Firefox 3 and Extensions You can't live without

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You can do that by clicking Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks,Import and Backup, and select Export to HTML.

My technique simply does it automatically every time I close FF.

yes, but automatically is better for me ; because otherwise i could conceivably forget...

"With great power comes great responsibility"

yep.

anyway i've installed foxmarks now (although i have not relaunched for it to take effect) so this is somewhat less critical. i still like having one html file with all my bookmarks though.

the new bookmark management looks pretty great ; i love the idea of adding tags, since i've spent plenty of time already trying to find that one hilarious page that if i recall correctly mentioned in passing the... um, you know, that mythical animal... Boris Vian wrote about it... the ouapiti ! no wait it was about hilariously bad french translations of old dime westerns, where Will Bill is sometimes called "Wild Bird"... and it also mentions a bird which may or may not have been the whippoorwill, called some random nonsense word that always *reminds* me of ouapiti... i found it by accident looking for something else (ouapiti ???) about 5 years ago... dammit... what the hell was the name of that blog.... i know i bookmarked it... (<-- completely true story, alas. and i still can't find that page, which is tragic because it is HILARIOUS. if i ever DO find it, i'm going to tag it ouapiti, wild bird hickock, western, boris vian, and silver eyebrows, which would make perfect sense to you if i could just find the stupid page.).

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dave Berk

There are two things that I sorely miss from Opera. One, is the ability to navigate by mouse gestures, and the other is the "fit to width" button. Because my eyesight is poor I view websites at least 200% magnified, so a "fit to width" is really a must for me. Do you know any addons for Firefox 3 that can manage that?Dave

I don't use mouse gestures, but one of these might be what you want:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/29
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6366
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12

I haven't found an extension that does the same thing as Opera's "fit to width", though I have seen a fair number of folks asking for it. See it this one helps you at all: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12
______
Dennis

[Dave Berk]

Well, I must say I'm liking FF3 even more than I liked opera. I've got everything I need now apart from a "fit to width" feature.
The extensions I'm using:
Tab Mix Plus DevBuild
PicLens 1.7.0.3459
NoScript 1.7.4
No Squint 1.93.2.1
FlashGot 1.0.4.2
FireGestures 1.1.2
Download Statusbar 0.9.6.3
Adblock Plus 0.7.5.5

And thanks to DMcCunney for the suggestions.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dave Berk

Well, I must say I'm liking FF3 even more than I liked opera. I've got everything I need now apart from a "fit to width" feature.
The extensions I'm using:

<...>

And thanks to DMcCunney for the suggestions.

You're welcome. I use Tab Mix Plus and NoScript here. I don't bother with AdBlock Plus. Part of the core of AdBlock Plus is FiltersetP, a set of CSS rules. The rules define things that are considered ads, and simply tell Firefox not to display those elements. I enable FiltersetP via the Stylish extension, which applies arbitrary CSS to specified sites. Stylish can also be used to style Firefox itself, since the look and feel of the browser is determined by XUL, CSS, and JavaScript, and interpreted and displayed by the Gecko rendering engine.

I'm currently using the following set of extensions: (Click the name to visit the extension's home page)

Enabled Extensions: [20]
- All-in-One Sidebar 0.7.6
Comprehensive Sidebar control and extensions
- Better Gmail 2 0.5
A variety of GMail tweaks
- CuteMenus - Crystal SVG 1.9.3
Icons for just about all menu items
- Dict 0.6.73
Look up a selected word on a dict server
- DOM Inspector 2.0.0
Document Object Model inspector, formerly included with FF, separate in FF3
- Firebug 1.2.0b4
Superb web debugging tool
- Firesomething 1.8.0
"All your branding are belong to Firesomething!"
- Gmail Notifier 0.6.3.4.1
Notifications of new GMail messages
- Greasemonkey 0.8.20080609.0
Run arbitrary JavaScript on specified pages
- Image Zoom 0.3.1
Image zoom functions I wish were built in to FF
- MR Tech Toolkit (formerly Local Install) 6.0.1
Add-on/theme management utility. This list was produced by it.
- NoScript 1.7.4
Block all scripting on sites not in a whitelist
- Prism for Firefox 0.2
Create a desktop shortcut to view the selected page in Prism
- Sage 1.4.2
My preferred RSS reader
- ScribeFire 2.2.7
Full-featured blog editor
- SpiderZilla 1.6.0
Mirror a site locally with httrack
- SQLite Manager 0.2.46
Sqlite database inspection tool
- Stylish 0.5.7
Apply arbitrary CSS to web pages, without a browser restart
- Tab Mix Plus 0.3.6.1.080416
Comprehensive tab management and control
- TotalToolbar 1.3
Toolbar control, which can modify the Status bar, too.

I'm also using a third-party build called Minefield. Technically, Minefiled is a "latest trunk build", compiled from nightly sources for testing purposes.

The default distribution of Firefox is a "lowest common denominator" version, expected to work on any machine using the Intel i386 architecture. But newer machines with more recent model Intel and AMD CPUs support advanced instructions (like SSE/SSE2) that can make things faster if used. FF doesn't use these by default because not all machines have them, and an FF build using them would not run on those machines. Various developers have been contributing optimized builds compiled to use those advanced instructions for people who have the hardware to run them.

My copy of Minefield is one of those, compiled from the FF 3.0 release source to use SSE/SSE2, which is available on my Pentium4 CPU. I've only been playing with a a few days, but it seems faster and more responsive.
______
Dennis

[zelda_pinwheel]

dennis, i am hoping you can answer this question about new tab behavior in FF3.

imagine, for instance, i have the MR browser spy open in tab number 1, followed by (let's say...) 20 or so other tabs with the threads i'm reading. for the sake of argument, 10 tabs are visible in the browser window at any time (no, i don't like fullscreen browser windows, why ?).

now imagine i scroll the tabs over so that tab number 20 (and the 9 preceding it) is visible at the far right of the window, while the spy in tab number 1 is active. then i center-click on a link in the spy to open in new tab number 21.

for some reason, whenever i click a link on the spy, the tabs scroll back to the beginning so the active tab (1) is visible at the left of the window, rather than remaining where they are so that i know where the recently-opened tabs begin (you didn't really think i was going to open just one, did you ?). this seems strange and unoptimal to me. do you know of any reason for it, and / or any way to prevent it happening ?


(aaah, nostalgie... the "similar threads" feature informs me that Portable Firefox 1.5 is available. i wonder if it still is...)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

dennis, i am hoping you can answer this question about new tab behavior in FF3.

imagine, for instance, i have the MR browser spy open in tab number 1, followed by (let's say...) 20 or so other tabs with the threads i'm reading. for the sake of argument, 10 tabs are visible in the browser window at any time (no, i don't like fullscreen browser windows, why ?).

I don't either.

now imagine i scroll the tabs over so that tab number 20 (and the 9 preceding it) is visible at the far right of the window, while the spy in tab number 1 is active. then i center-click on a link in the spy to open in new tab number 21.

for some reason, whenever i click a link on the spy, the tabs scroll back to the beginning so the active tab (1) is visible at the left of the window, rather than remaining where they are so that i know where the recently-opened tabs begin (you didn't really think i was going to open just one, did you ?). this seems strange and unoptimal to me. do you know of any reason for it, and / or any way to prevent it happening ?

I don't know, off the top of my head, because I haven't encountered that behavior.

The first reason is that I seldom open that many tabs at once. The second is that I never liked tab-scrolling. I run the Tab Mix Plus extension, and one thing TMP lets me do is wrap tabs onto multiple rows (how many rows it may use is configurable, and if you expand beyond that, the block of rows scrolls and earlier ones disappear off the top, and reappear when you scroll up.)

On the occasions when I am following multiple threads, I prefer to open the new thread in a new FF window, then open links in that thread in tabs in that window.

(aaah, nostalgie... the "similar threads" feature informs me that Portable Firefox 1.5 is available. i wonder if it still is...)

Yes, but with an important caveat.

Firefox 3 moved away from the bookmarks.html file as the bookmarks to an sqlite database. This has lots of possibilities for bookmark management, since it *is* an honest-to-god database (and you can run SQL queries on it!)

But it impacts portable Firefox implementations, because FF3 provides no means to specify the location of the file. It is created in and must reside in the profile directory. This was an annoyance for me. I use multiple FF profiles, customized for different purposes, and I have Netscape, Seamonkey, and Flock in the mix as well. I wanted all Mozilla based browsers to use the same bookmarks file. this was easy through FF v2. A one line user.js file in each profile directory contained a pointer to the bookmarks.html file, the browsers read it, and opened the file pointed to. That preference doesn't work in FF3. I wound up creating hard links in NTFS instead, outside of Firefox.

You can make a portable Firefox 3 implementation by creating the profile on a USB drive, but performance with everything residing on flash memory on a USB drive may be unacceptable. You may wish to stick to FF2 for portable implementations.
______
Dennis

[zelda_pinwheel]

hm. thanks for the answer. i might try out TMP, which i remember you mentioning before, but i don't think i want multiple rows of tabs, since i already have an extra toolbar (developper tools) which already reduces the size of the viewport. this can be a problem because sometimes i like to reduce the window vertically, to compare two pages or to keep an eye on something in the bottom part of my screen while i do something else in the top part (i really needa dual monitor display...). plus, when i said 20 tabs, that's a fairly conservative estimate... i don't want to end up with so many rows of tabs the viewport is no longer visible at all... (yes i know that slows things down. i just can't help myself).

i have theme windows (one window for mails, with several tabs for different accounts / individual mails, one window for MR, with several tabs for different threads / conversations / messages, one or more windows for whatever else i'm looking at... i rarely have fewer than 5 windows open).

i do like tab scrolling, at least the way ff does it. ie7 is an example of very poor implementation of tabs, if you ask me. i rarely have many tabs open in it since i use it mostly for testing purposes, but it's not at all practical to navigate among tabs. especially since for some idiotic reason they've put a toolbar on the same level as the tabs (and although the toolbars are not locked, i can't seem to drag it anywhere else), so tab space is already limited.

thanks for the explanation about portable ff 1.5, but no worries : i don't actually want to go back that far.

well, if you ever hear of a way to prevent the tab auto-scroll behavior, do let me know, i'd be interested. if you want to test, it always happens on MR with the forum spy, but unless i am mistaken does not *necessarily* occur on other sites... i'll check tomorrow, if i think of it, and confirm. it's getting late here so i'm going to bed now.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

hm. thanks for the answer. i might try out TMP, which i remember you mentioning before, but i don't think i want multiple rows of tabs, since i already have an extra toolbar (developper tools) which already reduces the size of the viewport. this can be a problem because sometimes i like to reduce the window vertically, to compare two pages or to keep an eye on something in the bottom part of my screen while i do something else in the top part (i really needa dual monitor display...). plus, when i said 20 tabs, that's a fairly conservative estimate... i don't want to end up with so many rows of tabs the viewport is no longer visible at all... (yes i know that slows things down. i just can't help myself).

As mentioned, how many rows tabs may expand to is configurable.

I have multiple toolbars as well, but most of them are hidden until I need them.

One thing you might want to explore is the Stylish extension, which I've also mentioned. Stylish lets you run arbitrary CSS based on application, site, or other criteria. There are a large number of "userstyles" available for Stylish, that can do things like automatically hide a toolbar, and reveal it on mouseover. I haven't seen one that auto-hides the Web Developer's toolbar, but it shouldn't be hard to modify an existing style to work with it.

<...>

i do like tab scrolling, at least the way ff does it. ie7 is an example of very poor implementation of tabs, if you ask me. i rarely have many tabs open in it since i use it mostly for testing purposes, but it's not at all practical to navigate among tabs. especially since for some idiotic reason they've put a toolbar on the same level as the tabs (and although the toolbars are not locked, i can't seem to drag it anywhere else), so tab space is already limited.

I was unsurprised that when IE finally got around to supporting tabbed browsing, their implementation was inferior to Firefox and Opera's.

thanks for the explanation about portable ff 1.5, but no worries : i don't actually want to go back that far.

FF2 isn't that far back...

well, if you ever hear of a way to prevent the tab auto-scroll behavior, do let me know, i'd be interested. if you want to test, it always happens on MR with the forum spy, but unless i am mistaken does not *necessarily* occur on other sites... i'll check tomorrow, if i think of it, and confirm. it's getting late here so i'm going to bed now.

I'll look. No promises. It may be a quirk of how MR handles the spy.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

hm. thanks for the answer. i might try out TMP, which i remember you mentioning before, but i don't think i want multiple rows of tabs, since i already have an extra toolbar (developper tools) which already reduces the size of the viewport.

Install the Stylish extension.

Then install this as a userstyle:

   
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

/* Pop-up Web Developer toolbar */
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #webdeveloper-toolbar
{
    visibility: visible !important;
}

#webdeveloper-toolbar
{
    visibility: collapse !important;
}

The Web Developer bar will be hidden until you mouse over it.

(With thanks to Chris Pederick, who told me the toolbar's true name. )
______
Dennis

[zelda_pinwheel]

yeah baby !!

[Madam Broshkina]

This one is pretty good.

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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4980