Make Tech Easier » Firefox

Firefox Extension Adds Functionality to Google Analytics

Shevonne — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:30:34 +0000

If you have a web site or blog, you probably rely on web analytics to understand about your visitors. It provides a way for you to know

1. How they found your site
2. The items on your site they find interesting and
3. Location information about your visitors.

The best known and most widely used web analytics tool is Google Analytics. There are over 80 reports that can be accessed to track and analyze the health of your web site/blog. Additionally, it also has an ad hoc reporting function that allows you to further tailor these 80 reports, or create your own from scratch. There are other tasks that allow you to monitor vistors’ paths on your site/blog, monitor your AdWords, group similar visits together, etc. What if you were able to extend the functions that Google Analytics offer? There is a Firefox add-on that will allow you to do that. It’s called the Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension.

What does it do?

Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension enhances Google Analytics by using a variety of GreaseMonkey user scripts. The add-on uses user scripts created by different developers into one area. It gives Google Analytics some of the user-friendly and additional features that are missing.

What do I need to do before I start using it?

The first thing you need is to go to the FireFox add-on page, and install GreaseMonkey. After GreaseMonkey is up and running, install the Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension add-on.

How do I personalize it?

After installing Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension and GreaseMonkey, go to Tools->Add-Ons->Better Google Analytics Firefox. Press the Preference button. There are three tabs: General, Reports, and Other.

What do I do in the General tab?

Go to the General tab. There are three options: automatically entering Google Analytics; automatically expanding the sub-navigation items; and increase the text boxes.

If you want to automatically enter Google Analytics whenever the button is displayed, then check the check box next to this option.
If you want to have all the sub-navigation expand automatically, then check the check box.
If you want to increase the text boxes, then check this check box.

What do I do in the Reports tab?

In the Reports tab, it provides you additional report features that will make the Google Analytics’ reports area, more powerful. It adds search functionality, export capabilities, full-screen reader, profile enhancements, table sorting, and social media metrics. If you want to select one or all of the options, check the check boxes next to them.

What do I do the in the Other tab?

In the Other tab, it allows additional features to other areas of Google Analytics. It provides two Google Analytics Conversion University functionalities: “Expand All” button and the time. Also, it has a URL builder override for the “utm_nooverride” url variable.

What did I think?

I really love this Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension. It gives extra functionality to Google Analytics that makes it more user friendly and easier to navigate. Before I found this add-on, I was using the basic functions that Google Analytics had to offer because I didn’t really understand how to use it. With this add-on, I am using it more, using more reports, and even the goals/funnel features. If you have never use it, and you have a web site and/or blog, install it.

How do I get more information?

To learn more about Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension, please visit: http://erikvold.com/tools/firefox/betterga/index.cfm
To learn more about GreaseMonkey, please visit: http://www.greasespot.net/

Firefox Extension Adds Functionality to Google Analytics originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Visual View of Your Firefox Web Search History With History Tree

Shevonne — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:09:02 +0000

Having a visual view of something is usually helpful to many people. It’s one of the reasons that charts, graphs, and mind maps are widely used as an aid to represent data that would just be numbers or text. Browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, and Opera) have started to have a way to visually view your most-visited web sites all on one page. However, Mozilla Firefox, which is one of the most used browsers, doesn’t have the functionality. What if it did? What if it also helped you view your entire web-searching history? This is where History Tree can help.

What is History Tree?

History Tree is a free Firefox extension that provides you the capability of viewing your web history as a tree and/or a web grid of screenshots. At the beginning of the page, you will see statistics:
1. Pages you have visited
2. Tabs now open
3. Tabs closed.

There are two icons at the bottom of each box, the up arrow indicates that this web site has pages that are linked to it. If there are none, then this icon will not be available. The question mark icon allows you to view a bigger view of the screenshot when clicked.

What versions of Firefox does it work with?

History Free works with Firefox versions 3.0 and 3.5.

How do I open it up?

The easiest way to get to History Tree is by going to Firefox’s Tools->History Tree.

How does it work?

There are two views: web-site screenshots and historical tree. Choose your preferred way of viewing your web history.

After selecting the view that you want, choose what kind of web site history you want to see. You are able to view your web history in four ways:

Show all open tabs
Show all open pages
Show selected tab
Show all closed tabs

You are able to expand/minimize the history tree/web-site screenshots. If you are using the history tree, you will see a Tree Spacing option. If you are using the web-site screenshots, then you will see the Image Size option in its place.

If you have a bunch of web sites in your history, History Tree has a search functionality that allows you to find the site that you are looking for without having to waste time searching through many web sites. You are able to search by name or URL. When it finds the page(s) that you are looking for, they are highlighted in green.

Are there things that History Tree won’t do?

History Tree does not give you the capability of saving your history. If you close the browser, it does not restore the history. It’s something that is suppose to be added in a future release.

Where can I install it or find out more information?

You are able to download it from the FoxTree web site or at the Firefox add-on web site.

Visual View of Your Firefox Web Search History With History Tree originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Enhance Your Browser with Greasemonkey

Joshua Price — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:26:25 +0000

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey.

By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

The Greasemonkey website describes the general function pretty well -

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.
Hundreds of scripts are already available for free. And if you’re the tinkerer sort, you can also write your own.

I should note that some other browsers support these scripts, but often in a limited fashion. Opera can run some Greasemonkey scripts, and Safari has Creammonkey to achieve a similar end.

Installation

You can download the Firefox extension from the Greasespot homepge. It will install normally just like any other Firefox addon, and you’ll likely have to restart your browser. Once it’s back open, you should see a Greasemonkey icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Adding Scripts

Once installed, you can begin adding in scripts. The scripts will not require a browser restart, but if you’ve already got the page open that the script is meant to act on (such as YouTube), you may need to refresh the page. To get an idea of the type of changes Greasemonkey can do, here’s a comparison of the same YouTube video page with and without the YouTube Enhancer script.

First the normal YouTube play screen…

And now with Greamonkey enhancements…

As you can see, this gives you a LOT more options in terms of video quality and control. This is just one of MANY great user scripts available from userscripts.org.

Recommended Scripts

No Greasemonkey article would be complete without a list of some of the most useful user scripts. Here I’ve listed some of the ones I’ve found to be particularly helpful.

YouTube Enhancer – Demonstrated above, adds new video controls and download option to YouTube.
TinyURL Decoder – Shows you what’s behind those TinyURL redirects so you’ll never get Rickrolled again.
Textarea Resize – Allows for a larger text area in websites that only provide a small text box.
Folders4Gmail – Allows you to organize your GMail labels into a category hierarchy so you can use “sub-labels”.
YouTube Cleaner – Removes some of the extra cruft from YouTube (like comments) that you may not want. Can be easily enabled/disabled.
Pre-Fill Comments – If you frequently comment on blogs like MakeTechEasier, you can use this script to automatically fill in your name/email/URL.

And many, many more.

Do you have any Greasemonkey scripts you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

How to Enhance Your Browser with Greasemonkey originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Scribefire: A Full Featured Blog Editor For Firefox Users

Trevor Dobrygoski — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:51:54 +0000

Not too long ago I started looking around for an easy way to post to some of the blogs I write for. The first thing that came to mind, since I was already using it to write, was to use the publish option in Google Docs to post. If you use the free hosting sites like Blogger, Wordpress.com or Livejournal to name a few, this will do the trick. This is also a viable option if you post to a site using that uses the Blogger, Metaweblog or Moveable Type API. Where Google falls short is if you need to post to multiple sites.

I went on a hunt and found a couple different choices. To be honest, I tried the Firefox add-on Scribefire first; I never quite got to the second one. The reason I didn’t go any further is it did what I needed it to do and it did it well. Scribefire lets me post to multiple blogs, storing of notes and uploads images. I can work on multiple posts at the same time by opening different tabs. This smart little Firefox add-on auto saves my progress while I work and also when I close the editing window.

Adding Visuals

This feature rich editor gives you a few ways to add a few pieces of flair to your post. Video is becoming wildly popular and very common in every kind of site. Scribefire lets you search for videos on Youtube right from the editing window. The videos can be previewed in the search window before you embed it in the post. Here is a look at the preview window.

When its time to add pictures, there are a few more options. Pictures can be uploaded from your computer, the web, Flickr or Zementa. Below is a sample of the search results when looking on Flickr.

Never having used Zementa before, I found a few of the features pretty neat. When searching, the pictures show up in the sidebar (not the neat part). As you hover over the picture, the text tells you if it is free to use.

When you decide on a picture, it adds in credit for the photo and a link to the picture on the web. Some editors have a specific way they want things laid out, so a simple copy and paste can move the credits where you want them.

Add Some Ads

Off to the side there are a few tabs, one of which is aimed to help monetize your blog. Currently inLinks (the provider of the HTML ads) only supports Wordpress, Drupal, Moveable Type, Joomla and Ruby on Rails sites. None of the free hosted blogging options are supported.

Share your Post

Another tab offers options to share your post. I personally would like to see a few more options, but I am not going to complain too much.

Under the Hood

In the sidebar, there are tabs to set up and select the blog you want to post to. The next tab lets you see all of the entries and notes. The notes are essentially autosaving drafts. In the categories tab, this is where you apply any tags or categories to your post. The fourth tab lets you modify the timestamp, add Technorati tags, trackback URLs and choose what sites to ping.

If you prefer to use it, there is the source code editor option. I am not much for doing the extra work if I can drag and drop it; Everyone has their preferences though.

What blog editor do you use to write your posts?

Scribefire: A Full Featured Blog Editor For Firefox Users originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers

Joshua Price — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:33:30 +0000

Like many of you, I use a LOT of different computers. Some at home, some at work, some in between. Many of these computers have more than one operating system installed, and those operating systems may have more than one browser. All this leaves a LOT of places you may have saved your bookmarks. What’s saved on one might not be saved on another, or perhaps you reformatted your OS and forgot to backup your favorite websites. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to solve this problem, and today we’ll be covering some of them. Each of the programs/toolbars/extensions we’ll try out today can store your bookmarks outside your browser so that they can be accessed from anywhere.

1. Foxmarks/Xmarks

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, IE, Safari)

Saves: Bookmarks, Passwords

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a browser extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks from several locations so that they can follow you anywhere. It used to be a Firefox-only extension, but now has extend its reach to Internet Explorer and Safari. The website has a type of content search where you can see reviews and ratings for many web sites based on the users of the Xmarks extension. With the Xmarks extension installed, you’ll also notice some new icons next to your Google search results indicating ratings and reviews for some of the sites in your search results.

Xmarks also includes an option to sync your saved passwords, so that you can keep the passwords saved in one browser and share them to all the others where you installed Xmarks.

To install the Xmarks extension, go to http://download.xmarks.com/download and choose the appropriate plugin for your browser.

2. delicious

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Chrome)

Saves: Bookmarks

Any topic on web bookmark services will always eventually lead to http://delicious.com/ (previously known as del.icio.us). This site has been around for a while and has always been a great place to store and share your bookmarks. Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords, so that you can search your (or other people’s) bookmarks based on tags. From the website you can search with those tags to see what bookmarks others have submitted on that topic.

The browser extension for Firefox can be found here.

The browser extension for IE8 can be found here

The browser extension for Safari can be found here

For Google Chrome, go to the delicious site and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.

3. Mozilla Weave

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox)

Saves: Bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs

Finally, there’s Mozilla Weave. This is a much more ambitious project than just saving your bookmarks online. Weave is intended to let you keep a complete browser “experience” from one computer to the next. It saves much more info online so that you can access things like your browsing history and tabs along with bookmarks and passwords when roaming to a different Firefox installation. Keeping things like your browser history saved online would make it a lot easier to access that page-you-were-on-yesterday-but-can’t-quite-remember-the-name, or pull up that news article you just saw but isn’t on the site’s front page anymore.

Weave appears to be a very useful tool, but unfortunately it seems to require Firefox 3.5, which is still in development. If you’re really excited to try out Weave but don’t want to wait until 3.5 is officially released as stable, you can get information on download and installation at the Mozilla Labs website.

There are some other options out there that I chose not to include in this article for various reasons such as platform portability or concerns about data privacy. If you’re using a bookmark sync program/extension to manage your bookmarks, I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Use Wolfram|Alpha Search and Firefox Extension

Joshua Price — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:01:06 +0000

If you keep up on tech news, you’ve doubtlessly seen all the hype surrounding Wolfram|Alpha, the new not-exactly-search-engine that’s making big waves in the web search industry. Your traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc all work on the same basic principle: finding web pages based on keywords. Wolfram|Alpha isn’t about bringing web pages to the user, it’s about bringing information to the user.

Let’s say you open up Google and enter a query like “Princess Bride Cast”. You’d get results linking to several pages with info on who was in that cinematic masterpiece. It would probably look something like this:

Pretty good, right? You’ve got a list of pages that probably all have the info you’re looking for.

Wolfram, on the other hand, doesn’t give you the pages with the info, it gives you the info! That same query in Wolfram gives results like this:

This approach to search opens all kinds of possibilities. Want to know the population of Guam? How many mililiters in a gallon? The current time in Dublin? The radius of the sun in yards? Of course it can’t handle queries that simply don’t make sense (it couldn’t figure out quite what I meant by “Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!”).

You can even lookup weather, stock values, and mathematical formulas, like this one:

Delivering information in this way is a flashback to those old sci-fi movies where a character walks up to a terminal and asks it something like “Computer, how long until we reach Alpha Centauri?”. The creators of Wolfram|Alpha have cited this as a direct inspiration behind the design of their system. Any why not? With the vast quantities of information available to us, why not make the computer sort and process that information to give us just what we need?

Firefox Addons

Now that you’ve got a good idea how and why to use Wolfram, let’s integrate it into Firefox for easy searches. First is a plain old search box entry that lets you use Wolfram from the search box in the top-right corner of your browser. The Wolfram|Alpha extension can be installed easily according to the instructions on the page, and it’s immediately ready to use.

A slightly different approach was taken by the other extension I tried. Wolfram|Alpha Google integrates Wolfram|Alpha results into existing Google results, giving you both options side by side, as shown below.

WARNING: Opinions ahead!

Many of the articles surrounding Wolfram|Alpha have portrayed it as a Google-killer. I think this is extremely inaccurate. For starters, the two have entirely different purposes. Sure, many of us use Google to find information, but we also use it to find pictures, files, news, articles, reviews, and of course web pages. All these things that Wolfram simply isn’t designed to handle. Calling it a Google killer is like saying the popularity in skateboards will kill the trucking industry. Sure, both can get you from A to B, but they’re two different things with different uses.

That being said, I’ve been extremely impressed by Wolfram|Alpha’s capabilities so far. It certainly does have the potential to pull some of the simpler queries away from Google, but as long as it remains a “computational knowledge engine”, we’ll still have the good old search engines.

How To Use Wolfram|Alpha Search and Firefox Extension originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Default Your Search To Google.com In Firefox

Miles — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:35:24 +0000

If you travel to foreign countries or are not from US, Firefox has the annoying habit of returning search results in a language based on the nationality of the service provider. When I was at home in France, it’d default to Google.fr, but at work in Switzerland it would default to Google.ch.

Here is a simple trick to default your search to Google.com, regardless of which country you are in.

On your browser’s URL bar, if you typed in google.com, it will redirect to your country local domains (such as google.fr or google.ch).

To search on Google.com, you just have to type in http://www.google.com/ncr and google.com will automatically appear. For your info, the ‘ncr’ refers to No Country Redirect.

A good thing about this is that you don’t have to type in ‘google.com/ncr’ everytime you want to search in Google. The first time you go to google.com/ncr page, Google will set a cookie in your browser and make all your future searches default to google.com. This means that you only need to go to www.google.com/ncr once and you will be able to search Google.com right from your Firefox’s search bar (at the top right corner) at all time.

Get your Google local domain back

You just need to clear your cookie and your Google local domain will show up the next time you type in Google.com.

How To Default Your Search To Google.com In Firefox originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Be More Efficient With Firefox Keywords

Joshua Price — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:30:06 +0000

A feature of Firefox that often gets overlooked is the keyword system. Firefox can be set up to accept keywords to do things like open a favorite page or search a particular website. Today we’ll try out some of the things you can do with keywords.

Bookmark Access

Often, it’s faster to send your computer instructions with the keyboard rather than with the mouse. This includes accessing your favorite websites. On my computer, for example, I’ve got a few different bookmarks for MakeTechEasier.com to access different parts of the site. If I want to log in to create a new post, I’ve got to grab the mouse, go into the Bookmarks menu, find the MTE submenu, find the section I want, and click the icon. While that’s not exactly rocket science, keywords can make that faster and easier.

Open your Bookmarks menu and pick something you use often. Right-click the icon and choose Properties. You’ll get a screen much like the one below. In the Keyword field you can enter whatever keyword you’d like to use to access that site.

From this point on, you can click in the address bar (or use Ctrl+L) and type in your keyword to be taken immediately to that site.

Keyword Searches

This is my favorite use for keywords. By default, Firefox includes a fair number of search engines in the box in the upper right corner, and even more available to be added from their website, but they can’t cover everything. There are several websites I search regularly and we can use the Keywords feature to do it better. The same method from above can be used to search your favorite sites. Above, we took an existing bookmark and edited the properties to include a keyword. This time, we’ll take a different approach.

In our example, I’m going to set up a keyword search for, you guessed it, MakeTechEasier.com. As you read this, you may notice the search box in the top right corner of our site. This box allows you to search for articles from within MakeTechEasier.com.

We’re going to use that box to create a custom search for this site. Right-click the blank space in the search box and choose Add a Keyword For This Search. You’ll get a dialog box where you choose the name and keyword. Since I’ve already got a keyword named mte I made this one mtes.

Now, wherever I am, I can click in my address bar (or use Crtl+L) and type mtes (search query) to find whatever I need on the site.

This works for all kinds of web sites. If you like movies you could make a keyword to search IMDb. If you download a lot of torrents, you can make a keyword to search your favorite torrent site. Keywords can be useful in many different ways to let you access just the information you want, right when you want it.

Do you have any other handy uses for this great feature? If so, let me know in the comments.

How To Be More Efficient With Firefox Keywords originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Useful Firefox Shortcut Keys (and Cheatsheet Download)

Juscelino M. Acevedo — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:37:24 +0000

I like using the keyboard as much as possible because it makes me feel more productive. In my opinion, moving your hand over to the mouse is unnecessary the majority of the time because most applications provide very convenient keyboard shortcuts. Today we will discuss the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to navigate the Internet faster, thus getting more work (or play) done.

The Shortcuts

I have decided to provide the keyboard shortcuts in an order which will allow you to start Firefox, navigate a couple of your favorite websites using multiple tabs, then close Firefox once you are done. The first step is to actually open Firefox as you normally would (with your mouse). Although there are plenty of ways to open applications without the use of a mouse, we are concentrating specifically on Firefox keyboard shortcuts.

Alt + D / Ctrl + L

Selects the location bar. This will allow you to go directly into the location bar (sometimes referred to as the address bar) and type in the website address that you wish to navigate to, such as http://www.maketecheasier.com.

CTRL + Enter (.com) / Shift + Enter (.net) / CTRL + Shift + Enter (.org)

Once at the location bar we are used to typing an entire URL, such as www.maketecheasier.com. These three shortcuts make life a bit easier because they will complete the .com, .net, or .org addresses for you. For example, typing maketecheasier in the location bar, then pressing CTRL + Enter will automatically complete the address www.maketecheasier.com and load the website.

ALT + Enter

Opens the address in a new tab. This will allow you to open up the website in a new tab opposed to interrupting the page that you are current viewing.

CTRL + R

Reloads the current page. Did your Internet connection get interrupted or is the website simply responding a bit slower than usual? Try pressing the ESC key to stop loading the page, then this shortcut will attempt to reload (or refresh) the page with hopefully better results.

F11

Full screen. If the menu, toolbars and Windows (or Linux) taskbars are getting in the way, then toggling full screen mode is a great idea. Press it once to enable it, then press it again to disable it.

Tab

Once you have arrived at your favorite website and spotted a link that you would like to follow, the Tab key will help you jump over to and select that link, then pressing Enter is the equivalent of clicking on the link with the left mouse button.

CTRL + F

Find a specific word on the page. If know that there is a specific word on the page will take you directly to the paragraph or link that you are interested in reading, this shortcut will allow your to search for that word. Once you have started searching, use F3 or CTRL + G to find the next instance of that word, until you have found the correct one.

CTRL + T

Opens a new tab. If you are like me, you will be browsing multiple websites at once for multiple reasons. This shortcut will allow you to open a new tab, and combined with the location bar shortcut navigate to a different website.

CTRL + Tab

Selects the next tab. Now that you have probably opened up about five tabs to research a couple of different issues, you may need to navigate back and forth between the tabs. This shortcut allows you to move to the next tab to the right. However, you can actually navigate left and right by using CTRL + PG UP and CTRL + PG DN, respectively. Even better, you can CTRL + (1 to 8) to select a specific tab (as long as you have no more than 8 tabs open) since CTRL + 9 takes you directly to the last tab on the right.

ALT + Left Arrow / ALT + Right Arrow

Equivalent to clicking on the Back and Forward buttons to navigate within a website. Basically, once you have tabbed over to a link and explored it, you can use these shortcuts to go back to the page were arrived from or forward again.

CTRL + D

Bookmarks the current page. This shortcut will help you bookmark the page that you are currently view, which gives you the ability to access it in the future. If necessary, use CTRL + P to quickly print the current page and take it with you on the road.

ALT + Home

Guess what? This shortcut takes you back to your home page, which is the page that opens when you first launch Firefox. Maybe your home page is your favorite search engine or maybe it is your favorite technical website; this shortcut will take you there.

CTRL + W

Closes the current tab. Once you have read a couple of paragraphs and bookmarked the page, you may want to close the current tab by using this shortcut.

CTRL + Shift + T

Undo closing of a tab. Did you close the wrong tab by mistake. This shortcut will get it back for instantly and reloads the last page that was in that tab.

CTRL + Shift + DEL

Clears your private data. If you are like me and like keeping your browsing history, cache and cookies clean, then this shortcut will help you keep your Firefox sessions clean.

ALT + F4

Closes the window. This final shortcut will close the entire Firefox session once you have closed all of your tabs and are done browsing the Internet.

Download

The above listed shortcut keys are some of the more useful one that you can use for everyday tasks. However, we know that you won’t be satisfied with an uncompleted list, that’s why we have prepared for you a Firefox shortcut keys cheatsheet where you can print out and reference to easily.

The cheatsheet covers all the shortcut keys for the various OS. It’s free of charge, download the Complete Firefox Shortcut Keys Guide now.

Photo credit: psd

Useful Firefox Shortcut Keys (and Cheatsheet Download) originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Automate Your Browser Tasks With iMacros

Joel Reyes — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:08:21 +0000

iMacros is a nifty Firefox extension that allows you to save loads of time by letting you record repetitive tasks such as filling out forms, email, and more without the need of any sort of special skills!

End the terrible thought of having to manually conduct every task that requires your attention on the web and “employ” the use of a more effective, time saving, accurate app.

How it works:

As soon as you’re able to get the hang of it, you can easily do more than just repeat a group of specified steps. You’ll be able to start scripting some very complex tasks in Firefox that will allow you to save immense amounts of time and sky rocket your productivity. This works by iMacros placing a library like function bar that goes in the left side of your screen.

Now you just have to click the ‘Record’ button on the ‘Rec’ tab of the iMacros sidebar, start doing some tasks you’d like to record in Firefox, click ‘Stop’, and now you’ve instantly just made a macro.

To tell iMacros to replay the task all you have to do is find your macro in the list, hit the play tab and click ‘Play’ to do the task in the macro.

Once you’ve created a macro in Firefox, you can go directly to the ‘Edit’ tab in the iMacros sidebar, select your recoreded steps from the list and choose the ‘Edit Macro’ option to view and edit its corresponding code. It’s fairly easy and simple to pick up on the basics of the scripting language iMacros uses just by recording a macro and effectively viewing its source code. Here’s a quick step by step overview of the entire process.

Conclusion

This is an incredible Firefox extension that will allow you to save ample amounts of time with the click of a button. Leave all of those repetitive and annoyingly tedious tasks in the past and look forward to a more productive future with the use of iMacros.

If you’ve ever used or have found this app to be useful, please feel free to discuss it below and subscribe to our amazing feed for one of the best scoops on free apps!

Automate Your Browser Tasks With iMacros originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Zip Through Pages Without Having to Hit Next

Joel Reyes — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:09:39 +0000

If you’re a heavy Firefox user like me and love to search for things utilizing Google, other search engines and photo sites then you’re going to find great use for PageZipper within your Firefox arsenal. This extension allows you to automatically load the following page within a search window without having to click on the next button. It saves you time and boosts your productivity as well.

Using PageZipper

As you reach the bottom of a current search page this extension will quickly load the next page, however, this app isn’t automatically active once you’ve downloaded it. As soon as you restart your Firefox browser you will need to go to the View section in your top menu bar, then scroll down to Toolbars and choose Customize.

A window will appear with many icons. You will have to find the PageZipper icon and drag the selection to your Firefox toolbar.

Now all that’s left to do is travel to a search page and press Start PageZipper icon and all of your pages will begin to automatically load beneath each other once you start to reach the end of the search page.

Conclusion

I mostly like to use this extension for searches on Google; however, it also works on similar apps such as Flickr. The way this app works is it automatically identifies the “next” link on a page and then it takes the liberty of loading the actual next page for you. This means that it won’t work on most blogs, as many don’t have a next link.

One downfall I found this newly established extension to lack in is the non-compatibility of sites that do not utilize the English language. Hopefully in the future its developers can get this feature added on to improve its usability. It also does not work on sites that load their next pages using JavaScript, such as Deviantart.com.

All in all I’ve come to believe that this is a great app and it offers the ability to save you time and increase your productivity depending on the tasks you’re working on.

Currently PageZipper is compatible with Win2000/XP/Vista/7 and all recent versions of Firefox.

Zip Through Pages Without Having to Hit Next originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Instantly Save Every Images On A Web Page

Joel Reyes — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:27:01 +0000

We’ve all experienced the time consuming right-click wonder as we scroll down the small browser pop-up that appears when we want to save an image. Depending on what you may be working on or what you’re trying to do, it isn’t always the most feasible option to save images one by one. This is exactly why within this article I plan on showing you how to instantly download every images on any web page.

Save images with Save Images?

Save Images is a Firefox add-on that allows you to save all the images on any web page at one go. This add-on not only has the potential to increase your productivity, but can also save you a whole lot of time while managing to keep your right-clicking finger intact.

There are several useful functions in Save Images, and the most notable one is that you can configure the size you’d like Save Images to store your every images. Other options include renaming images as they are being downloaded, and save the link if any image is not in place.

Step 1) Download Save Images. Once you’ve installed this add-on you can customize this extension by accessing the Tools menu.

Step 2) Now you have to choose which image selection format you’d like to customize. Save Images allows you to save every images in every tab from left to right or vice versa, or only save images in the current tab.

Step 3) Select the size limit of an image, the size you’d like all images to be saved in, and how you’d like Save Images to deal with duplicate pictures.

Step 4) Next you have to choose which folder you’d like your images saved to, and what name you want images saved as.

Step 5) As soon as steps 1-4 have been completed all you have to do is click OK at the bottom of your tab option window, and all of the images on the tab that you’re currently in will be saved to the folder you selected.

A small pop-up window will appear bottom-right of your browser letting you know how many images were instantly saved.

Step 6) Quickly and efficiently access all of the images you saved in the folder you selected on your desktop.

Conclusion

It is a repetitive and boring task to save every images in a web page, especially when there are tons of images in that page. With Save Images, you can save some efforts and time and put them in places where they can give you more productivity. If you feel like you can take advantage of this add-on, then you can download it here.

Please feel free to leave us a comment below; we love to hear from our readers!

How To Instantly Save Every Images On A Web Page originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Install Firefox 3.1 On Ubuntu Without Affecting The Default Setting

Damien — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:31:00 +0000

If you are someone who always like to test out bleeding edge products and applications, then Firefox 3.1 is something that you definitely don’t want to miss. Not only does it comes with more improved features, it is also much faster than its predecessor and other browsers. The current version is at beta 2 and is available for download for all platforms. Even though it is not recommended to install in a production machine, it is already very stable and can be used on a daily basis.

If you want to test out Firefox 3.1 beta 2 (or other versions) on your Ubuntu, but don’t want it to mess up your existing Firefox setting, you can easily do so by creating a new profile. Here is how you can do so.

Go to Firefox 3.1 beta 2 download page. Download the Linux package (firefox-3.1b2.tar.bz2) for your preferred language to your Home folder.

Unzip the downloaded file to your Home folder. You should see a Firefox folder.

Before we launch Firefox 3.1 beta 2, we need to create a new Firefox profile so that it won’t interfere and conflict with our current version of Firefox.

In the terminal,

cd ~/Firefox ./firefox --no-remote -P new_profile

You should see the Firefox profile manager. Select the new profile and rename it to a name that you can remember easily.

Click “Start Firefox“.

Firefox 3.1 beta 2 should now start with a new profile.

To make sure that it will start with this profile every time, we need to create a desktop entry where you can easily click to launch it.

On your desktop, right click the mouse and select Create Launcher.

Fill in the detail as shown in the screenshot below. Remember to change the USERNAME to your own username and the your_profile_name to your own newly set profile name. You can find the Firefox icon at the Firefox -> Icons folder.

Click to enlarge

Next, we are going to modify the entry for the current of Firefox so that it won’t boot up from this new profile.

Right click on the menu bar and select Edit Menus.

Navigate to the Firefox section (Application -> Internet -> Firefox) and select Properties.

In the Add the following command

In the Command field, append the following code to then end:

--no-remote -P default

If you have added Firefox shortcut to various places (such as the dock, panel etc), you need to change their entries as well, else they will start up with the new profile.

That’s it. You can now test out Firefox 3.1 and run your existing version of Firefox simultaneously without affecting the setting of each other.

How To Install Firefox 3.1 On Ubuntu Without Affecting The Default Setting originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Flickr Gallery Plus Makes Flickr Even More Fun To Use

Sharninder — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:37:26 +0000

Flickr is one of my favourite websites. I use it for storing photos, searching for interesting photos for my blog posts and to meet like minded people.

The best part is the simple and plain interface and the social aspect. The sheer number of users active on Flickr make the whole experience of photography very social and fun.

Flickr was one of the first websites to use web 2.0 elements in its design but it hasn’t really kept up with the rest of the web since then, especially the process of browsing photos in a set. Don’t you agree that it is plain annoying having to click a hundred times just to see all the pics in a set.

Don’t be sad though, my friend, Flickr Gallery Plus is a step in the right direction. This is a Firefox extension whose sole purpose in life is to make your Flickr photo browsing experience a better one.

To get started install the extension using the Tools -> Add-ons menu in Firefox.

I’m using the Debian version of Firefox, called Iceweasel and that is what I see in the image above. If you use Firefox, you should see an Add to Firefox button instead.

Once you have the extension loaded, you’ll see a small icon in the bottom right hand corner of the Firefox window. Flickr Gallery Plus sits in that corner quietly and only comes into the picture when you’re viewing a photo set on Flickr.

See the difference ?

As soon as you browse over to a photo set on Flickr, the Flickr Gallery Plus extension starts to pre-load all the pictures that are present in that set. It also rearranges the page to look like the picture above.

As you can see, the first thumbnail in the set has been selected and the preloaded bigger sized image is being shown on the left of the thumbnail view. Now, as you click on the next thumbnail, that image will be displayed in the same place. You can also use the right and left arrow keys to view your pictures. Nifty … don’t you think ?

Pressing on the Enter key or clicking on a picture will take you to the individual page of the picture using Flickr’s standard interface.

Another really cool feature of this extension is the slideshow mode. Just click on the “Start Slideshow” link right under the picture and you will be able to go through your complete set in a slideshow with nice fade-in/fade-out transition between images. The only problem is that it doesn’t do full screen slideshow … yet.

Don’t you think this is a much better and easier way to browse a Flickr set ? Let us know your thoughts on this extension in the comments.

Flickr Gallery Plus Makes Flickr Even More Fun To Use originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

10 Firefox Extensions For Better Tab Management

Damien — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:13:40 +0000

The tab is easily one of the most used feature in Firefox. It gives you the convenience of browsing different sites in one single window and save you the trouble of too many windows cluttering your desktop. If you are like me, who like to open many tabs at the same time, here are 10 useful extensions that you can use to better manage your tabs.

1) Tab Mix Plus (TMP)

Tab Mix Plus is probably the best, if not, one of the best Firefox tabs extension around. It extends your tab function in many way that you never think is possible. With TMP, you can duplicate tabs, control tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, and many more useful features. In fact, if you take a look at the database of Firefox extension, some of the tab extensions have long been included as a feature in TMP.

Alternative to TMP: Tab kit

If you don’t like TMP for the reason that it conflicts with some other extension, a great alternative will be Tab Kit. Tab Kit is another extension that gives you a great deal of control over your tabs. It allows you to group your tabs according to domain or parent tab and arrange your tabs in multiple rows. You can also shift your tab bar to the top/left/right of the window and also copy/paste/duplicate group of tabs by dragging. Tab kit is not compatible with TMP.

2) TooManyTabs

TooManyTabs is an experimental Firefox addon. It allows you store up to over 50 tabs without cluttering up your tab bar. TooManyTabs uses an extra rows just below your bookmark bar to store the tabs. Whenever you move a tab to TooManyTabs, the memory is freed up and can be allocated for other use. This helps to prevent your Firefox from consuming too much memory from idling tabs.

3) Quick Drag

Quick Drag is an extension of the popular SuperDragAndGo extension. You can easily drag and drop any images, highlight texts or links within the browser to open them in new tab. When highlighted texts are dragged and dropped, it will perform a Web search with the selected text on a new tab. Dragging and dropping an image will save the image to your Desktop.

4) Tab Split Tab

Opera users will know that you can easily split the browser into vertical, horizontal, cascade tiles for viewing of multiple tabs concurrently. Tab Split Tab is an experimental addon that aims to fulfill the same window splitting task in Opera. At the moment, you can split your Firefox browser into two and view multiple sites in one page.

5) Morning Coffee

Morning coffee allows you to bookmark your frequently visit sites and open them all with one click. What is unique about this extension is that it allows you to choose which bookmarks to open on each day. There might be some sites that are updated weekly and you don’t want to visit them every day. By defining the day that you want to visit the sites, Morning Coffee adds the sites to the appropriate day and load them all up when that day arrives.

6) Tab Catalog

Tab catalog displays a thumbnail of all the tab on a canvas so that you can choose and load up the tab you want. This is useful when you have too many opened tab and can’t make out which is which. There are several ways to display the thumbnail canvas, either press Ctrl + tab, mouseover the Tab-Catalog button or press the view all tab button at the right of the tab bar.

Alternative to Tab Catalog: Firefox Showcase

Firefox showcase is another extension that displays a thumbnail of all the opened tab. You can choose to load the thumbnail in a new tab, or in a new window. Though functionally the same as Tab catalog, Firefox showcase does provide you with more configuration options to personalize your thumbnail, such as setting the size, thumbnail caching, thumbnail updating time etc.

7) Aging Tab

This extension make the inactive tab fade as time passes and at the same time highlight the active tab making it more distinguishable. Custom colors can be configured for the aged and active tab.

Alternative to Aging Tab: Colorful Tab

Colorful Tabs paints each tab with different color and make them easy to distinguish. The latest version comes with a default black background that many come to hate. Luckily, one can easily switch off the background from the Preferences page.

8) Fish Eye Tab

If you open too many tabs at one time (more than 20), you will find that each of your tab become barely visible. What Fish Eye Tab does is to zoom and expand each tab to display the tab label as you mouseover it. Fish Eye Tab is activated only when the number of tabs exceed the width of the Firefox window.

9) FaviconizeTab

This extension replace the usual tab with the site favicon, thus reducing the width of the tab. With FaviconizeTab, you can squeeze more tabs into the tab bar without it looking messy and untidy.

10) Source Viewer Tab (for web developer)

This last one is actually my personal favorite. Being someone who did a lot of coding, I find it a chore to switch between windows just to view the source of a Web page. This Source Viewer Tab is able to open the source in a tab rather than in a new window.

There are plenty of other tab management extension in the Mozilla database. Which one did you use to manage your tab?

10 Firefox Extensions For Better Tab Management originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Easily Add A Custom Search Engine To Your Firefox Search Bar

Damien — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:05:00 +0000

How many times have you been frustrated that you have to go to a site just to search for a particular post or article? Wouldn’t it be great if you can search your favorite websites or blogs right from the Firefox search bar? The search bar itself does not provide you with any methods of adding your own search engine. If you want to add one to your search bar, here are some simple and easy methods that you can use.

1) Installing Add to Search Bar extension

Add to Search Bar is a Firefox extension that allows you to add any search engine to your search bar. Go to your favorite site. Right click on the Search box and select “Add to Search Bar“.

2) Create your own search engine via Mycroft Project

Mycroft Project is a site created by the Mozdev team that hosts a collection of Sherlock and OpenSearch search engine. It also has a form generator that you can use it to create your own search engine.

Go to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/submitos.html
Fill in the form details
If you are not sure what to put in the Search URL field, go to your favorite site and perform a search with the site’s search bar. On the address bar, copy the URL and replace your search term by {searchTerms}. Paste the result into the Search URL field. For example, when you search Make Tech Easier, you will get a URL something like this:

http://maketecheasier.com/about/search-result/?cx=012219648382774935931%3A71v9_lruh3c&cof=FORID%3A11&q=your-search-term

Replace your-search-term by {searchTerms} and you get something like:

http://maketecheasier.com/about/search-result/?cx=012219648382774935931%3A71v9_lruh3c&cof=FORID%3A11&q={searchTerms}

Paste this URL to the Search URL field.

Once you have completed the form, scroll down and click on the Generate Plugin button. Code will show up on the text area.
Click on the Install Plugin. A window will pop up and ask you if you want to install the search engine in your search bar.
Click Add. Once you are happy, click Submit Plugin to enter your search engine to Mycroft database.

3) Hacking the backend

If you don’t like to install any extensions as you might feel that it will slow down your Firefox’s performance and you don’t want to submit your search engine to Mycroft, the other way that you can do is to hack the backend of Firefox. Don’t worry, it’s very easy.

Open up a text editor.
Copy and paste the following to the text editor.

name=”Name_Of_Search_Engine”
method=”GET”
action=”URL_Of_Search_Engine_Result_Page”
queryCharset=”utf-8″
>

Change the Name_Of_Search_Engine to your search engine name.
Change the URL_Of_Search_Engine_Result_Page to the search url of the site (without the search parameter)
In the input field, enter any relevant search parameter in the search url. Leave the as it is.
Save the file and give it a .src extension (for example: your_search_engine.src)

If you are using Windows, save the file to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

If you are using Ubuntu, first save the file to the desktop. Open up your terminal and type

sudo cp ~/Desktop/your_search_engine.src /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/

If you are using Mac OS X, this method does not work.

Restart your Firefox and you should find your new custom search engine in the search bar

Adding an image to your custom search engine

Create a image of size 16×16 pixels and save it with the same name as your search engine. It doesn’t matter if you save it as jpg, gif or png.

Now copy and paste the image to the same directory where you place the search_engine.src file.

Done!

How To Easily Add A Custom Search Engine To Your Firefox Search Bar originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Easily Create and Insert HTM signature For Your Webmail

Damien — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:01:53 +0000

If you are bothered that you can’t create html signature in Gmail or other web-based email accounts, WiseStamp could probably be the answer to your problem.

WiseStamp is a Firefox extension that allows you to create and insert rich HTML signature for your Web-based email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL mail. After you have installed and get it running, you can create your own signature with a rich text editor and optionally, fill in your social network detail and get them to show up in your signature.

The WiseStamp Email Signature Firefox extension is still an experimental extension that is not yet approved by the Mozilla team. To install, you will have to create a Mozilla account and log yourself in before you can access the installation link. Alternatively, you can bypass the logging in by installing via the WiseStamp site.

Once you have installed and restarted your Firefox, you can access to the rich-text editor to create your html signature.

You can also fill in your social networking detail and display them in your signature.

The Setting tab allows you to configure how you want to display the signature, whether to show an icon, text or both for the IM and social services. By default, WiseStamp include a promotion link in your signature. You can remove it by unchecking the box beside “Promote Wisestamp Project“.

WiseStamp email signature works on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL mail. There is no extra steps required to insert the signature. Whenever you compose a new message, the signature will automatically be inserted to the message area.

If you are using Gmail only and are keen to create multiple html signatures, Blank Canvas Gmail signature would probably be a better choice.

Easily Create and Insert HTM signature For Your Webmail originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Gmail: Create Custom Signature For Different Accounts

Damien — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:27:13 +0000

While Gmail allows you to set up and manage multiple email accounts within itself, the Gmail team seems to have overlooked the fact that each email account is meant for different purpose and you will need a different signature for each account. For sure, I don’t want to include all my business contacts when I send an email to my family members, and vice versa. Currently, Gmail allows you to set only one signature and expect you to stick with it for all your email accounts.

Luckily for Firefox users, there is a Firefox extension – Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures that enables you to insert custom html signature into your mails based on which email address you are sending form.

At the moment, Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures is still an experimental add-ons and is not yet available for the general use. However, if you sign up an account with Mozilla and log in to your account, you will be able to install it just like any other Firefox extensions.

Blank Canvas Gmail signatures allows you to create up to 4 different signatures for each email address.

When you compose a new message, or reply/forward a current message, you will find a new dropdown field beside the “From: ” field.

To create a new signature for a particular email address, first select the email adress on the From dropdown field. Next, click on the Edit Signature.

Two large text boxes will appear. You can now create your custom signature on the first text box and see the preview on the second box. It only accept html codes, which means if you want to insert a line break, you have to use the code

To insert an image signature, you have to first upload your signature image file to a Web server that can be accessed at any time with any computer. In the create signature field, place the following html image code to insert an image signature.

In the option field, you can configure whether the signature should appear before/after the quoted text. You can also change the label for each signature for easy identification.

I found this Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures extension to be extremely useful as it eases all my frustration of having to edit the signature everytime I compose a message. Hopefully, it can get out of the experimental stage and become available for the mass public. Do you find this extension useful? What other ways do you use to create custom signature on your Gmail?

Gmail: Create Custom Signature For Different Accounts originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

28 Coolest Firefox About:Config Tricks

Damien — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:24:03 +0000

You may have installed countless add-on in Firefox to enhance your using experience, but if you want to get the most out of Firefox, you really have to hack your way into the about:config.

The about:config page contains most (if not, all) of Firefox configuration options. It is so far the most effective, and the most powerful way to tweak and enhance your Firefox performance. Here are 28 of the popular tweaks.

Accessing your about:config page

In your Firefox, type about:config in the address bar.

You will be shown a warning page. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to proceed.

On the main page, you will see a long list of configuration entries. Enter the name of the key you want to update in the “Filter” field. The list will narrow to only the entries that match your keyword as you type.

To modify the value, simply double click on the entry value field and update the entry. That’s all!

Isn’t that simple? Now, let’s get to the tweaking.

1) Adjust the Smart Location Bar’s Number of Suggestions

In Firefox 3, when you start typing in the location bar, a drop-down list of suggestion URLs will be shown. If you want it to show more than 12 suggestions (12 is the default), you can adjust the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults keys and get it to show the number you want.

Config name: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
Default: 12
Modified value: Set to your desired number of suggestion. If you want to disable it all together, set it to -1

2) Disable the session restore function

Firefox 3 automatically saves your session every 10 secs so that whenever it crashes, it can restore all your tabs. While this is a useful feature, some of you might find it irritating. To disable this function, toggle the value of browser.sessionstore.enabled to False

Config name: browser.sessionstore.enabled
Default: True
Modified value: False if you want to disable the session restore function

3) Adjust the Session Restore Saving Frequency

Same as above, if you decided to keep the session restore feature on, but want to reduce the session saving frequency, change the value of browser.sessionstore.interval so that Firefox will save the session at a longer interval.

Config name: browser.sessionstore.interval
Default: 10000 (in msecs, equivalent to 10secs)
Modified value: Set it to your desired value. 1000 means 1 sec and 60000 means 1 minute.

4) Enable Advanced Color Profile Support

Firefox has this advanced color profile features that display higher image quality. It is not enabled by default as it has a negative effect on the performance of the browser. If you are concern with the image quality rather than the performance, you can activated it via the gfx.color_management.enabled setting

Config name: gfx.color_management.enabled
Default: False
Modified value: True (if you want to activate the color profile support feature)

5) Disable Antivirus Scanning

This is mainly for Windows users. By default, Firefox 3 automatically scan the downloaded file with the default anti-virus application to make sure it is free of virus. If you download a big file, it could take a long time for the whole scanning process to complete. To increase the performance of the browser, you might want to consider disabling the anti-virus scanning via the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone key.

Config name: browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone
Default: True
Modified value: False (if you want to disable it)

6) Configuring The Scrolling Tabs

When you opened many tabs, Firefox will not keep on reducing the tab width. Instead, it shows a scrolling bar so that the min width (100px) is conserved and you can scroll to find your tabs. If you are those who don’t like the scrolling tab function and prefer Firefox to show all the tabs, regardless how small it is, you can set the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 to disable it. Similarly, if you want Firefox to display more tabs before showing the scrolling button, you can reduce the default value to a lower value, say 75 pixels.

Config name: browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
Default: 100
Modified value: 0 if you want to disable the scrolling functions, other values to set the min width value

7) Show/Disable Close button on Tabs

Some people love to see the Close (the red X) button on every tabs, but some hate it. Whatever is it, you can configure it to your preferences via the browser.tabs.closeButtons setting.

Config name: browser.tabs.closeButtons
Default: 1
Modified values:

0 – display a close button on the active tab only
1- display close buttons on all tabs
2- don’t display any close buttons
3- display a single close button at the end of the tab strip

8) Extend Scripts Execution Time

In Firefox 3, a script is only given 10 seconds to respond, after which it will issue a unresponsive script warning. If you are hooked on a slow network connection, you might want to increase the script execution time via dom.max_script_run_time to cut down on the frequency of the no script warning.

Config name: dom.max_script_run_time
Default:10 (in secs)
Modified value: 20, or any values greater than 10

9) Handling JavaScript Popups

When you come across a site that executes a javascript open new window function, and if the popup window is without all the usual window features, i.e. back/forward/reload buttons, status bar etc, Firefox will automatically treat it as a popup and will not open it as a new tab. However, if you find this to be a nuisance and wanted to open all new windows in a new tabs, you can specify it via the browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction setting.

Config name: browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction
Default: 2 – Open all JavaScript windows the same way as you have Firefox handle new windows unless the JavaScript call specifies how to display the window
Modified values:

0 – open all links as how you have Firefox handle new windows
1 – do not open any new windows
2- open all links as how you have Firefox handle new windows unless the Javascript specify how to display the window

10) Enable Spell Checking In All Text Fields

The default spell checking function only checks for multi-line text boxes. You can get it to spell-check for single line text box as well.

Config name: layout.spellcheckDefault
Default: 1 (spell checker for multi-lines text boxes only)
Modified values:

0 – disable the spell checker
2 – enable the spell checker for all text boxes

11) Open Search Box Results In New Tab

When you search using the search box at the top right hand corner of the browser, it will display the search results in the current tab. If you don’t want the search to interfere with your current tab, you can tweak the browser.search.openintab to make it open in a new tab.

Config Name: browser.search.openintab
Default: False
Modified value: True (open search box results in new tab)

12) Lower The Physical Memory Used When Minimized

This tweak is mainly for Windows users. When you minimize Firefox, it will send Firefox to your virtual memory and free up your physical memory for other programs to use. Firefox will reduce its physical memory usage, when minimized, to approximately 10MB (give or take some) and when you maximize Firefox it will take back the memory that it needs.

The preference name does not exist and needs to be created.

Right click on the background and select New->Boolean.

Enter the name when prompted: config.trim_on_minimize
Enter the values: True

13) Speed up your Firefox

Several tweaks required for this

Config name: network.http.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

Config name: network.http.proxy.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

Config name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Default: 4
Modified value: any value higher than 4, but not more than 8

Config name: network.http.max-connections
Default: 30
Modified value: 96

Config name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Default: 15
Modified value: 32

14) Increase/Decrease the Amount of Disk Cache

When a page is loaded, Firefox will cache it into the hard disk so that it doesn’t need to be download again for redisplaying. The bigger the storage size you cater for Firefox, the more pages it can cache.

Before you increase the disk cache size, make sure that browser.cache.disk.enabled browser.cache.disk.enable is set to True.

Config name: browser.cache.disk.capacity
Default: 50000 (in KB)
Modified value:

0 – disable disk caching
any value lower than 50000 reduces the disk cache
any value higher than 50000 increases the disk cache.

15) Select all text when click on the URL bar

In Windows and Mac, Firefox highlights all text when you click on the URL bar. In Linux, it does not select all the text. Instead, it places the cursor at the insertion point. Regardless which platform you are using, you can now tweak it to either select all or place cursor at insertion point.

Config name: browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
Modified value:

False – place cursor at insertion point
True – select all text on click

16) Autofill Address in URL Bar

Other than the smart location feature, you can also get your URL bar to autofill the address as you type the URL.

Config name: browser.urlbar.autofill
Default: False
Modified value: True (Have Firefox autofill the address as you type in the URL bar)

17) Same Zoom Level For Every Site

Firefox remembers your zoom preference for each site and set it to your preferences whenever you load the page. If you want the zoom level to be consistent from site to site, you can toggle the value of browser.zoom.siteSpecific from True to False.

Config name: browser.zoom.siteSpecific
Default: True
Modified value: False (enable same zoom preferences for every sites)

18) Setting your zoom limit

If you find that the max/min zoom level is still not sufficient for your viewing, you can change the zoom limit to suit your viewing habits.

Config name: zoom.maxPercent
Default: 300 (percent)
Modified value: any value higher than 300

Config name: zoom.minPercent
Default: 30 (percent)
value: any value

19) Configure Your Backspace Button

In Firefox, you can set your backspace to better use by getting it to either go back to the previous page or act as page up function.

Config name: browser.backspace_action
Default: 2 (does nothing)
Modified value:

0 – go back previous page
1- page up

20) Increase Offline Cache

If you do not have access to Internet most of the time, you might want to increase the offline cache so that you can continue to work offline. By default, Firefox 3 caches 500MB of data from supported offline Web apps. You can change that value to whatever amount of your choice.

Config name: browser.cache.offline.capacity
Default: 512000 (in KB)
Modified value: any value higher than 512000 will increase the cache value

21) Auto Export Firefox 3 bookmarks to bookmarks.html

Unlike the previous version, Firefox 3 backup the bookmarks file in places.sqlite rather than the usual bookmarks.html. Since bookmarks.html allows us to export and sync our bookmarks with other browser, it will be very useful if Firefox 3 can backup the bookmark to the bookmarks.html as well.

Config name: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML
Default: False
Modified value: True (auto export bookmarks file to bookmarks.html)

22) Disable Extension Compatibility Checks

This is useful if you want to use an extension that is not supported by your version of Firefox badly. It is not recommended, but you can still do it at your own risk.

Right click and select New->Boolean. Enter extensions.checkCompatibility in the field. Enter False in the next field.

Right click again and select New->Boolean. Enter extensions.checkUpdateSecurity into the field and enter False into the next field.

23) Disable Delay Time When Installing Add-on

Everytime you wanted to install a Firefox add-on, you will have to wait for several secs before the actual installation starts. If you are tired of waiting, you can turn the function security.dialog_enable_delay off so that the installation will start immediately upon clicking.

Config name: security.dialog_enable_delay
Default: 2000 (in msec)
Modified value:

0 – start installation immediately
any other value (in msec)

24) View Source in Your Favorite Editor

This is very useful for developers who are always using the ‘view source‘ function. This tweak allows you to view the source code in an external editor.

There are two configuration need to be made:
Config name: view_source.editor.external
Default: False
Modified value: True ( enable view source using external text editor)

Config name: view_source.editor.path
Default: blank
Modified value: insert the file path to your editor here.

25) Increasing ‘Save Link As‘ timeout value

When you right click and select the ‘Save Link As…‘, the browser will request the content disposition header from the URL so as to determine the filename. If the URL did not deliver the header within 1 sec, Firefox will issue a timeout value. This could happen very frequently in a slow network connection environment. To prevent this issue from happening frequently, you can increase the timeout value so as to reduce the possibility of a timeout.

Config name: Browser.download.saveLinkAsFilenameTimeout
Default: 1000 (1 sec)
Modified value: any value higher than 1000 (value is in msec)

26) Animate Fullscreen Toolbar Collapse mode

In Firefox’s fullscreen mode, toolbars and the tab strip are hidden at the top of the screen and only shown on mouseover. To draw attention to this, there is an animation of the toolbar sliding upwards and off-screen when fullscreen mode is toggled on. For performance issue, the animation of the collapse of the toolbar only appear for the first time. For some reason that you may love/hate the animation, you can adjust Browser.fullscreen.animateUp to switch it on/off for every collapse.

Config name: Browser.fullscreen.animateUp
Default: 1 (animate the toolbar collapse only the first time)
Modified value:

0 -disable the animation
2- enable the animation for every collapse

27) Autohide Toolbar in Fullscreen mode

In fullscreen mode, the toolbar is set to autohide and appear upon mouseover. If you have a need to view the toolbar at all time, you can toggle the value of browser.fullscreen.autohide to False to always show the toolbar.

Config name: browser.fullscreen.autohide
Default: True (always autohide)
Modified value: False (always show the toolbar)

28) Increase Add-On search result

If you go to Tools->Add-ons->Get Add-ons and perform a search there, Firefox will only fetch and display 5 matching results. If you want Firefox to show more than 5 results (say 10), you can adjust extensions.getAddons.maxResults to get it to display more results.

Config name: extensions.getAddons.maxResults
Default: 5
Modified value: any value more than 5

This list of about:config is definitely not the complete list. If you have any tricks not listed here, please add it in the comment.

28 Coolest Firefox About:Config Tricks originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Portable Firefox For OS X

Damien — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:00:20 +0000

When Portable Apps released their portable Firefox, it is meant to be used only on Windows. Now, with the release of Portable Firefox OSX, Mac users can also enjoy the benefit of bringing the Firefox everywhere they go, even on their iPod.

Portable Firefox OSX is developed by FreeSMUG (Free Open Source Software Mac User Group) and is meant to be used on any Mac OS X computer. It can be installed on any portable devices such as USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive or memory card as long as it has 57MB of free space and in a format readable by Mac.

The installation is easy. On your Mac desktop, simply drag the “Portable Firefox OS X” folder to your portable device. That’s it. To use it, click “Portable Firefox” from your portable device. No configuration is required.

A good thing about Portable Firefox For OSX is that upon installation, it will also import your existing Firefox profile over. Your entire profile, including your bookmarks, preferences, passwords, extensions, history and cookies will all be ported over such that when you open Portable Firefox, all your settings and configurations are fully intact.

Download Portable Firefox for OSX

Portable Firefox For OS X originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)