGameGeek. Nice work Jason!

We haven't tried this, but it looks like it will speed up Firefox by multiplexing downloads.

"Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!"

Darrell Norton reports on several ways to speed up Firefox. Follow the link to get all the details.

Speeding up Firefox seems to be a meme going around the blogsphere lately. Most of the tips I’ve seen, though, are only for broadband connections with the latest hardware and only include some of the settings that would affect performance.

Very cool history tool for Firefox browsers.

Having messed around with del.icio.us I toyed around with some ideas for integrating something like it into a firefox extension. Thus historyAgent was born (see my profile). It is sort of like other online bookmark managers, but better (IMHO). I invite you all to poke around and see how it works for you. The extension works well, but will log "every" site you visit. The favlet option work similar but makes it a lot quicker to quickly build a history that you can log and view, then file them as you see appropriate. It is similar to online collaboration tools, so you can just quickly save pages from any computer and come back and organize them later. I will be adding in rss/rdf/partial foaf output at a later date. If you have any question about it.. Check out this screenshot:

Big Baer presents wonderful set of HTML ideas for creative use of style sheets.

Where did we lose our collective CSS coding creativity? Are we all still burdened with a table layout mentality? Do we read the W3C Cascading Style Sheets Specification and not get it? CSS allows for so much freedom from traditional table based layouts that we sometimes do not consider page and layout design alternatives. What a pity. Time to think outside the box!

I saw this on Technosailor. JustBlogIt is a cool plugin:

Pretty slick. Right-click on a page or selected text and JustBlogIt will blog it for you. It has built in support for Wordpress, MoveableType, Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Radio Userland, Textpattern, Typepad, journalspace, b2 and BLOG:CMS. Nice job, guys.

Firefox is pretty quick, but here's some info on making Firefox faster.

Speeding up Firefox seems to be a meme going around the blogsphere lately. Most of the tips I’ve seen, though, are only for broadband connections with the latest hardware and only include some of the settings that would affect performance.

The Firefox Tweak Guide has the full details on how to speed up Firefox regardless of your connection or hardware, reprinted in part below. Don’t forget that the easiest way to tweak user files is with chromEdit extension.