Slashdot Mirror

More good stuff for porn link farms (aka TGPs):

Bookmarklets (mini-extensions)

remove redirects - turns those annoying redirecting links that only redirect you to the correct site 20% of the time into real links
hide visited links - most useful for TGPs that use images (thumbnails) to link to galleries, since it's often hard to tell whether an image link is visited or not.
linked images - opens a window showing all the images linked to by the current page
increment, decrement - change the last number in the URL by 1 with 1 click.
make numbered list of links - for when you want to use increment/decrement but some pages in the sequence are missing
zoom images in, zoom images out
zap - fixes text/background/link colors and removes some common annoyances
go to referer - lets you go "back" one page after opening a link (e.g. to an image) in a new tab

User style sheet rules

Look for "Always show a border around image links" on this page. It puts a solid blue border around unvisited image links and a dashed purple border around visited image links. The Mozilla version does not interfere with site layouts.

You can also use user style sheet rules to mark or hide links to known-junk domains. This may save you slightly more time than adding those domains to your hosts file.

Extensions

linky - includes "open selected links in new tabs"
leech - adds ui for wget-type stuff

More good stuff for porn link farms (aka TGPs):

Bookmarklets (mini-extensions)

remove redirects - turns those annoying redirecting links that only redirect you to the correct site 20% of the time into real links
hide visited links - most useful for TGPs that use images (thumbnails) to link to galleries, since it's often hard to tell whether an image link is visited or not.
linked images - opens a window showing all the images linked to by the current page
increment, decrement - change the last number in the URL by 1 with 1 click.
make numbered list of links - for when you want to use increment/decrement but some pages in the sequence are missing
zoom images in, zoom images out
zap - fixes text/background/link colors and removes some common annoyances
go to referer - lets you go "back" one page after opening a link (e.g. to an image) in a new tab

User style sheet rules

Look for "Always show a border around image links" on this page. It puts a solid blue border around unvisited image links and a dashed purple border around visited image links. The Mozilla version does not interfere with site layouts.

You can also use user style sheet rules to mark or hide links to known-junk domains. This may save you slightly more time than adding those domains to your hosts file.

Extensions

linky - includes "open selected links in new tabs"
leech - adds ui for wget-type stuff

More good stuff for porn link farms (aka TGPs):

Bookmarklets (mini-extensions)

remove redirects - turns those annoying redirecting links that only redirect you to the correct site 20% of the time into real links
hide visited links - most useful for TGPs that use images (thumbnails) to link to galleries, since it's often hard to tell whether an image link is visited or not.
linked images - opens a window showing all the images linked to by the current page
increment, decrement - change the last number in the URL by 1 with 1 click.
make numbered list of links - for when you want to use increment/decrement but some pages in the sequence are missing
zoom images in, zoom images out
zap - fixes text/background/link colors and removes some common annoyances
go to referer - lets you go "back" one page after opening a link (e.g. to an image) in a new tab

User style sheet rules

Look for "Always show a border around image links" on this page. It puts a solid blue border around unvisited image links and a dashed purple border around visited image links. The Mozilla version does not interfere with site layouts.

You can also use user style sheet rules to mark or hide links to known-junk domains. This may save you slightly more time than adding those domains to your hosts file.

Extensions

linky - includes "open selected links in new tabs"
leech - adds ui for wget-type stuff

More good stuff for porn link farms (aka TGPs):

Bookmarklets (mini-extensions)

remove redirects - turns those annoying redirecting links that only redirect you to the correct site 20% of the time into real links
hide visited links - most useful for TGPs that use images (thumbnails) to link to galleries, since it's often hard to tell whether an image link is visited or not.
linked images - opens a window showing all the images linked to by the current page
increment, decrement - change the last number in the URL by 1 with 1 click.
make numbered list of links - for when you want to use increment/decrement but some pages in the sequence are missing
zoom images in, zoom images out
zap - fixes text/background/link colors and removes some common annoyances
go to referer - lets you go "back" one page after opening a link (e.g. to an image) in a new tab

User style sheet rules

Look for "Always show a border around image links" on this page. It puts a solid blue border around unvisited image links and a dashed purple border around visited image links. The Mozilla version does not interfere with site layouts.

You can also use user style sheet rules to mark or hide links to known-junk domains. This may save you slightly more time than adding those domains to your hosts file.

Extensions

linky - includes "open selected links in new tabs"
leech - adds ui for wget-type stuff

More good stuff for porn link farms (aka TGPs):

Bookmarklets (mini-extensions)

remove redirects - turns those annoying redirecting links that only redirect you to the correct site 20% of the time into real links
hide visited links - most useful for TGPs that use images (thumbnails) to link to galleries, since it's often hard to tell whether an image link is visited or not.
linked images - opens a window showing all the images linked to by the current page
increment, decrement - change the last number in the URL by 1 with 1 click.
make numbered list of links - for when you want to use increment/decrement but some pages in the sequence are missing
zoom images in, zoom images out
zap - fixes text/background/link colors and removes some common annoyances
go to referer - lets you go "back" one page after opening a link (e.g. to an image) in a new tab

User style sheet rules

Look for "Always show a border around image links" on this page. It puts a solid blue border around unvisited image links and a dashed purple border around visited image links. The Mozilla version does not interfere with site layouts.

You can also use user style sheet rules to mark or hide links to known-junk domains. This may save you slightly more time than adding those domains to your hosts file.

Extensions

linky - includes "open selected links in new tabs"
leech - adds ui for wget-type stuff

More good stuff for porn link farms (aka TGPs):

Bookmarklets (mini-extensions)

remove redirects - turns those annoying redirecting links that only redirect you to the correct site 20% of the time into real links
hide visited links - most useful for TGPs that use images (thumbnails) to link to galleries, since it's often hard to tell whether an image link is visited or not.
linked images - opens a window showing all the images linked to by the current page
increment, decrement - change the last number in the URL by 1 with 1 click.
make numbered list of links - for when you want to use increment/decrement but some pages in the sequence are missing
zoom images in, zoom images out
zap - fixes text/background/link colors and removes some common annoyances
go to referer - lets you go "back" one page after opening a link (e.g. to an image) in a new tab

User style sheet rules

Look for "Always show a border around image links" on this page. It puts a solid blue border around unvisited image links and a dashed purple border around visited image links. The Mozilla version does not interfere with site layouts.

You can also use user style sheet rules to mark or hide links to known-junk domains. This may save you slightly more time than adding those domains to your hosts file.

Extensions

linky - includes "open selected links in new tabs"
leech - adds ui for wget-type stuff

Anyways, you can always use Zapping Bookmarklets to fix ugly sites.

Uh... I think you misspelled Mozilla :-)
Did you notice that the lizard supports more bookmarklets than IE?

Thank you, Microsoft, for making my favorite browser Internet Explorer.

look here

Click on "zap colors"

Mozilla 1.4 beta includes a security fix to prevent web pages from loading XBL from file: URLs (bug 200691, fixed). Unfortunately, the fix also prevents user style sheets from making web pages load XBL files from file: URLs (bug 204140), which affects some users of my XBL Flash blocker (blocks Flash using a placeholder that you can click to play a particular Flash animation).

If you saved flash.xml to disk and used a file: URL for flash.xml in userContent.css, you need to change userContent.css to load flash.xml from a local web server or from the original location on www.cs.hmc.edu instead. Otherwise, Flash won't appear at all (not even a click-to-play placeholder), and you'll see this if you open the JavaScript Console:

"Security Error: Content at http://www.shockwave.com/sw/home/ [or another URL with Flash] may not load or link to file:///C:/.../flash.xml#obj."

The best way I've found for dealing with these (and annoying flash, too) is to use a bookmarklet that replaces all objects, embeds & iframes in a page with a one word strike-through of the object replaced (object, embed, or iframe).

Here's a link to all the different versions for IE, Mozilla & Opera.

If you liked Dion's Flash blocker, you might also like this one, which also lives in your user style sheet but lets you click blocked Flash to play it. (You'll have to remove Dion's rule for Flash for my rule to work.)

Here's a better user stylesheet rule that blocks all Flash but lets you click any blocked Flash animation to play it. It's compatible with your idea of completely unblocking certain Flash (so you don't even have to click)... I think "-moz-binding: none" will undo the binding.

May I suggest a simple fix:

Works great, I use it a lot.
And Games.Slashdot is suddenly a lot easier on the eyes...

You can regex in a page with a bookmarklet, works usually with any javascript-enabled browser.

One of them is here, spawn your favorite search engine and look for bookmarklets, there are plenty.

Bookmarklets and smart bookmarks (not available in IE) can make magic and turn your browser into a very powerful process ;)

If you might want to view Flash on web pages, but don't want them playing their flashy flying wizzing crap as soon as the page loads, check this out for Mozilla, it prevents flash animations from playing until you click on them. It works great, and I wouldn't want to browse without it!

I'd love to see something that helped me with CSS layout- a way to put big bright borders around divs and highlight their containing blocks, etc.

Use Jesse Ruderman's test styles bookmarklet. It's about the coolest thing ever. If you combine it with a custom keyword and the the DOM Inspector and you can debug any CSS problems in no time.

• shell (type JS statements to evaluate them)
• onerror status
• onerror alert
• test styles (type CSS rules; it applies them immediately)
• zap style sheets
• view style sheets
• view scripts
• view variables
• generated source
• partial source (not as good as "view selection source" in Mozilla's context menu)
• show blocks
• ancestors (makes status bar show what you're hovering over, in the format "BODY > DIV#content > DIV.blog > DIV.blogbody > P")
• make link (create HTML to link to a page)
• show named anchors

• shell (type JS statements to evaluate them)
• onerror status
• onerror alert
• test styles (type CSS rules; it applies them immediately)
• zap style sheets
• view style sheets
• view scripts
• view variables
• generated source
• partial source (not as good as "view selection source" in Mozilla's context menu)
• show blocks
• ancestors (makes status bar show what you're hovering over, in the format "BODY > DIV#content > DIV.blog > DIV.blogbody > P")
• make link (create HTML to link to a page)
• show named anchors

• shell (type JS statements to evaluate them)
• onerror status
• onerror alert
• test styles (type CSS rules; it applies them immediately)
• zap style sheets
• view style sheets
• view scripts
• view variables
• generated source
• partial source (not as good as "view selection source" in Mozilla's context menu)
• show blocks
• ancestors (makes status bar show what you're hovering over, in the format "BODY > DIV#content > DIV.blog > DIV.blogbody > P")
• make link (create HTML to link to a page)
• show named anchors

I like this solution for Mozilla-based browsers.

Simply use some of these bookmarklets to zap all anoying colors/embeds/effects.

If you're using Mozilla (or, for some reason, NS7), you can go to here and bookmark the "ROT 13 selection" bookmarklet.

You prayers (and mine) have been answered! This will block Flash and still let you opt-in for Flash you do want to see. I believe it is Mozilla-only. Please be nice and copy the XML file like he asks.

You might want to check this page out. It has a bookmarklet which will automatically zoom in on all the images on the page. I haven't installed the new Mozilla yet but if it's automatic image resizing is half as annoying as it was in IE, I'd rather control it myself.

or you could use this nifty little bookmarklet

javascript:var coding = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmABCDEFGHIJ KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM"; function rot13(t) { for (var r = "",i=0;i -1) character = coding.charAt(position + 13); r += character; } return r; } S=window.getSelection(); function t(N) { return N.nodeType == N.TEXT_NODE; } function r(N) { if (t(N)) N.data = rot13(N.data); } for (j=0;jS.rangeCount;++j) { var g=S.getRangeAt(j), e=g.startContainer, f=g.endContainer, E=g.startOffset, F=g.endOffset, m=(e==f); if(!m||!t(e)) { /* rot13 each text node between e and f, not including e and f. */ q=document.createTreeWalker(g.commonAncestorContai ner, NodeFilter.SHOW_ELEMENT | NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT, null, false); q.currentNode=e; for(N=q.nextNode(); N && N != f; N = q.nextNode()) r(N); } if (t(f)) f.splitText(F); if (!m) r(f); if (t(e)) { r(k=e.splitText(E)); if(m)f=k; e=k;} if (t(f)) g.setEnd(f,f.data.length); } void 0

it rot13's currently selected text. so far only mozilla that I am sure of.

It took me about 5 years, but I've finally actually started liking javascript.

I see your ROT13 decoder and raise you one bookmarklet to decode it.

My apologies as I forget who to credit for this

http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/

• Link styles:
  • Links to Slashdot are bold and Slashdot-green.
  • Links to mozilla.org have a 16x16 red-dino logo next to them.
  • Links to goatse.cx are brown and crossed out.
  • javascript: links are green.
  • mailto: links have an envolope icon next to them.
• Borders for image links. Solid blue for unvisited links, dashed purple for visited links.
  
• Hide all reset buttons.
  
• Before each named anchor, display the name in the format [#foo], but make it 80% transparent so it doesn't get in the way of the actual text of the page.
  
• Ignore the effects of blink and marquee tags

• Link styles:
  • Links to Slashdot are bold and Slashdot-green.
  • Links to mozilla.org have a 16x16 red-dino logo next to them.
  • Links to goatse.cx are brown and crossed out.
  • javascript: links are green.
  • mailto: links have an envolope icon next to them.
• Borders for image links. Solid blue for unvisited links, dashed purple for visited links.
  
• Hide all reset buttons.
  
• Before each named anchor, display the name in the format [#foo], but make it 80% transparent so it doesn't get in the way of the actual text of the page.
  
• Ignore the effects of blink and marquee tags

There are ways of zooming in mozilla. Just bookmark a small javascript (Bookmarklet).

Here are the bookmarklets I use:

javascript:(function(){ function zoomImage(image, amt) { if(image.initialHeight == null) { /* avoid losing height information due to integer rounding while zooming out */ image.initialHeight = image.height; image.initialWidth = image.width; image.scalingFactor = 1; } image.scalingFactor *= amt; image.width = image.scalingFactor * image.initialWidth; image.height = image.scalingFactor * image.initialHeight; } for (i=0; i

javascript:(function(){ function zoomImage(image, amt) { if(image.initialHeight == null) { /* avoid losing height information due to integer rounding while zooming out */ image.initialHeight = image.height; image.initialWidth = image.width; image.scalingFactor = 1; } image.scalingFactor *= amt; image.width = image.scalingFactor * image.initialWidth; image.height = image.scalingFactor * image.initialHeight; } for (i=0; i

I also set the keywords to = and - so all I have to do is type - in the location bar and it will zoom out. Type = and it will zoom in. It works with html pages too.

For more info on bookmarklets check out this site Jesse's Bookmarklets Page

either way it totally screws up my normal browsing process, since I tend to leave a "main page" where I can get back to it with two or three "back"s, and use Go to shortcut that. Under Phoenix, the Go list ends up filling with misc junk and my "main page" isn't visible anymore.

So instead I'm still using Netscape 4.

Selecting the bottom item from the Go menu is faster than double- or triple-clicking the back button? And faster than right-clicking the back button and selecting the bottom item from that shorter menu? I find both statements hard to believe. (Netscape 4 has a bug where double-clicking the back button only goes back one page, which might explain the first, but not the second.)

Btw, you might find the "back to first" bookmarklet on http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/misc.html useful. I think it works in most browsers, including Netscape 4.

<A HREF="javascript:(function(){var x,i; x = document.forms; for (i = 0;
i < x.length; ++i) x[i].method=%22post%22; alert(%22Changed %22 + x.length + %22
forms to use the POST method. After submitting a form from this page, you shoul
d be able to bookmark the result.%22); })();" ADD_DATE="1035609001" LAST_CHARSET
="ISO-8859-1">frmPost</A>

Add the above link (yes I know it's not a link, but you know what to do) to your bookmarks. When you are at a page using GET forms and you want to change them to POST, simply click on this in your bookmarks list, and it will change all GETs to POSTs.

Modified from a base at Jesse's Bookmarklet's

It should work in all versions of mozilla and MSIE 4 (or maybe 5)+

Hope this helps,
gleam

Try the "Test Styles" bookmarklet from this page. It's really slick -- it lets you dynamically make changes in the stylesheet on the page you are viewing. You have to temporarily toggle off popup blocking for it to work, since it pops up a new window for typing in the changes.

Try some bookmarklets (Check out the web development category).

Bookmarklets are a really nice way to enhance your browser. Now if there only was a way to activate a bookmarklet through a keyboard shortcut...

I completely agree. I hate flash. I didn't install it for the longest time, but there's just too much out there, so I gave in.

However, I have a solution. I found these wonderful little "bookmarklets" that work in mozilla. Find them here.

They are little javascript things that remove annoyances from pages, including blink text, javascript, embedded event handles, and even colored backgrounds and text, and background music.

The one you want is called "zap embeds". It will kill all flash from the page you are looking at, leaving almost everything else intact. You can also use the vanilla "zap" which zaps Flash and some other stuff.

I personally put a few of these in my personal toolbar. It's the first good use I found for that toolbar. Thus, one click away from killing flash on any page!

IMHO, the perfect solution. Whoever wrote these is my saviour. Everyone should get these. :)

I do not think that Reuters actions were wrong. In fact I use bookmarklets quite a bit with browsing, and I like when URLs are predictable.

However, I wonder: What if the URL in question had been something like "ftp://username:password@ftp.whatever.com/"?

Sounds like you could use a bookmarklet!

1. Click hyperlinks. Can't beat the mouse for this, IMHO.

No, but you can get close. IE for Mac lets you type the first few characters of a link to focus the first matching link. Current Mozilla nightlies have a similar feature, but in Mozilla, you can type letters anywhere in the link text. Mozilla gives you more feedback as you use its version of the feature. Mozilla lets you use Ctrl+G to go to the next matching link. Mac IE's version currently works better for pages that use image links, as long as the images have alt text.

I use accesskeys (Alt+S, etc) and type-to-focus for links on my start page and type-to-focus for paths I follow frequently from my start page (classes -> bio -> schedule, mozillazine -> talkback, etc). I also use type-to-focus to search through a list of students and phone numbers where the names happen to be links. If I need to open a large number of links at once, I often use a bookmarklet : Linked Images for thumbnail links to images, Linked Pages for a list of links to non-image pages. I use the mouse for most other links.

2. Scroll. Since my hand is already on the mouse, the mouse wheel is perfect. Mouse wheels are pretty common these days.

I also use the mouse for scrolling often, even if my hand isn't on the mouse before I want to scroll. Why? It might have something to do with the way the down arrow key only goes one line in Mozilla and the pgdn key goes a little too far. Or maybe I miss "smooth scrolling" from IE. Or maybe it's because in a maximized Mozilla window, there is no space between the scrollbar and the edge of the screen, so it's easier to scroll using the mouse in Mozilla than in IE.

In the Mozilla 1.1 thread, someone pointed out the Zap Embed bookmarklets. I put 'Zap Embeds' into my toolbar in Moz1.0, and it is a lifesaver (or an "eyesaver")! It works great!! Check it out, you won't regret it. Hit "Zap Embeds" in the toolbar the moment you come across an annoying flash advert, and voila! That critter is nuked!

Try Jesse's Zap embeds bookmarklet. It's not perfect but I've come to depend on it. Just add the bookmarklet to your personal toolbar and whenever you visit a site with an annoying flash ad or java plugin just bonk on the personal toolbar link and the plugin gets zapped.

There are lots of great bookmarklets at Jesse's site. Take a look around and give some of them a try. I couldn't get by without them.

--Asa

Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly.

Isn't this something that can be fixed in Perl?

No. It can only be fixed by reducing the use of the <TABLE> tag and then turning off word-length restrictions.

One of the evil things about using tables for layout is that it forces you to use word-length restrictions on text content and width restrictions on image content. Tables expand when there is a single long word. Since all of the comments are in a single table, one 9000px-long word in a comment causes other paragraphs, even paragraphs in other comments, to wrap at 9000px instead of at the edge of the browser window. Without layout tables, the long word would still make a horizontal scrollbar appear, but other comments would wrap at the edge of the screen as if there had been no scrollbar-forcing comment.

For some other problems with table layouts, see my comment at webmasterworld. Note that tables are great for tabular data, but using them for layout at the same time makes them less useful for tabular data.

One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows would be able to see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it could only do so in Slashdot's light mode.

In Slashdot light mode, fixing the page-expanding-comment problem may be as simple as removing a single table tag. In heavy mode, it requires rewriting the layout to replace several layers of nested tables with divs and CSS. (Examples of existing light and heavy modes: light, heavy.) You can use the "block structure" web development bookmarklet to give each table a border (blue, green, or red depending on nesting level) if you want to see how the tables are nested without digging through the HTML source.

I'm sure that a few of the browsers I've used over the years (AWeb comes to mind) let the user choose how certain abstract things (such as emphasis tags) were rendered, whether it was bold, italic, different font, different size different color, or something like that.

If you want that level of control over how web pages appear, create a user style sheet. You can even use a bookmarklet to apply your styles to a specific site rather than all sites and without restarting your browser. This rule makes <strong> appear as italics rather than bold:

strong { font-weight: inherit; font-style: italic; }

I think including "how should <strong> appear?" in UI prefs would be confusing. First, it's geeky because it involves specific HTML tags. Second, most sites use <b> when they mean <strong>, and prefs that work 20% of the time (or even 80% of the time) are usually not good. Third, misguided web designers might start intentionally using <b> when they mean <strong>, just like they specify text and background colors as black on white for simple pages where the user's preferred colors would work fine.

Most people know text zoom and it is indeed a very handy feature...

But when using Bookmarklets in Mozilla, you can have all sorts of handy functions just one mouse-click away on your personal toolbar!

The most usefull bookmarklet in my opinion is 'zoom image in. As I work with a big resolution for graphical work, lot's of things tend to get renderd rather small when browsing. It's understandable, but still an anoyance. So when I discovered Image zoom I was, as you can imagine, absolutely delighted!

And since Mozilla 1.1b, Mozilla has REALLY speeded up and is wonderfull to use.

And as for Mozilla's GUI;
If you want integration you should use Galeon on Linux and K-Meleon on Windows. They are actually intended for end-user usage, Mozilla is just for test purposes!

One example of how javascript can improve a web site: a webmail site could do a client-side sort in javascript-supporting browsers and a server-side sort in other browsers. I know that sorting a table works in at least IE/Win and Mozilla, because I wrote a bookmarklet that does it, yet none of the webmail sites I use do a client-side sort :(

Another example: an inline or onload script can focus a form element if the the user more likely to enter something into the form than scroll the page. Most major search engines do this. Alltheweb doesn't in alchemist mode and Netscape search never does.

What other examples do you know?

Bookmarklets are bookmarks containing javascript code. Instead of taking you to another page, bookmarklets do things with/to the current page. Here are some bookmarklets for Mozilla that I have added since Mozilla 1.0:

• Zap event handlers: removes event handlers, including those responsible for blind links and exit pop-up ads.
• Zap embeds: removes java, flash, background music, and iframes from a page.
• Zap colors: makes text black on a white background, and makes links blue and purple.
• Zap: combines "zap embeds", "zap colors", and "zap event handlers".
• Test styles: type in CSS rules to experiment or to create a temporary user style sheet.

• View Style Sheets
• View Scripts
• View Script Variables

• Toggle checkboxes
• Transfer cookies: creates a bookmarklet you can use to move cookies from one browser to another.
• Number rows in each HTML table

Several of these bookmarklets also work in IE 5.5, to the extent that IE supports DOM Level 2 and doesn't make me go too far out of my way to accommodate its quirks.

Bookmarklets are bookmarks containing javascript code. Instead of taking you to another page, bookmarklets do things with/to the current page. Here are some bookmarklets for Mozilla that I have added since Mozilla 1.0:

• Zap event handlers: removes event handlers, including those responsible for blind links and exit pop-up ads.
• Zap embeds: removes java, flash, background music, and iframes from a page.
• Zap colors: makes text black on a white background, and makes links blue and purple.
• Zap: combines "zap embeds", "zap colors", and "zap event handlers".
• Test styles: type in CSS rules to experiment or to create a temporary user style sheet.

• View Style Sheets
• View Scripts
• View Script Variables

• Toggle checkboxes
• Transfer cookies: creates a bookmarklet you can use to move cookies from one browser to another.
• Number rows in each HTML table

Several of these bookmarklets also work in IE 5.5, to the extent that IE supports DOM Level 2 and doesn't make me go too far out of my way to accommodate its quirks.

Mozilla.org gets a lot of duplicate bug reports: 40-50% of a sample of bugs from April 2002 are dups. If you know how to search Bugzilla, you can get that down to 15-20%. (Knowing some jargon helps too, of course.) Unfortunately, the most widely advertised Bugzilla search tool, the query builder, is so complicated that many testers give up before finding their bug and report a duplicate.

There's a well-hidden search box on the Bugzilla front page that works a lot like Google. You can almost use it like Google, but there are several differences you should be aware of:

• Each word is matched as a substring of the summary (and several other fields). A search for 'auto compl' will match "auto-complete", "auto complete", and "autocompletion".
• Like in Google, you can use | to create disjunctions. For example, a search for 'address|location|url bar|field focus' will match "focus does not move when clicking outside of location bar". While "or" is usually unnecessary for general web searches, it is indispensible when searching for a specific bug report.
• By default, Bugzilla only searches for open bugs. If you're looking for a bug that has been reported several times, it may help to include duplicates in the search. One way to do this is to prefix the search with 'ALL ' in all caps. For example, 'ALL rename exe' will lead you to an often-reported bug (120327) that I should be helping bz to fix instead of posting this comment, while 'rename exe' will not find anything.
• If you know that the bug you're searching for is visible and popular, try adding 'votes:2' to your search. For example, 'ALL votes:2 context menu back' will find the newest flamewar-bug about the back command in the context menu among the 42 bugs that match 'ALL context menu back'. Searches that use votes:2 are several times faster than searches that include all bugs because bugzilla can start the search with an integer comparison.
• The search includes several fields, not just the bug summary (title). For example, in a search for 'mail compos focus', the word "mail" can appear in either the product name (MailNews) or the bug summary, and "compos" can appear either in a component name (Composition) or in the summary (compose, composing, etc). To restrict a search term to the summary, use '+term'.

Other useful tools for avoiding reporting duplicates include the frequently reported bugs list and #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. If you find yourself working in Bugzilla a lot, you can use the collect buglinks bookmarklet to get a list of bugs mentioned in a given bug report, which is useful because many bug reports include links to related bugs.