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Building a Better Mozilla With Plugins
Ant writes "Wired has a story on how to improve Mozilla and Firefox web browsers with various plugins/extensions (XPI installations). It lists some of the extensions that have been rated highly by Mozilla users like BugMeNot. One of them not listed and my favorite is PrefBar."
From the prefbar web site:
It does not work with Mozilla Firefox
my favorite extension is RadialContext, basically gives you mouse gestures for Mozilla and Firefox.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I can't believe Adblock isn't listed. It even works with Firefox 0.9, despite rumblings I've heard to the contrary.
any article about firefox that doesn't mention adblock and the best filters to use is seriously lacking.
By far, I find the mouse gestures extension to be the greatest addition to Mozilla. This borrowed feature of Opera will certainly and permanently change the way you browse websites.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Oops! You have to type it in manually to see the warning message for some reason. http://www.@google.com
I guess its not completely implemented yet.
Slow news day, eh? The Article is low on substance. This page has much more details. Looks like the wired article has copy-pasted and not done any real work. The actual article should have had listed quirks, what do the extentions actually do, rather than pasting text from mozilla extention page.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Works with 0.9, blocks anything (hate to admit it, but I've used it on OSDN for Doubleclick crap), and allows for selectivity in blocking.
http://adblock.mozdev.org
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Tom.
Oh arse
You also get this with Opera, just hit "Fast Forward", or the space bar, or use the right mouse gesture and you're away. Not that I'd know about this in your particular sceanario, of course ;-)
Tom.
Oh arse
My favortie Mozilla plug-in is Flash Click to view. It blocks all those annoying flash ads and puts an icon in its place. If you want to view the Flash ad/game/movie whatever, you just click the icon and it loads. It makes browsing the web just a little more bearable.
You know.. its easy really
Go to
Edit - Preferences - Navigator - Downloads.
Select the option to open a progress dialog.
Then works just about like IE.
Launchy enables you to open links and mailto's with external applications like IE, Opera, Outlook, GetRight.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird Launchy Homepage
Henrik Gemal
gemal.dk
Linky
and
JumpLink
Why do I get the feeling the Slashdot community may find these of some assistance
I want to be able to see each window for a download so I know exactly when each finishes.
Perhaps you'd like this then?
What can Mozilla offer that will aid its cause in the enterprise environment.
;)
You can download the .pdf of the book there.
Rapid Application Development with Mozilla
The ieview extension could be used for getting your web developer friends to code the web-pages for mozilla first and then check if it works ok with IE. (You just right-click the URL and choose "Open link target in IE".)
The web developers I know sadly just use IE and then ignores the other browsers.
Magpie also includes tools for adjusting a site's URL by incrementing or decrementing the numbers in it ... This is a good extension for those who do a lot of research online.
Yup. I find this priceless while "researching" the webs many sequentially numbered jpegs.
If you're stuck browsing sequentially numbered jpegs at work using internet explorer (or you just don't use extensions), you can also use Jesse's bookmarklets.
Just drag them to your bookmark bar!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
noone has mentioned Aaron Spuler's Single window which puts all those annoying pages that spawn a new window into a tab instead... just a wonderful plug-in
I've just started using Firefox, and the best plugin I know of for it is Super DragAndGo. If you drag a link to empty space on the webpage, that link is opened in a new tab. It's so simple, but it's the best new web browsing feature I've seen in a long time.
BTW, Camino does not install this automatically, but is relatively simple to go into your chrome folder and hack it yourself.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Bookmarklets are an underrated way to extend the usability of Mozilla, Firefox and even IE.
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
I have 'zap plugins' and 'zap images' in my personal toolbar to stop strobing ads and flash on a page-by-page basis. Works great!
FlashBlock! That is the BEST plugin EVER created! Everybody who has Firefox installed should also have this plugin installed.
Bryan
Not quite. It has "tab browsing" out of the box, but not the "Tabbrowser Extensions" plugin. Tabbrowser Extensions is MUCH more powerful and feature-rich.. something like 40 different options to set rather than the 3 found in 0.9.
I was disappointed enough that I reverted back to 0.8 so I could have my tabs the way I like them.
IE5 is increasing? Wha? From the link in my sig:
;)
IE5 usage:
April 2004: 10.1%
May 2004: 9.2%
June 2004: 8.3%
July 2004: 8.1%
Were you reading the chart backwards?
Firefox for linux (with gtk+ and xft) comes with an installer. Just extract the tarball and run firefox-installer in the extracted directory and it will behave essentially the same as any winbloze installer. If you want an rpm, I'm sure google will find one if you're that desperate.
Already done.
Isn't that what the article is about?
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
The default install is a self contained binary. All you have to do is untar/gzip and run firefox from the new firefox directory.
/opt/firefox and create a link in my window manager. When I want to upgrade or try a different version, wipe out the directory and untar a new one.
Personally I just untar into
Also the reason Mozilla does it this way, is it makes it super easy for any of the distro's to create an install package for it. They dont even have to compile the app if they dont want. So if your really missing that rpm to install, complain to your distro for not releasing one yet.
This extenstion should do what you are looking for.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Download Sort is what you're looking for.
Hope that helps.
IE5 usage is increasing quite rapidly. I think you may be reading the table upside down - it has more recent data at the top.
Flashblock: Absolute must have stops the all singing dancing net, but lets you use it if you must.
t ensions .html.en
l la/
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Preferential: Lets you change every option, not just the subset that they think you need. Lets me kill gif anims for one thing.
http://preferential.mozdev.org/
Tab Browser extentsion: The only current way to get true single window mode.
http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabex
Adblock: Block annoying adds that get by above measures. I leave them alone if the don't blink/anim and flow in my text. One of those and they are gone. For some reason newegg flash adds were escaping flashblock so, I adblocked *newegg*.
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
Nuke anything: Sometimes a site will serve ads from the same place as usefull image so I don't want to filter. This lets me knock out anything from the page temporarily.
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozi
I second (or more) the notion of SingleWindow. I'd also like to toss in "UndoClosedTab" -- as a very handy feature for opening a webpagethat was just closed. Also, Tab browser Extentions, which may not be currently on the mozdev site (but is, if you google, updated and working for 0.9.1), gives you a ton of useful features for tabbed browsing configuration. One I like is "Tab Sessions" -- which lets you save an entire bank of open tabs to a 'tab session' to be later reopened (kinda like mass bookmarking).
Mozilla 1.7 and current nightly builds of Firefox don't accept extensions from websites other than Mozilla's.
Anything else?
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Er.... You mean this Adblock? The one that's currently the second highest rated extension for Firefox on Mozilla Update?
You won't need that pref bar extension once you've installed the Web Developer extension. It lets you turn off cookies, javascript, check cookie info, validate CSS/HTML, resize to various window sizes, turn off images, outline block elements, show image paths/sizes, etc.
It makes my life easier.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
1) You can rearrange tabs by just drag and drop.
2) If you ctrl-click a link, it can open as new tab next to the tab of the page your looking at.
3) Tabs can be in different colors, and tabs opened with e.g ctrl-click inherit the color from the tab of the page the link is on. I.e. you can group tabs by color
3) If you get too many tabs in a window, it can make a new row of tabs, or open a new browser window and continue making tabs there.
4) You can undo close tab. In multiple steps.
I don't know anything about Gmail, but my guess would be somthing like this: Gmail tries to give yo a visual widget to compose your emails. It does that with the regular IE widget (which is activeX) or they use Midas (visual composing widget), from Mozilla.
:)
BTW, check Epoz or Kutu, those are some crossbrowser visual widgets (they even work in konqueror)
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
*shrug*
Mozilla already has a large developer community, almost all of the extensions at Mozilla Update are developed by the community.
An extension developer can submit their extension to Mozilla Update and directly link to the XPI from their homepage.
Or they can provide a downloadable XPI file, the user has to open it (from File > Open), and it'll be installed.
So there is no automatic installation, and the avarage user can't be tricked to click yes for an installation dialog.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Built-in since 0.8, at least according to Bugzilla (direct links from slashdot don't work, copypaste and open manually)
Are you sure about that? That security hole won't be fixed until Firefox 1.0.
Extensions in the classic MacOS sense are like kernel modules or plugins. Extension in the Mozilla/Firefox sense are augmentations of the application (usually demand loaded) so they don't significantly impact stability or load time, as far as I can tell. An extension could be implemented in a lot of ways, whether simple or complex. Generally they can't overwrite anything, so they hook into the existing API, and Mozilla provides a pretty vast one.
Mozilla/Firefox don't come with any extensions at all. They are perfectly useful without them. Moz/Firefox may directly incorporate features of popular extensions in later versions, but they cease to be extensions at the point, and are considered part of the application proper.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm not an expert on Mozilla's codebase, but based on their history, I would say that your worries are probably misplaced.
Firefox is purposely limited to the bare minimum of functionality that general users required. If any extensions ever rise to that level of ubiquity, they'll probably get adopted by moz.org and slipstreamed into the code base, which should remove the performance concern.
After all, that's how tabbed browsing made it into Mozilla -- first as a separate XPI extension (Multizilla), which got incorporated into the code base when the developers saw how popular it was.
Of course, it will require some serious popularity to rise to that level, and I doubt that many extensions will ever make it. But that's the beauty of the extension framework, my Firefox can be very different from yours...
Read my blog.
Yes, this is part of Firefox now. If you try to close a window with multiple tabs open it will prompt you to confirm or cancel, with the option to prevent it displaying the same message again.
Why is anything anything?
I wonder how we must understand this sentence in the article. Is it : "We know IE is pretty bad but don't switch to Linux, use Firefox and everything will be ok." ? I strongly recommand reading this PDF file about this topic, it is A Comparison of the GPL and the Microsoft EULA that could as well be named "EULA and GPL explained to non-lawyers". I think that windows users should know what they really agreed to.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Is something like Safari's or Google's AutoFill form feature.
You mean like the AutoForm extension ?I have it setup so it will save and load form values only when I tell it to, but you can set it to do so automatically.
Mouse Guestures take a while to get used too, but I even use them on a touch pad because they are so cool. And it really funny watching someone demo on that pad who is getting nervous because they just opened some windows for no reason, then their hand starts to shake :)
--
Zot O'Connor
The calendar for Firefox, etc is at least as good as Outlook's. The build from 6/22 works great in .9.1 Give it a try, you wuss.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/download. html