SECRETS OF FIREFOX

It's not so long ago that we learned to master the Windows Registry, a buzzing hive of little-known configuration settings. Now we find that Firefox 1.0, the hot new browser released on Nov. 9 by the Mozilla Foundation, has its own hidden playground for us to tweak.

In case you haven't heard, Firefox is rapidly gaining steam as a free replacement for Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser. OneStat.com, which measures Web behavior in 100 countries around the world, reported on Nov. 22 that IE had lost 5 percentage points of market share in the past six months, dropping to 89% of browser users. Firefox and its predecessor, Mozilla, are up to 7.35% of users. The foundation says 7.5 million people downloaded Firefox 1.0 in the month of November.

That doesn't tell the whole story, though. Experienced Windows admins, who often set the tone for other users, seem to be adopting Firefox at a much higher rate. More than 25% of the visitors to my specialized Web sites — WindowsSecrets.com, BriansBuzz.com, BrianLivingston.com, and the like — are now using some version of Firefox or Mozilla, according to my server logs. That's up from only 10.9% as recently as January 2004.

With all this momentum, it's fascinating to find that many powerful capabilities of Firefox 1.0 are still difficult to find and little known. For example, typing the following strings into Firefox's Address Bar (which the new browser calls the Location Bar) and pressing Enter brings up a wide variety of novel applets.

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HOW TO SPEED UP FIREFOX

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

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter. 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" (double click to change)

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true" (double click to change)

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

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 recieves.

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

THE EXTENSION GUIDE

Please note Firefox & Thunderbird are currently going through an Extension/Theme installation process change, so you may have some issues, just make sure to match the version you have installed with the installer version available from each extension below.

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Firefox, Mozilla & Thunderbird Extensions:
BBCode: "Adds a context menu for easy access to BBCODE/XHTML/HTML formating in Forums (Firefox/Mozilla Suite/Netscape 7.x)"

BugMeNot: "Enables a context menu to access the community maintained database of usernames and passwords of BugMeNot."

ChromEdit: the User File Editor - lets you customise your Mozillan Application by allow you to edit your userChrome.css, userContent.css or user.js, without the hassle of finding your profile.

Extension Uninstaller: Found this little puppy to uninstall older plugins and it worked like a charm, enjoy. Installing is a little ackward, you have to install the api also separately and it's in the old plugin style but it works. (To see this plugin listed under newer Firefox/Thunderbird builds, install the "Show Old Extensions" extension)

Launchy: Launchy will enable you to open links and mailto's with external applications. Both browsers, media players, FTP clients and download managers are supported.

Linky: "Linky will increase your power to handle links. It will let you open or download all or selected links, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows."

Mozilla Calendar: A fairly decent calendar/appointment app with support for local or remote iCal standards.

Preferential: "Aims to provide you with a simple, accessible GUI that allows the modification of any preference set within that environment."

SwitchProxy Tool: "SwitchProxy is a Mozilla tool you can use to organize all your proxies. You can add, edit and remove them from a single master list. When you need to use one, just select it from the list and click apply."

URIid: "The URIid extension makes it possible to create CSS rules based on the site you are visiting. This is useful when specific sites do not render correctly or are simply not visually appealing." - Sample available here

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Firefox & Mozilla Extensions:
AdBlock: When configured properly can block virtual 99.9% of all banner ads very easily. With tremendous support for regular expressions, flash, iframe and collapsing the areas that have been hidden.

Alt-Text for Link: "Displays links' destination URLs in a tooltip window. Based on Hiroshi Shimoda's Popup Alt for Images extension. If a link has a title attribute, then the title will override the URL address."

CuteMenus: "CuteMenus is an extension for Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Sute. It will add icons to the most menu-items in your popus and menus." A slightly modified version of this extension is available on Aaron Spuler's Site, this version adds some kewl features like allowing you to pick different sets of cute images to use, etc.

Download Statusbar: This plugins moves the download status of files to a new area just about the status bar, with autohide, etc..

FlashGot: "FlashGot is a free Mozilla/Firefox extension, meant to handle single and massive ('all' and 'selection') downloads with several external Download Managers."

ForecastFox: "ForecastFox is a highly customizable Firefox extension that brings weather forecasts to your browser. Use it to display the current conditions and the forecast up to 9 days ahead. It is a light weight alternative to external programs which use too much memory. It currently uses an international weather service provided by The Weather Channel."

Gmail Notifier: "Allows checking for new Gmail messages directly from the browser's UI."

GoogleBar: Adds a google bar to the browser with a ton of options.

Html Validator: "The extension is based on Tidy. This program, Tidy, was originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C."

Named Anchors: "This extension adds a new tab to Page Info with information about the named anchors in the current document."

Popup ALT: Nice to have the good old Alt tag popups back.

Reload Every: "The Reload Every extension adds an option to the context menu (the menu you obtain by right clicking on the web page you're currently viewing) to reload the web page you are viewing every so many seconds or minutes. This can be handy if you have a page with for example sports scores, news or stock quotes and want to refresh them automatically."

ScrapBook: "ScrapBook is a Mozilla/Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections."

SessionSaver: "Adds great crash recovering and undo close tab features."

Statusbar Clock: Adds the date and time to your status bar in any format you want.

Tabbrowser Extensions: This "little" dittie adds a TON of tab browsing options and tweaks. Though I used tab browsing before, this extension has converted me from a multi-window user to a permanent tab browsing freak.

Text Link: This will allow you to double-click on plain text urls on pages and it will open them up. Very useful when annoying url's aren't href'd properly, etc.

undoclosetab: "undoclosetab allows recently closed tabs to be reopened."

User Agent Switcher: Allows you to change the User Agent String that is sent to websites, (BTW, sending the user agent string to sites is a standard browser behavior/feature.)

Web Developer: This puppy adds a developers wet dream of options, a true must have for developers beginner or advanced.

WebMailCompose: "Makes mailto: links load your webmail's compose page and adds a Compose link to the context menu. Currently supports GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail/Mail.com and 1 user customizable." - This extension was formally known as YahooCompose

Yahoo! Companion: "The idea of this project is to build the popular Yahoo! Companion for Gecko-based browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, the Mozilla Suite or Netscape."

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Firefox Only Extensions:
Bookmark Backup: Backs up your bookmarks when closing your browser.

Configuration Mania: allows you easily to configure various hidden preferences and to force the extensions and the no-longer-required chromes uninstalled which has not uninstaller.

Context Highlight: "Allows you to quickly and easily highlight all instances of your current text selection within the current page."

Disable Targets For Downloads: "Lots of web-pages set their download links to use target="_blank", which causes a new (blank) window to appear in Firefox and Mozilla, as well as starting the download. When you click a link, it's target attribute is removed for these specific file extensions: .zip .rar .exe .tar .jar .xpi .gzip .gz .ace .bin"

Download Manager Tweak: "The extension allows the Firefox download manager to be opened in a separate window, the sidebar, or a tab. The extension also modifies the default appearance of the download manager to make it more concise and intuitive."

Favicon Picker: I usually don't post extensions unless they have support homepage, etc. but this one adds a much needed property to each bookmark to let you erase or assign favicon. This is important now that favicon are now stored with the bookmarks and this code is still a little flaky. This extension will help clean the flakiness. Just download/install from the directory.

FoxyTunes: This extension adds direct audio playback for almost any Media player to Firefox. By default the controls are placed in your statusbar.

Linkification: "Linkification highlights and linkifies plain text links, either on page load or by pressing ctrl+alt+L if automatic linkification is disabled from the Options menu. It surrounds plain text URLs with anchor tags."

Listzilla: Outputs either a plain text or HTML file that lists all installed themes or extensions.

Make Link: (the update is a Alpha/Beta release) If your always posting url's to sites or in html postings, this will help you build the href, etc.

Mime Type Editor: "Mozilla's Helper Application preference panel as a stand alone extension for Firefox."

MR Tech Local Install: Adds Extension and Theme local install options from the File menu, shortcut key and the Themes & Extension manager window.

Remove It Permanently (RIP): "Rip (Remove it Permanently) provides the ability to point at and remove permanently any item you can select. It provide a flexible and easily configurable solution to removing unwanted content from a web page."

Sage: "a lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox."

TabMix: Replace all your other Tab preference extensions, this sucker is awesome. MR Tech Note: You can also disable the undoCloseTab extension.

Tabbrowser Preferences: "This extension adds GUI options to change some of the hidden tab browser preferences available in Firefox."

TargetAlert: "If a hyperlink points to a something that is not a web page, then TargetAlert will try to append an icon to the hyperlink that represents its destination."

Toolbar Enhancements: "This extension adds many useful extra toolbar buttons, and makes toolbars more configurable"

View Cookies: "you will find a new Cookies-tab in the Page Info dialog box. You can open the Page Info dialog box by selecting Page Info in the Tools menu."

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Firefox & Thunderbird Extensions:
EMbuttons: This little puppy adds a few things: 1) buttons that you can add to your toolbar, 2)the ability to open themes or extensions in the sidebar or tab, 3) shortcut keys to open themes/extension (ctrl-shift-t & ctrl-shift-e) and 4) the ability to sort the list of themes/extensions.

Minimize to Tray: "A powerful extension to minimize Windows versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to the system tray." I find this extension to work best with Thunderbird since it's only really one main window (though opened messages can be minimized too). For Firefox this extension almost give you back the Quick Launch feature that was disabled a while back. While it's not a Quick Launch feature, open on window and minimizing will make subsequent window launches much faster, the only caveat is that you can minimize sever windows, just put your cursor over the icon to read the document's title.

Show Old Extensions: Handy tool for seeing what old extensions are still running under the new Extension ragime.

Slim Extension List: "Makes items in extension list shorter, so you can see more of them without having to scroll. Also, sorts them by name."

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Thunderbird Only Extensions:
Allow Empty Subject: "This little extension disables the warning dialog when you send a message without a subject."

Buttons!: "This extension adds buttons to Thunderbird which can be added to the toolbars."

Contacts Sidebar: "This Thunderbird extension displays the address books in a sidebar in the 3-pane-window." Just press F4 and enjoy. Note: the pre-release version was update, this version support Thunderbird nightlies.

Quick Reply: "This Thunderbird extension displays the address books in a sidebar in the 3-pane-window." Just press F4 and enjoy. Note: the pre-release version was update, this version support Thunderbird nightlies.

WorldWeather: "WorldWeather is a Thunderbird extension that allows you to view your local weather." or around the world.

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Great sites for tons of other Extensions:
Mozilla Update (Official Mozilla repository), Extension Room, My Extensions Mirror
(Firefox & Thunderbird Only), Texturizer List of Thunderbird Extensions, Texturizer List of Firefox Extensions, mozdev.org Active Projects

Mr. Tech