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Make a new text doc and paste my CSS in it, then rename it whatever.css and in mozilla I recommend finding the Web Developer extension, or maybe the EditCSS extention.

The /. Light version had no styling before, but now it has stylesheets, so you have to disable All Styles then CSS Add Style with webdeveloper plugin. Don't know a better way at this point, someone Pleas tell me.

You can also try and add it to you chrome\userContent-example.css but it might just cascade.

Opera does a better job with user CSS, and it's now free. Opera is how I got hooked on User CSS.

Press: Alt + P, Advanced, Content, Style options...
Then when browsing, hit Shift + G or hit the glasses and/or the Document button.
(Doing Shift + G without specifying a stylesheet will just strip the styles out.)

Here's another small one:

body,td{font-size:12px;
font-family:verdana,sans-serif;} /* optional */
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,a[name] b{display:block;background:#696;color:#eff;margin: 0;padding-left:3px;}
td td{background:#cdc;}
ul{margin:1em;}
b{font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;} /* font optional */

Yes, huge improvement. Unfortunately, there are a few problems.

• It still does not validate.
• The CSS does validate, but it's full of warnings.
• It is just old, 1999 HTML.
• There remains a mix of presentational markup (try disabling CSS using something like the webdeveloper extension.
• Still not semantic.
• It is now completely unusable on hand-held devices.
• Lots of glitches remain.

I could go on, but we are not seeing a serious commitment to web standards here. Too bad they didn't follow the lead set by A List Apart.

It feels snappier.

Joking aside, the tab reordering via drag and drop is a feature I have long wished. Obviously, all of my extensions stopped working (give me my WebDeveloper back!!), but other than that this version indeed seems to be faster. Great work by the FF team!

My bank's online system demands using IE; Although I sent a couple of emails clarifying the bugs in IE & how insecure it is, they kept their stupid standards.

I downloaded FireFox's extension, User Agent Switcher, changed the browser's agent to IE 6 - WinXP and everything worked out fine.

This is a great extension which enables you to see and edit (in real time) CSS for sites, as well as overlay ID and class info on the actual page! BRILLIANT! (and a lot more stuff too) WEB DEVELOPER

I work for a similar place. You can try the FireFox User Agent Switcher plugin and set it to IE. It works as long as the vendor didn't put in some really IE specific stuff. ActiveX controls in particular tend to not run in FireFox. I know there is even an ActiveX plugin for FireFox, but I have not tried that.

I disable all animated gifs - browsing is soooo must more peaceful now!

I use the extension:
http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper /

There might be other solutions, but that extension is just awesome if you do any web development.

Is Firefox modular enough to break out valuable, reusable parts and implement something new out of them?

I like Search Status, which conserves space. It installs on the lower right corner of the window, and provides Google Pagerank, and Alexa traffic stats. Very handy for comparing different web sites to see relative traffic or PageRank. With Firefox, the other Google toolbar features are not too exciting.

Also good for web developers: The Web Developer Extension

I use this Chris Pederick's web extension to assist me with my web development. A few years back I would have happily paid a hundred dollars for this baby. Viva open source.

With Firefox, the developer toolbar and Quirk SearchStatus, and you can learn all these things yourself.

I totally uninstalled it; I didn't want to make my test messy. I would imagine that disabling would give the same results though.

I've posted on the Web Developer extension forum.

Web Developer Extension

Even if IE implements everything that the basic Firefox installation has and then some, they still won't have the strong community of extension developers that Mozilla does. Will the next IE have anything like AdBlock, the web developer toolbar, or any of the countless little tweak extensions I like? Will I be able to easily change detailed settings like I can with about:config? I doubt it.

With Mozilla/Firefox these new ads are actually not a problem. Just use a userContent.css file to block them.

For example, I found some that use divs with IDs, so I just added something like:

div#GF__p_0,
div#floatpop { display: none !important;}

And, poof, they're gone. Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what to block, but the Webdeveloper extension can help quite a bit.

Which is why you should just turn javascript off altogether. It's essentially malware anyway. Have you seen how much it info leaks even with a user agent switcher?

Let's be clear for anyone who doesn't yet know: popup blockers are a work around to make a broken protocol slightly less terrible.

That would be the UserAgent Switcher extension.

Maybe the User Agent Switcher Extension http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragen tswitcher/ would help?

The real answer is to phone/email/write to the banks in question to ask them to fix the bug though. (NB: they are probably also violating your local disability and/or advertising laws.)

Try Chris Pederick's developer toolbar - built in validator plus a bunch of other bits. I love it, makes my job lots easier :-)

I did. And if you use the USer Agent Switcher you can too from their website technical support contact form.

By the way, my custom setting for user agent switcher is:

User Agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; ATTENTION IDIOT WITH BROKEN WEBSITE: Actual User Agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1)

App Name:
Microsoft Internet Explorer ATTENTION IDIOT WITH BROKEN WEBSITE: Actual App Name is Netscape

App Version:
4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; ATTENTION IDIOT WITH BROKEN WEBSITE: Actual App Version is 5.0 (Windows; ))

-

Mouse gestures, automatic numerical forward/back and image zoom, popup blocking, skinning, tabbed browsing and UA spoofing.

Ok, so I liked Opera when I used it for a while. But firefox kicks its butt. I prefered FF myself because there were no ads (although you can add them if you want them)

But all of these features are available as FF extensions... even adding google ads to your browser.

I don't want to sound like a zelot, but FF is cheaper, ad free and does all that plus some. Email client? IRC client? That's what Thunderbird/Chatzilla/Mozilla suite are for.

It's your money, but I know where I'll be putting mine. Straight back in my wallet.

Some of those banking sites are just retarded. Some moron added some javascript so that you see a "This page only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 or better" page if you try to access it with anything else.

What really annoys me is that every single one I've accessed with Firefox after installing the user-agaent switcher works fine. I can understand people who don't know any better designing a site that only works with IE, but rejecting other browsers that work fine is unforgivable. I mean how long would it take to check?

Use the User Agent Switcher.

I managed to load the Windows update page here, but couldn't get very far without Active X (on Linux).

• CSS Wiki! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Fix crappy MSIE support! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• tips, tricks and good practice techniques! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Box model Illustrated! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Tutorials, Demos, and Hacks! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices Crib Sheet! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Holly Hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• 3 pixel hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Firefox webdev plugin! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Mozilla CSS editor! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Debugging Advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Page Building Process! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• selectutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Lists

• listamatic 2 (nested lists)! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listamatic! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Piped List! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Floats

• floatutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• float-theory! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Filtering

• Explorer! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• safari filtering! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• filters! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Type Issues

The Firefox Web Developer Extension works great for this, use the Validate Local HTML command.

And if firefox is still beta, Mozilla has been in release for a while (although it is slower).

To add one more concrete example of a great development tool that I regularly use for development of web apps:

Web Developer Extension. This tool makes working with forms, CSS, images, etc. really really easy. I have been using 'View Source' or 'View Selection Source' much less often since I got this extension.

Similarly, I like to be able to search various online resources directly from my browser. To full-text search my bookmarks stored in Simpy I use browser search plugin.

In addition to that, you can get a number of other useful search plugins over at Mycroft (I keep typing Mycrosft - how bad is that!)

...has to be Web Developer.
A MUST for every webnerd.
It even lets you edit CSS live on the web.

The Web Developer extension for Firefox has a Zoom feature (under Miscellanous, Zoom) that works just like the one you describe, scaling images and all.

Download the Web Developer extension today. Disable -> Image Animations. 'Nuf said.

Not that it matters...using the firefox User Agent Switcher Extension I changed mine to "Internet Explorer" just to trick people like you into thinking I was still using IE after the vulnerabilities...

Why not use Firefox with the User Agent Switcher extension? It lets you give your browser whatever disguise you want.

Just curious, why don't those menus work in Firefox?

Because, as the article indicated, the menus are "interactive features designed exclusively for Internet Explorer." The lack of support in other browsers is intentional, or at least an artifact of how their base authoring tools detect browser capabilities.

They are sending different versions of the page depending on which browser is detected. The version sent to Firefox does not have these features. If you spoof the user-agent using a user agent switching extension to tell Firefox to pretend that it is IE, it appears that they are using IE-specific extensions of the DOM, rather than W3C standard methods and objects. If standard DOM elements were used instead, Firefox would be perfectly capable of displaying the same effects. In fact, one of the points of authoring to standards is to cut costs by making browser sniffing and other such methods unnecessary.

(Both as a security measure and for its cross-platform goals, base Firefox does not support ActiveX, however, so the javascript functions -- not part of those menus -- that write out ActiveX controls would still not be supported in Firefox.)

1. On Win (which I must still use sometimes), ffox is the slowest of the 3 (especially re-draw), even though I'm always on the latest release.

2. I can't get the other browsers to do the simplest, stupidest things I can do in IE, e.g.: drag/drop shortcuts between address-bar & folders, or File=>Send=>Shortcut To Desktop, or drag a link from a page to the address-bar (a sure-fire "use the same window, dammit"). I dunno, maybe I just didn't RTFM.

3. I make genuinely productive use of toolbars (e.g. Google) unavailable on other browsers.

4. I don't grok the excitement of tabbed windows. I much prefer being able to position pages independently in separate windows. And if one of those windows crashes or hangs, I don't lose the others (or their back-traces).

As for security, I do quite well with the combo of common sense, frequennt AV updates, SpyBot, AdAware, WebWasher, and very aggressive/paranoid firewall settings. (I love Agnitum Outpost, which lets me control cookies, ActiveX, JavaScript, etc. -- each *separately* -- on a per-domain basis.)

Its probably just some javascript that is searching for the UserAgent tag. Get the useragent switcher extensions and you can "change" to IE6 on the fly:

User Agent Switcher

It's your fault you lost data, not theirs.

Which isn't the greatest attitude when you are trying to get some loving for an alternative browser by non-techies.

I had managed to convice a fair few people to switch from IE to Firefox 0.8, and they were enjoying it, and were prepared to put up with not being able to go to some of their favorite sites (yes, even with the pretend to be IE extension). But when the latest version of Firefox hit, and they decided to install it, the fact that it removed their bookmarks(for some), removed their extensions, and ruined their themes(which for some was the biggest hurt, they just prefered the eye candy more than anything), more or less made them revert back to IE.

Unfortunately many of them also have the google toolbar for IE, which means the usual pop-up killing advantage of Firefox is now mute, and so the reasons for convincing them to go back are outweighed by the frustrations they have just encountered.

I can only hope the joy of tabs will bring them back.

I just came across the Web Developer plugin - I think this just may be the happiest day of my life. From little things like resizing the window quickly to popular resolutions, to the live CSS editing, it's hard to overstate how useful this plugin is for web development.

The point is NOT to make a web site accessible to people who don't understand web sites! This is like the icon caption: "AOL 4.0: DOUBLE CLICK TO START". Don't do that. It's okay to say "Click here to view the page I have written about foo." instead of "I have written a page about foo.", but please don't take all that advice literally.

Yes, please do not take this advice literally, as it is wrong. The poster is correct that you are not to build a web site to people that don't understand web sites, but W3C actually recommends the exact opposite of his example of what is ok.

Also, making multiple links only seperated by spaces is bad. Not just because slashdot's filter (or whatever it is that adds the link domain) probably just garbled that, but those with poor sight cannot tell the difference when one link ends and the other begins (unless slashdot garbles it for them to point out a link is done and where it goes).

Also, if you come across sites referencing Bobby, please note that for some reason Bobby has decided that if an image is used anywhere in the page it will not pass their test. Previously, they would mark it off and warn testers that they must ensure that colors aren't used to differentiate context. Because of this, there are many sites out there that will claim Bobby compliance when they are not. That said, Cynthia Says provides a similar tester with a few more options. If you use Mozilla, Chris Pederick's Web Developer Extension contains an option under the Validation menu to validate against WAI Accessibility or Section 508 (as well as validate links, HTML and CSS).

Finally, it's worth noting that some you should check your pages in Lynx Viewer to see how the page would look in Lynx (or just run Lynx yourself). This is useful for when judging your content based on its textual equivalent (which in some instances is what is read off by screen readers). Also add a "skip to content" link whose CSS sets it to display none for graphical browsers (some people suggest leaving this on, but W3C's validator even uses this method so I go with them). If they are having the screen read to them after a while they will no how the navigation system works, and won't need to have all those links read to them and just want to get to the actual content in your page. If you go the full XHTML route, you'll also have accesskeys and tabindexes available so they can tab through your links corretly and can get back to the beginning of your page if you set a named anchor as the first thing they tab to (the second being the skip to content, thus they can simply hit the 'T' key on to take them to the top and then skip the content to get to the beginning of the content OR they can go through the navigation (of course, you could have given each entry in your navigation an accesskey, but that's not always helpful, and this is useful in case they forget what they key is for something in the navigation).

Wow, I can't believe I knew this much on the subject....

Mozilla/Firefox user agent switcher link: http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragen tswitcher/