Exploring Firefox Extensions

Gary writes "If you haven't made the switch to Mozilla Firefox it may be because you aren't aware of the great benefits Firefox has over IE. Flexbeta has posted a nice HOWTO guide on Firefox extensions; my favorite is the Target Alert extension which displays a small graphic next to links that are not web pages. For example a mailto: link will display a small envelope, a link to a PDF file will display a small Adobe icon, etc."

Comments

Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Slashbot Hive-Mind]

FireFox features I can't live without:

1. Middle click to open link in new window/tab
2. Find as you type
3. Themes/Skins/Chromes
4. Customizable toolbars
5. Plugins that allow me to put just about anything on the toolbars
6. Great development tools - javascript console, venkman debugger, live-headers plugin

All that boils down to:

1. Easier to use
2. Easier to customize
3. Broader advanced feature set

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

One feature I cannot work out is how to stop Animated gifs from animating.

I've looked around and cannot find it, do I need to add a plugin to stop them, or am I just missing something really fundimental?

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[nkh]

Middle click to open link in new window/tab

Someone should really change the code of this feature because it doesn't work with javascript links (you get a blank page when you middle-click on this kind of link)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[qshapadooy]

about:config

Preference Name: image.animation_mode
Value: once

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Artichoke]

Go to about:config and navigate to:

image.animation_mode

Set its value to 'once' or 'none'.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

Doh! Of course it would be there!

Extremely straightforward and easy to find and understand!

Theres me thinking it would be on the Options/Web Features dialog in the "Load images" area.

Sorry for being sarcastic, and I do thank you muchly for the info, it has been something thats bugged me from day one.
I just don't think a novice user could handle changing that.
I wonder what other gems are lurking in the depths of the config area, I shall investigate later...

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Threni]

> I just don't think a novice user could handle changing that.

Novices shouldn't be using pre v1.0 software. It's not done yet.

> it has been something thats bugged me from day one.

So ask for your money back.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Anml4ixoye]

Someone should really change the code of this feature because it doesn't work with javascript links (you get a blank page when you middle-click on this kind of link)

Unfortunately there is no way to know what to change it to so it can be "fixed." Such a wide variety of actions could occur during onClick that it would be very difficult to parse that out and do the right action.

For example, I have used javascript in an href to do the following:

• Open a new window
• Open a new window to a specific width and height
• Change the location of the current page
• Change the source of an image on the page
• Interact with a Flash movie
• Interact with form elements on screen

And even with the location and window opens, sometimes it is done with the simple

javascript:window.open()

and sometimes through a function.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[peterprior]

The DOM inspector is also quite useful...

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[nkh]

I was just thinking of a small hack to detect the simple redirections, not a full-featured parser. I guess I'll have to look at Firefox's source code for that :(

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[otisg]

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!)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

Just because something moves to v1.0 does it magically become stable, feature rich, simple and user friendly?

Anyway, I must be confused.
Internet explorer is dire, so thousands of geeks start running wildly in the Firefox direction, shouting from the rooftops about this alternative, only to discover now that Threni says we shouldn't use it.

On the mozilla site itself, they say it can be used as a primary browser, but don't rely on it for mission critical stuff.

No software is ever complete.
Every piece of software has problems, bugs and niggles, I asked a group of people who were likely to know the answer :)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[lucas teh geek]

>I just don't think a novice user could handle changing that.
I just don't think it would occur to a novice user that its something they could change. heck, most novice users dont even know how to change their homepage unless a website pops up and asks to do it for them

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[otisg]

Ah, it looks like one of the Simpy links requires you to be logged in. Luckily, you can use a shared demo account without registering, and see the search plugin in action.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[ckswift]

Middle click to open link in new window/tab

Too bad it doesn't work in OSX:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151249
Two years later it finally appears a patch is in the works....

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

Good point :)

I suppose I'm still holding things up against MS, where with internet explorer there is no need to delve into the registry (equivilent to about:config) to change such a simple setting.

I think possibly my misgivings about the config is the path to open the screen more than the missing option, if the properties in the about:config screen were all available in the options area, I would most likely have found it.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[B'Trey]

One thing that I would absolutely love to see is to be able to specify what program the page is opened in when you select "View Source" or some other simple, one-click way to say "I want to edit the source of the page that has the focus in my browser right now."

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[byolinux]

On the mozilla site itself, they say it can be used as a primary browser, but don't rely on it for mission critical stuff.

The web is mission critical?

Relying on a public infastructure full of infected and unpatched computers operated by people who didn't realise they needed to install things on their computers to make them keep working? Ouch.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

Their words: It is a pre-release product and should not be relied upon for mission-critical tasks.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/# download

Worryingly now, I have visions of some Indian doctor performing invasive surgery on some poor chap in another country using nothing more than a html interface and a shared 56k modem!

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Sir_Stinksalot]

What I would love to see is a split-view like in konqueror to see two webpages at the same time in one window.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[jazman]

* Open a new window
- with contents referenceable by a URL, presumably

* Open a new window to a specific width and height
- which must also contain something pointable to via some sort of URL

* Change the location of the current page
- to something involving a URL at some point, perhaps?

* Change the source of an image on the page
- that image could be displayed in another window via a URL

* Interact with a Flash movie
- which might be referenceable via a URL

* Interact with form elements on screen
- OK, probably no relevant URL for this.

So Firefox /could/ attempt to do something sensible in the majority of cases. Or at least pop up a message saying it can't figure out what to do (maybe presenting a few options?).

Your point that a general solution is impossible is accepted; however, simply opening a new tab with nothing in it and no indication to the user that what they /expected/ isn't going to happen is IMHO something that could be improved with just a small amount of thought.

Even just a warning would stop me, for example, browsing through interesting adverts in Loot.com, "Open In New Tab"-ing on all the interesting ones, then looking at the tabs to see nothing but (untitled) (untitled) (untitled) (untitled) which is damn annoying.

And the behaviour of Wanadoo's email page to a control-click is just bizarre - you get the mail you clicked on in the current window, and the mailbox in the new window. It's probably quite clever how they managed to engineer exactly the opposite behaviour of what is expected.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[HansF]

The fact that it is a browser doesn't mean it's only fit for web. Suppose you have a intranet-site on a local network wich serves your business applications.

That would qualify as "mission critical".

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[jazman]

I kept meaning to have a look at this, now I have.

What on earth is general.config.obscure_value? (And don't say "13" - I figured that part out!)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[ioslipstream]

So.... novices would be better off using a browser that is highly susceptible to hijacking?

I'm not trying to troll here, but c'mon, novices are just fine. Firefox has great functionality out of the box, same as IE.

They both get the job done... for a novice.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Linknoid]

Simple and consistent solution: The user middle clicking on any element is doing so because they desire whatever action they clicked on to occur in a new tab. The solution is to make an exact replica of the current page and its state in a new tab, and then act as if the button had been pushed on the replica page instead. Sure, there will be things that don't work right with it, but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior. Oh, and open in new tab should work with buttons too, not just links.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Threni]

> Just because something moves to v1.0 does it magically become stable, feature
> rich, simple and user friendly?

No - rather, it won't be released at v1.0 or above until it IS stable and more user friendly.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Threni]

> Internet explorer is dire, so thousands of geeks start running wildly in the
> Firefox direction, shouting from the rooftops about this alternative, only to
> discover now that Threni says we shouldn't use it.

Where did I say that geeks shouldn't use it?

> On the mozilla site itself, they say it can be used as a primary browser, but
> don't rely on it for mission critical stuff.

Sounds sensible to me.

> No software is ever complete.

What are you talking about? None of this stuff contradicts my suggestion that novices avoid beta releases of software.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Threni]

> So.... novices would be better off using a browser that is highly susceptible
> to hijacking?

Who's suggesting that should happen?

> Firefox has great functionality out of the box, same as IE.

Why are people putting words in my mouth? Are you all reading the same comment I posted?

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[CamTarn]

Thing is ... in Mozilla, if I remember right, the option to change image looping to once-only *was* actually in the options dialogue. I think the Firefox designers took a policy decision that Mozilla's prefs dialogue was too crowded, so Firefox options would be limited to things which most users would regularly want to change.

In one way it's a step in the right direction - Open Source projects are often criticised for having too many options without enough organisation. However, I prefer the approach of other projects - instead of removing the options altogether, have a switch you can use to show or hide 'advanced user' options, which novice users wouldn't need to use.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Zemran]

IE is a browser that knows what you want and dictates to you that you will have it. A bit like a Saddam Hussein of the browser world. Whereas Firefox lets you turn it into what you want it to be and does not assume that it knows what you want. More like a Democracy :) Lets send in the troops and invade Redmond...

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

The problem with that is, its already pretty much there. I realise there are slight problems with it, but on balance, its a very stable, and usable system.

Whereas with other software, 1.0 status definately does not imply completion or stability.

The problem with software is unlike a motor car, or aeroplane, problems with v1.0 isn't the end of the line.

We have a patch ethos which follows with the "Release early, release often" thinking that bosses like.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[DigiDarkCloud]

There's an extension called MozEX that allows you to use an external program for View Source.

TFA ended up describing the author's personal favourite extensions, so it kind of missed the point that there are extensions for almost everything, like what you need. Some good places to look for extensions:

• ExtensionRoom
• update.mozilla.org
• MozillaZine extensions forum (more intended for developers of extensions, but there are some neat finds there)

Like any other kind of software, extensions can vary in quality and stability. You might want to get other opinions of an extension you're considering before you install it. Fortunately, the new Extension Manager in Firefox 0.9 and up makes it easy to uninstall an extension. Before that came along, you had to do it manually which was tricky and easy to screw up.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

I think we're all gettin our knickers in a twist. I read all the comments here, and your right in a way about beta software, but firefox is essentially feature rich and practically complete.

Us geeks have been heralding Firefox as the second coming and telling everyone we can to download and use it. Your the first person I have seen that has actually put into words that maybe we shouldn't be saying this.

To me, the version number is irrelivent, I will use any software and gladly recommend the stuff that does the required job.

Firefox fulfills its job with flying colors, but such is life that nothing is absolutely perfect (my original config niggle).

I would rather a novice used this almost finished piece of software than carry on polluting the web with an insecure browser.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[MikeDX]

As a (mostly) happy firefox user, I have to say this:

When the hell is the HTTP 1.1 Protocol going to be fixed in the mozilla family of browsers?

How long has this been broken? . No I will not fix it myself, Yes I can live with the broken-ness of it. No this is not a troll :)

As for the rest of the browser, I'm lovin' it! (Especially the extensions)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Threni]

You're talking to me like I'm a novice or an idiot or something. I've been developing software for 15 years. I know what you call something doesn't affect the code. I'm saying that a good developer doesn't call something v1.0 until it's at least considered ready for use by the great unwashed. The fact that it's `pretty much there` isn't a problem. I'm sure there'll be some more work on the UI before it's done. Already there's an extension which makes more of the about:config prefs more easily fiddleable. Frankly, though, an option to turn on/off gif animation doesn't strike me as something many people - especially novices - are likely to want to do.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[NutscrapeSucks]

One of the goals of the Firefox project was to get rid of the 10,000 different nerd options from the dialogs. KISS.

This has nothing to do with "pre-1.0" and everything to do with a UI design decision. The theory is that someone will provide a "Advanced Options" extention.

(And there are IE features that are only available through the registry -- such as setting Quick Search shortcuts.)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[mfg]

Here's a bookmarklet that will display two pages side-by-side. It's a trivial change to make it display two copies of the current page without prompting.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[EvanED]

On the other hand, there are a hell of a lot of options in the about:config area. Exposing every one of them to the user in the preferences window would be quite burdensome. Apparently the designers felt that turning off animated GIFs was not important to make it to the limited space of the preferences dialog.

(Though maybe they should add an 'advanced' button that would expose more)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Beetle B.]

Go to http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#beh_locati onbar

Won't do what you want, but it will tell you when the link you're hovering above is a Javascript one (among other things).

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[LiquidCoooled]

Leaving options in the about:config area is no better than using ini files years ago, its good that they are there, and now I know they are there I can have a look and change whatever I need.

Whilst I am picking up on one single option that relates to the way I want to use it, there are likely 100s of other hidden options which could be useful to others. These same options won't effect 99% of users, and your right, you can't design a system expecting everyone to use every option.

Actually discovering the about:config screen even existed was as much an eye opener as fixing my specific problem itself.

I notice from other replies on this subject that the full mozilla suite includes these options, would it have been *that* difficult to leave an "Advanced options" button or tab on the firefox options screen? All it would do is fire up the about:config screen in a new window.
This entire thread would have been totally redundent if it was there.

I realise I may sound pretty condescending in my posts, and make no apologies for it, I am merely trying to be clearly understood in what I say.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Anml4ixoye]

Even just a warning would stop me, for example, browsing through interesting adverts in Loot.com, "Open In New Tab"-ing on all the interesting ones, then looking at the tabs to see nothing but (untitled) (untitled) (untitled) (untitled) which is damn annoying.

Now this seems doable. I didn't check out the target alert extension, but if it already doesn't, maybe it could be modified to show a little script icon for JS links. Or maybe we could just have the href of an anchor tag point to the page, but do any javascript stuff in the onclick, so that users who middle-clicked would get something.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[bsane]

It will work with a ms mouse. Just configure it to do a command click when the middle button is pressed.

I'm not familar with all the variations of third party mice, but I would imagine most would have software that could be configured to do a command click when firefox is open and the middle button is pressed...

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[drsquare]

Seems to be a common pattern when advocating OSS software:

"Don't use that shitty commercial software, use this superior OSS alternative!"
"OK. Wait, it doesn't even have these simple fixtures..."
"Well, it's not 1.0 yet, you shouldn't be using it!"

Or:

"Don't use that shitty commercial software, use this superior OSS alternative!"
"OK. Wait, it's broken and buggy..."
"You didn't pay anything for it so fix it yourself!"

If software shouldn't be used by the masses then stop advocating it to the masses. If you're going to argue that Firefox is sub 1.0 and shouldn't be used, don't complain when sites are incompatible with it or when people at work force you to use IE instead.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, Asshat

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[nitrocloud]

The web used by the military could be mission critical. Considering they use it for EVERYTHING.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[jc42]

about:config

OK; that works for GIF animations. I learned about it a few weeks ago, and set it to "once".

But, after a few days of watching Hurricane Frances on weather.com, I found that firefox was once again soaking up 90% of the cpu. And there were ads in the weather.com tabs that were busily showing me stupid pictures of fish swimming and butterflies flitting from flower to flower. They were flash animations.

The "about:config" page only has one instance of the string "flash", and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this problem. Is there a way to disable stupid flash movies like this?

Also, I know how to use the menu item that suppresses images from a site. But with flash ads, the menu is short, and doesn't include the "Block images from ..." item that GIF and JPEG ads have. So is there a way to do this with flash ads?

I find that I have to constantly kill firefox because it's going insane and eating the cpu. It seems a lot worse about this than mozilla (though mozilla does show a lot of the same problems). This is the main thing that's limiting my usage of firefox now. I know that if I open too many tabs or windows, the chances are great that one of them will do something that puts firefox into cpu-eating mode, and I'll have to kill it to get my machine back.

Maybe what's needed is a per-image "speed control" that would limit how much cpu time an image can use. And a way to set the default. This would let me say something like "The default for any active images is 0%, but for this one, let it use 40%."

It's especially annoying when there's one video that you'd like to watch, but it keeps stopping because it's competing with N animated ads that can't be stopped (or even found).

This is mostly a problem on my Mac (PB, 10.3). On my linux box, flash is still broken in both mozilla and firefox, so it's not a problem. ;-) Actually, I can run standalone flash with several programs, so it's not the flash interpreter itself (wherever that is) that's broken; it's its interface with the browsers. I can hope that they don't fix this, I guess, and just use linux for sites like weather.com that use flash.

Maybe it's time to get a linux laptop ...

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[jc42]

Well, the way I usually hear it is:

"Don't use that shitty commercial software, use this superior OSS alternative!"
"OK. Wait, it's broken and buggy..."
"Unlike that shitty commercial software, huh?"
"Oh, yeah ..."

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[TMOLI 42]

"Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers that takes a pessemistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content." - flashblock.mozdev.org

Works well for me but read the notes on the Installation page about known bugs. When you mouse over the blocked flash movies my cpu still shoots up a little, but not nearly as much as without this extention.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[darkwhite]

Hey smartass, not all HTTP traffic has to go over the web. Many HTTP servers and clients are perfectly mature enough to perform mission-critical tasks in non-embedded, human-interface applications over controlled networks.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Hast]

That's because no-one using OSX uses mice with more than one button anyways... or so I've heard.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[mmortal03]

There is a feature request filed for this at Bugzilla, however: RFE: "Open a JavaScript link in a new window"

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[danila]

Unfortunately there is no way to know what to change it to so it can be "fixed."
There is an extremely simple and obvious solution to this. On middle clicking (or right clicking and selecting Add Bookmark, etc.) the javascript link the browser should execute the script with all objects and their properties set to read-only. The script will not be able to actually change anything, but as soon as there is an attempt to open a new window (or load an URL into some window), the broswer will catch the URL and then act as if this was a simple A HREF="http://..." link.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[e_AltF4]

AniDisable
FireFox 0.9 plugin that controls gif animations.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Minna Kirai]

but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior.

No. It'll almost never give the desired result.

When a person middle-clicks on a link, she wants the target of that link to show up in a new tab. Frequently this doesn't work, such as when the link contains a javascript window.open() command. In that case, her new tab contains only an error message.

Your "solution" would avoid that error message, and give her a new tab containing the exact same page she had already been looking at, plus a popup window containing the content she'd wanted in the tab. This is somewhat better, in that error messages have been avoided...

The real correct solution is for the browser to set a flag indicating that all new windows should open as tabs, which is enabled when you middle click on a button, and lasts until all javascript called by that button has terminated.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[xSauronx]

someone send this memo to Microsoft...they went past ver 2000 and its still fucked up

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[karniv0re]

1. Middle click to open link in new window/tab

For shame! How can you live without the EasyGestures Extention?!

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[dcam]

Install the preferences bar extension. There is a chaeckbox for killing flash, along with a whole stack of other stuff.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Cromac]

The web may not be but browers are used for mission critical applications on internal networks all the time therefore are not relying on a public infastructure full of infected and unpatched computers operated by people who didn't realise they needed to install things on their computers to make them keep working.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[at_slashdot]

about:mozilla ;)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Myen]

Umm...
There's about 15 bugs blocking 1.0 PR.
About five don't have patches yet.

At the moment there's about 200 blocking 1.0 (post-PR, post-l10n freeze - meaning, no UI text changes).

Neither of those lists contain a request for animation mode UI - at least, not containg "anim" in the summary.

You will likely need to use an extension if you want the GUI. (It was probably in Things They Left Out - not sure if that's still up-to-date though)

For reference, the query used on bugzilla.mozilla.org was
Status: unconfirmed | new | assigned | reopened
Flag: contains blocking-aviary1.0PR+
Keywords: does not contain fixed-aviary1.0
Summary: does not contain fixed-aviary1.0
Product: does not contain (MailNews | Thunderbird)

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Myen]

(I looked this up, because it sounded interesting)

See bug 228791 (no link - bugzilla.mozilla.org if you don't already know; they block links for /., and no point in DDOSing their server for something so trivial anyway)

It looks like a value to be subtracted from every character of something called the MCD .cfg file. That would probably be this - something about Mission Control Desktop (looks like something for admins to apply site-wide policy).

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[SeaFox]

The web is mission critical?

Not the public web. I think the statement on Mozilla.org meant it is usable for Internet browsing but it's not recommnded you use it for accessing accessing web-based apps on you companies intranet, ect. They wouldn't want some weird interaction between Firefox and a corporate homebrew app bringing down a customer database, for example.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[timts]

no offense, following available from crappy IE:
1.ctrl+click for new window
2.find as you type
3.windows theme
4.customizable tool bar, link bar
5.3rd party tool bar, plugin
6.VS.net for development

so it boils down to same thing

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[juhaz]

Also, I know how to use the menu item that suppresses images from a site. But with flash ads, the menu is short, and doesn't include the "Block images from ..." item that GIF and JPEG ads have. So is there a way to do this with flash ads?

In addition to flashblock and other drastic measures recommended (though may be fine for you, sounds you don't like flash at all, non-ads included) Adblock does kind of what the mozilla builtin image blocker does, only it works with _any_ object, as well as supports filtering on regexp or other pattern instead of only domain.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[GimmeFuel]

Another thing that'd be nice would be some sort of comment-explanation-thingy for options in about:config. "image.animation_mode" can be figured out by us geeks using Google or guessing, but very few Firefox users would be able to decipher it. Something as simple as a tooltip that said "Controls how animated GIFs are displayed. Possible options:..." when you hovered over the related setting. The next step would be implementing a search feature of the explanations, similar to the filter for setting names already in place.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[GimmeFuel]

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/keyconfi g

Is this what you want?

Re:names

[Quo_R]

Dude, 2003 called, they want their joke back.

Tabs

[frankthechicken]

Tabbrowser extensions, to get the tabs reacting the way I want(i.e everything in the same browser window, middle mouse click on the tabbar opens an accidently closed tab).

And for browsing Slashdot, this kind of helps.

Re:Tabs

[ari_j]

Can you get it set to everything goes in one window, except when you click on the program icon in Windows (or other OS's)? When I hit it on my quicklaunch bar, I want a new window in the foreground, not a new tab in some deeply-hidden browser window I had left minimized for later perusal.

Re:Tabs

[BigHungryJoe]

Thank you for that link. I've been looking for something that makes the tabs behave more sensibly for a while.

Re:Tabs

[Pentagram]

Does anyone kow if the are there any plugins that stop target="foo" links opening in a new window? That really annoys me.

Re:Tabs

[Yer Mom]

Go to about:config and set browser.block.target_new_window to true.

Re:Tabs

[frankthechicken]

Yep, it should work if you set Window mode in the Startup option to use multiple browsers normally.

Though I've only quickly experimented with it, as I tend to prefer using just the one browser.

Re:Tabs

[eddul]

No need for an extension. Just set

browser.block.target_new_window=true

There is a basic UI to all config options if you type about:config in the URL-bar.

Re:Tabs

[ari_j]

Is that a new option? I don't have it in 0.9.2, evidently. (Yes, I read the sibling to this comment and still didn't find it.)

Re:Tabs

[lucas teh geek]

And for browsing Slashdot, this kind of helps.
damn, I was hoping it would be something to automatically remove the "it." from it.slashdot.org urls.

Re:Tabs

[KernelHappy]

FYI you don't need to use an extension to do "linkification", you can use a bookmarklet. I somehow missed the memo on bookmarklets and only recently found out about them maybe 6 months ago. For those that don't know, bookmarklets are javascript snippets that you turn into bookmarks and then can be executed on any page you view. I use them primarily for linkification and for URL manipulation. I have one that removes all redirects from urls (if a url is present within the url it sends you directly there) which is really handy for sites like fark when the redirect system takes a dump. Other bookmarklets that I rely on are Links List, which makes a new doc with all the links on a site, top which changes the URL tot he top level of the domain, decrement and increment which decriment or increment the last number in the url (great for boobie links).

Various bookmarklets

Re:Tabs

[damiam]

The Single Window extension will open all new window links (whether by target="foo" or JavaScript) in a new tab.

Re:Tabs

[DigiDarkCloud]

I used to love Tabbrowser Extensions, but it got bigger and slower over time until it finally became unbearable for me. I still think it's a brilliant extension, but I use Firefox instead of Mozilla specifically because I don't want one package that does everything. (:

Piro points to a list of smaller extensions that add features from TBE on an individual basis. I use a few of those and love them. But the one thing I really miss from TBE is the coloured tabgroups. I loved having related tabs all grouped together, and being able to close the group without closing all my other tabs as well.

I have a few years of experience writing/hacking Mozilla-and-family extensions, so I may eventually tackle this myself. But I'm quite busy (lazy) and I keep hoping someone else will miss it enough to write a tabgroup extension for me. (:

Re:Tabs

[dspeyer]

Thank you!

On a similar topic, is there a way to get rid of the "you don't have this plugin; do you want it?" popup? I know I don't have the plugin; I don't want it! Every page with a flash banner ad now has a popup, despite popup-blocking!

Re:Tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

is there a way to get rid of the "you don't have this plugin; do you want it?" popup?

Uninstall the "plugin downloader plugin" (you can just delete or read-protect libnullplugin.so on Linux).

Re:Tabs

[SoulOfMyShoe]

Try using the Disable Targets For Downloads extension, I think it may be what you are after.

Re:Tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Linkification looks ok, but I like the "Super Drag and Go" extension.

If I want to browse a plain-text link, I highlight it and drag it (anywhere on the page) and it opens in a new tab.

If I drag a regular link, same thing (I have middle-click set to open a link in background, but have dragging configured to open it in the foreground)

If I drag an image, it downloads it.

If I drag regular text, it does a google search on it... this last one especially is VERY useful. :D

Re:Tabs

[dspeyer]

Uninstall the "plugin downloader plugin" (you can just delete or read-protect libnullplugin.so on Linux). Thank you! That works.

my most used extension ever...

[huphtur]

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

Re:my most used extension ever...

[Jugalator]

It even lets you edit CSS live on the web.

... to fix the colors on Slashdot IT once and for all?? :-)

Re:my most used extension ever...

[RWerp]

No, because as (almost) everyone knows, Slashdot does not use CSS :(

Re:my most used extension ever...

[evronm]

It even lets you edit CSS live on the web.

I love that feature too, but you have to use it sparingly, or it will bite you in the ass. One time, I wrote like 50 lines of CSS in this things, and then hit reload by accident. Man was I pissed!

That kind of thing never happens to me in other apps, because years of experience have taught me to save often. But when saving entails copying the entire file and pasting it over the old one, then saving, you tend to procrastinate saving.

I imagine there's some clever way of getting around this, and I've given it some thought but haven't really come up with anything solid. Any ideas?

Re:my most used extension ever...

[otisg]

I agree 100% (see this).
I don't leave my home without Web Developer any more.

Re:my most used extension ever...

[kwoff]

That kind of thing never happens to me in other apps, because years of experience have taught me to save often. But when saving entails copying the entire file and pasting it over the old one, then saving, you tend to procrastinate saving.

I imagine there's some clever way of getting around this, and I've given it some thought but haven't really come up with anything solid. Any ideas?

Why not make a backup copy of the original, then edit the new one in place? Save it whenever you feel like it. Maybe I'm not understanding the situation.

Re:my most used extension ever...

[evronm]

Well, the situation is as follows: The "edit css" feature of the developer toolbar brings up a window with all the css of the current page loaded. You can then edit the css and see your changes on the page as you make them. This is incredibly neat because you don't have to reload the page to see your changes; they just happen.

However, there's no way to save your changes from this window. The text in the window doesn't even necessarily represent a single file, but rather all the css in the current page. Therefore, even if you're working with a single file, you have to go back to your text editor to save your changes. If you're working with multiple css files, you have to figure out which file to modify and save. It gets to be a real hassle.

That said, as long as you're mindful, it's still an incredibly useful tool. You just really have to watch what you're doing...

Re:my most used extension ever...

[discogravy]

for that you just need lots of alcohol.

Sweet, sweet whiskey: Helping take the pain away since ...fuck, too drunk to remember.

Re:my most used extension ever...

[juhaz]

Actually, yes it does make that possible, because even though Slashdot does not use CSS, CSS can be used to *override* /.'s HTML formatting.

See http://www.cc.puv.fi/~e0000274/itslash.png, css code at http://www.cc.puv.fi/~e0000274/slash.css.

Whole thing, and especially the image swapping is a kludge, but hey, it works, and looks non-it'y. I don't know CSS worth a crap so it's all done with try-and-error method.

Note that until http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238099 lands to Firefox (in 1.1, probably), this can and probably does affect colors of non-slashdot sites if put into userContent.css, so it's not really anything other than demonstration.

adblock

[seanismdotcom]

adblock is one of the greatest extensions I must say. Adblock along with the following filter block 98% of ads..

[Adblock] /[\W\d][Aa]d(server|s|remote)?[\W\d]/ /[\W\d][Bb]anner(s|id\=)?[\W\d]/ /[\W\d][Ss]ponsors?[\W\d]/ /amazon\.com.*\W(promotions|marketing|merchants|st ores|associates)\W/ /yimg\.com.*\W(a|flash)\W/

Re:adblock

[jdkane]

What about the built-in option:
Firefox 0.9.3 >> |Tools| >> |Options...| >> |Web Features| >> [x] Load Images >> [x] for the originating Web site only.
It works in lower versions too, but the Options Control Panel contents may be ordered differently.

That would suffice for the part about
Something which blocked images that linked off-site would be extremely useful for example

Re:adblock

[glpierce]

Don't know whether anyone cares or not, but I keep my adblock settings available here. My file is a bit more complex, but does an excellent job. If you find any problems or notice any ways it could be improved, let me know (email listed in the instructions file).

Re:adblock

[glpierce]

Text in Regular Expressions isn't case-dependent in Adblock - you only need "a" insted of "[Aa]".

Re:adblock

[JakeThompson1]

IF YOU KEEP SHOWING YOUR IGNORANCE WITH YOUR SPELLING ERRORS, I AM GOING TO DO SOMETHING NASTY TO YOU.

Your first "TO" is not a preposition, as it is linked with "do", which is not a noun. Also, with your correction, the AC will be ending a sentence in a preposition...

Re:adblock

[the_riaa]

Since we're all chiming in, here's one I've been editing for a while: http://www.tfn.net/~mdjordan/mozilla_adblock_filte rs.txt

Re:names

[slobbargoat]

They last changed their name ages ago, and it wasn't cos they "felt like it". I wish people would get over it and move the fuck along.

The best thing is not that it has extensions

[Gopal.V]

The best thing I like about firefox is not that it has extensions , but that the extensions are done up in Javascript and XUL (most of them are). I can safely install most of these because I just take a peek at the code (*tinfoil hat*) to make sure there are no obvious backdoors in it.

Thankfully most extensions are done up cleanly , so it's easy to understand that there is no "crazy" code or backdoors hidden.

Lastly they run the same (almost) everywhere :)

Re:The best thing is not that it has extensions

[alphan]

I wouldn't bet on it.

1)Most of firefox is in XUL/javascript, meaning XUL+javascript+chrome can be very powerful.

2) There are binary extensions,

The moral of the story is: Don't install anything you don't know/trust.

Here's one benefit...

[proxy2]

Firefox is the ultimate porn browser !

Re:Here's one benefit...

[Lord of Ironhand]

They have some valid points too:
What other browser has a "throbber" displaying its logo while pages loads, an image-rendering library called "libpr0n", a code name like "Seamonkey" (see monkey), or a slogan like "free the lizard"?

Re:Here's one benefit...

[karniv0re]

I absolutely love the Pornzilla project! Not just for pr0n (though primarily for that), but for many other things as well. The zoom image button, increment page button, go to referrer button, hide visited links button... They all have non-pr0n uses too. Very cool stuff.

The only missing extension is "download all media." Kind of like Magpie, only something that actually works. Who knows, I'm learning Java this semester, so maybe I can bang something out. Man, those were choice words...

If you didn't like those changes, you'll hate this

[Jon.Laslow]

Take a look at this. From the site:

Allows you to change the product name in various parts of the browser. Random name generation ensures perpetual humour and possible end-user confusion.

Adblock

[strider44]

As extensions go, nothing beats adblock.

It's also a potential expoit

[Anonymous Coward]

When one of my work mates stepped out for a bit leaving his Firefox running , we just opened Yahoo and did a "Show Passwords" in Webdeveloper :)

That'll teach him not to leave his PC unlocked.

If you know who I am, I'll have to kill you

Re:It's also a potential expoit

[Myen]

Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Saved Passwords -> View Saved Passwords -> Show (bottom right corner) -> Yes.

Available on nightlies only - presumably will be in 1.0PR (and 1.0 when that happens).

If on *nix, replace Tools -> Options with Edit -> Preferences.

Compact Menu Extension

[xaoslaad]

The thing that has kept me away from Firefox and Mozilla is that each has very large menu bars when compared to IE. You have the Standard Menu bar, the back/forward/stop/etc bar, the address bar; it all adds up.

With IE you could always throw them all up on one line with small icons and it took up very little space at the top of your window when you have the browser minimized.

The Compact Menu extension for Firefox allows me to setup the menu bar very similarly; then just use a small icon theme and boom I have almost the same effect.

Now that I can see the screen the way I want I have to admit firefox is indeed a very nice browser.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[BenjyD]

I'm sure I used to run firefox like that, but it doesn't seem to work anymore (0.9.3).

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[tfreport]

You installed an extension for this? Try following these steps:

1. Right-click on any of the icons (say the home icon) and choose 'Customize'.

2. Choose small icons.

3. Then drag all icons and bars (such as the URL and Search) into the top menu bar. Everything should now be along the top. And if there are any icons you do not want or need, simply drag them onto the Customize Box.

4. But you say, there are still two bars without anything in them. Correct. Solve that by going 'View' > 'Toolbars' > and unselect both 'Navigation Toolbar' and 'Bookmark Toolbar.'

Not that the way you did it is wrong. Just that you will want to know about the feature of Customizing for other uses.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[attobyte]

I do this now. I have just one bar with all my icons, menus, and address bar in one. Then my tabs are below that. Very compact and very nice. A lot nicer then IE in my opionin.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[larsoncc]

That was a handy tip, thanks.

It wasn't readily apparent, because it doesn't follow Windows "standard" of dockable/lockable toolbars where you just drag the whole toolbar where you want it.

The extra step of opening the "customize" menu to be able to drag widgets didn't occur to me, because I just got used to the Windows meme.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[glpierce]

That's odd - every major Microsoft application is designed almost exactly the same way - all of Office, IE, etc. has right-click Customize for toolbars. Oh, and so do most other applications I've used in the last 5 years (Wordperfect, Paint Shop Pro, OpenOffice, etc).

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[Crayon Kid]

More ideas about how to organize your toolbars in this handy Mozillazine forum topic:
Post your 0.9 custom toolbars here.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[WWWWolf]

Another possibility is to mess around with the *instripe theme's spacing in userChrome.css file.

here's some instructions regarding the thing. Personally, I just went for zero pixel padding =)

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[Hank Chinaski]

just use small icons. everything is fully customizable. in fact a well configured firefox uses less screen real estate than any IE

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[mcn]

This seems a general problem with OSS or other free software. It's menu bars and interface is not familiar to those Windows users, and requires lots of efforts to customize it to look like one. People (esp. the Windows users) are used to movable menu/tool bars, small icons, etc. Can Mozilla Firefox come with small icons by default?

And on this note, Office 2003 come with bluish tool bars, new set of icons (vs Office XP). I haven't tried OpenOffice 2.0 beta (the fortnightly builds). I hope OpenOffice 2.0 will have that too, or something that looks like that, so that users that attempt to try/switch will at least find it familiar.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[xaoslaad]

If you right click and customize the menu bar there is an item simply called 'Menu'

Drag it into the bar and you should be able to click on it to see File/Edit/View, etc. This gives more room to the buttons and address bar while still making them available.

As for the google bar, I wish there was something like you could do in IE, with the help of TweakUI (or the registry if you knew the proper entries.

There is the ability in IE to configure a prefix such that when you type it into the address bar (I used to make this the character 'g' for "Google") followed by a space and then a search string you are interested in searching for it would perform a google search.

So, I would simply type 'g Search String' (w/o the quotes) into the address bar and results for a google search on 'Search String' would be displayed. It works with quotes to (where you can enter 'g "Search String"' and get the expected behaviour)

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[juhaz]

As for the google bar, I wish there was something like you could do in IE, with the help of TweakUI (or the registry if you knew the proper entries.
There is the ability in IE to configure a prefix such that when you type it into the address bar (I used to make this the character 'g' for "Google") followed by a space and then a search string you are interested in searching for it would perform a google search.

Well, there is, and has been for a LOOOOONG time. I can't believe you haven't heard of it, especially since it sounds you've been looking for that...

So, I would simply type 'g Search String' (w/o the quotes) into the address bar and results for a google search on 'Search String' would be displayed. It works with quotes to (where you can enter 'g "Search String"' and get the expected behaviour)

It may not be immediately apparent because it's not related in GUI to the address bur, but it's there.

Create a bookmark that points to "http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s", and set the keyword field to g, and it does exactly what you describe, without having to install any pesky third party tools like tweakui, or go digging in the obscure registry.

Re:Compact Menu Extension

[xaoslaad]

Most excellent. This works perfectly. Thank you!

Why people cling to IE

[ptomblin]

I wish somebody would port mozex to Mac OS X. (And no, I don't think I could manage it myself)

I introduced my step-daughter's girl friend to Firefox when she was complaining about all the pop-ups in IE, but after about 5 minutes she switched back to IE. The only reason: In IE you can copy an image to the clip buffer and paste it into Photoshop or some other graphic program (she was grabbing pictures to make her Livejournal icons), but in Firefox (and Mozilla) you have to save the image and then open it in Photoshop as an extra step. Evidently managing all those little files was more effort to her than dismissing all the popups.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true! Right Click / Copy Image -- use it all the time for Photoshop jokes I trade on IRC. If she spent more than 5 minutes using it, she would have found some of those features -- too quick to judge. Took me a while to get Firefox *just* the way I likes it.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[manticor24]

You better hook her up with an extension to copy images:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.p hp?t=7332 4

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused. I just tried it using drag and drop and got an image into Photoshop w/no extra steps.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[the_womble]

So why not install the Image Toolbar extension?

Re:Why people cling to IE

[SimplePaul]

1. Right-click on an image
2. Select 'Copy Image'
3. Paste into mspaint, Photoshop, etc.

This works fine in FireFox 0.9.3

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Midnight Thunder]

Hmm, I decided to try that, but the only copy option is 'copy image location', which copies the URL. This is for both Mozilla and Firefox. I tried dragging and dropping to two different applications. The first application only took the URL, while the second took the image.

Maybe there is an extension to add 'copy image'.

BTW this was under MacOS X.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you now can copy image directly from firefox, time to switch her back!

I also held back for a long time for the exact same reason. There is an extension for mozilla that does it, but in Firefox 0.9 there is a "copy image" function built in when you right click on any image.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Jarlsberg]

Just tell her to upgrade Windows to Service Pack 2 and then explain how IE's new inbuilt popup blocker will suppress those pop up windows. Everyone's happy.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Turn-X Alphonse]

This sounds harsh but..

If she's that dumb don't let her use a real browser, she'll end up breaking it some how.. I'm not trying to insult anyone but if you can't give it 5 minutes to play and learn a browser you arn't worthy of using the browser.

First time I used firefox (AKA Phoniex then), I was rather worried that it took about 10 seconds to load on my PC (IE was instant) but then everything ran fine. I played a little (slashdot and all the usual hang outs trying everything) and found tabbed browsing was just far too useful for a 56ker to even think about going back to IE. As time went by I learnt of the extentions and everything just improved (Hey I can plat tetris as I let stuff load, that alone makes it worth it). Now I refuse to use anything but Firefox and I attempt to convert anyone who says they use IE to me and have the brains to understand the benefits (AKA dont try and teach 12 year old girls who can only use AIM, it's not worth the hassle and waste of time).

Then again live journal has always been a place of annoyance for me... so I'm biast.. so I'll stick to slashdot journals where it's not all moaning about their family and 'friend (like we have them).

Re:Why people cling to IE

[stealthv]

Good Lord!!!
IE for OS X is so incredibly broken it's not funny. Personally I think Firefox works well on OS X but if she doesn't that's fine. However, she should at least try out Safari.
They are both better than IE anyday.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[ptomblin]

Your elitism wouldn't sound so stupid and hypocritical if you knew how to spell "biased".

The fact remains that she had a task to do, and IE made it easy and Firefox made it harder, so she decided to stick with IE. That doesn't make her dumb, just focused.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[lucas teh geek]

in 0.10 (PR1 NOT FINAL) for win32 theres definately a "copy image" right above "copy image location" and below "view image", and im pretty sure its been there in previous versions too. its anyones guess why they're leaving it out for you mac people

Re:Why people cling to IE

[ryouki]

I never noticed a problem of this type. I worked on a project involving the clipbord, and Drag and Drop a few months ago.

The documnetation for D&D and Clipboard documentation

If the clipboard does not work on your system then it is a bug and you should report it.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[wagemonkey]

I introduced my step-daughter's girl friend to Firefox when she was complaining about all the pop-ups in IE, but after about 5 minutes she switched back to IE. The only reason: In IE you can copy an image to the clip buffer and paste it into Photoshop or some other graphic program (she was grabbing pictures to make her Livejournal icons), but in Firefox (and Mozilla) you have to save the image and then open it in Photoshop as an extra step. Evidently managing all those little files was more effort to her than dismissing all the popups.

Here is an extension to let her do that too.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Crayon Kid]

I introduced my step-daughter's girl friend to Firefox when she was complaining about all the pop-ups in IE, but after about 5 minutes she switched back to IE. The only reason: In IE you can copy an image to the clip buffer and paste it into Photoshop or some other graphic program (she was grabbing pictures to make her Livejournal icons), but in Firefox (and Mozilla) you have to save the image and then open it in Photoshop as an extra step. Evidently managing all those little files was more effort to her than dismissing all the popups.

Here's how a non-techie person thinks: "Damn, I can't do that thing I used to do in this Firefox. Back to Explorer, because there the thing works and I'm used to it already."

No, thoughts like "perhaps there's a trick or a setting to do this thing in Firefox" will not cross their mind. They're not stupid, it's just not obvious to them that (or how) computer applications' functionality can be altered by the user.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Crayon Kid]

Maybe there is an extension to add 'copy image'.

There is, it's called Copy image to clipboard.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[no_space_in_time]

I introduced the mother of my step-daughters girlfriends boyfriend to....oh, nevermind.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[juhaz]

Hmm, I decided to try that, but the only copy option is 'copy image location', which copies the URL. This is for both Mozilla and Firefox. I tried dragging and dropping to two different applications. The first application only took the URL, while the second took the image.

BTW this was under MacOS X.

It's there, but the feature currently only exists in Windows version. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210043 (bugzilla and slashdot, you know the drill)

Maybe there is an extension to add 'copy image'.

There is that too, from a time it was not a browser feature, perhaps it works in non win32-platforms, perhaps it doesn't.

Re:Why people cling to IE

[Midnight Thunder]

I was given the URL of CopyImage. It works under MacOS X ("works for me") and also should work on any another platform - the extension only uses Javascript that leverages what Firefox already provides.

Would be nice if this was standard.

Re:Switch tabs ?

[Luthwyhn]

No extension needed... just use Ctrl + #

I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[bogaboga]

I haven't switched [from Konqueror], and will not switch anytime soon because I find that: -

1: Mozilla Firefox had terrible fonts on Linux. I know there is the possibility of using one compiled with xft. But where is it? Whenever a new release is announced, the version producing those bad fonts is what I find.

2: I find that it is slower than Konqueror on most sites. My only use of Mozilla Firefox is on Gmail. I wonder why Google will not support Konqueror yet.

3: Firefox keeps some important passwords long after I have logged out of my online baking site. It is not the problem of the site but Firefox. I have confirmed this.

Please note that I am no expert in these matters. I just download stuff and use it as such.

Cb..

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[The Grassy Knoll]

>my online baking site

Doh! (nut)

.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[cloudless.net]

"Mozilla Firefox had terrible fonts on Linux."

Which Linux distro do you use? If you install Firefox in a binary format (RPM/DEB) thru APT/URPMI, you'll probably get a version of Firefox with good font support.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[cammoblammo]

1) Edit -->Preferences --> General -- Fonts and Colours.

2) Can't answer that one. You might be right. The one thing I like about Konqueror is the status bar tells you in kb the size of the page and how much has loaded. AFAIR Opera has (or had) this feature too.

3) Edit --> Preferences --> Privacy --> Saved Passwords. Edit away. It's probably a good idea to make sure that you never save passwords for banking sites. If you want to reset any of your password choices you can do it here.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[rincebrain]

1) A lot of programs have terrible fonts if you don't take the time to set them up. If you're using a binary distro, such as RedHat or Debian, that's not the browser's fault, but the distro's. If you're using Gentoo, toy with the make flags. Otherwise, build from source manually. =) 2) Konqueror is fast because it's not as compliant as Firefox. I've seen several sites display as crap in Konq, and run perfectly in Firefox. In addition, GMail doesn't support Konq yet because they don't see a need to, IMO [Firefox runs perfectly on any OS, and IE/Safari are the primary browsers of most users of the respective OSes, so why support Konqueror?]. 3) That's your own problem, not Firefox's. I've never had that problem, and I've run Firefox on my Linux boxen for almost a year now...under whatever name it was at the time. =)

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[gtaluvit]

about:config will solve 1. for you. Put "about:config" in your menubar. On that page, find font.FreeType2.autohinted and set it to true. Do the same for font.FreeType2.enable. Set font.FreeType2.unhinted to false. Also, for number 3, ensure that you go to preferences and that you have Remember Passwords unchecked. You may also want to ensure that its not a cookie thats storing it. Restart Firefox and you'll have much nicer fonts.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[FoboldFKY]

1. I dunno about the new site, but last time I checked the Linux binaries, it was on the "More languages/OSes/etc." page beneath the regular binary.

2. IANAGE (I am not a Google Employee), but as far as I understand it, Gmail is built almost entirely on a little gem called XMLHttpRequest (it might be HttpXmlRequest or HtTpXmLREQUEST but that's beside the point...)

   Basically, it allows you to send requests back to the server, and get XML (Gecko and IE allow you to recieve HTML as well) back from Javascript without having to reload the whole dang page. Gmail uses this pretty much everywhere instead of doing roundtrips.

   I'm not sure if Konqueror supports XMLHttpRequest, but odds are that might be why.

3. Ya got me on that one.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[Nimey]

Mozilla Firefox had terrible fonts on Linux. I know there is the possibility of using one compiled with xft. But where is it? Whenever a new release is announced, the version producing those bad fonts is what I find.

You'll want the version that's built with GTK2, here.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[BHearsum]

I just set those 3 config variables, restarted Firefox and there is no change in my fonts. AFAIK, firefox for Debian Unstable (0.9.3) is compiled with freetype support...

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[_xeno_]

No, he doesn't. He uses Konqueror, and therefore most likely uses KDE. Why should he have to install the GNOME desktop environment just to get fonts that don't suck to work with Firefox?

Oh, and I know he only needs the GTK2 libraries, but that's still a huge chunk of code to download and install to use for just one program.

Do you seriously need GTK+ support to get decent fonts? That's kinda - too bad. I thought the GTK2 stuff only made Firefox/Mozilla support styling the controls based on the current GTK theme, I didn't know it did anything with the fonts.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[ticktockticktock]

Odd. On my SuSE Linux 9.0 setup, if I download FireFox 0.9.3 straight from www.mozilla.org, it defaults to having anti-aliased fonts even with:
font.FreeType2.autohinted set to "false" and font.FreeType2.enable set to "false" and font.FreeType2.unhinted set to "true" in about:config.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[evilviper]

3: Firefox keeps some important passwords long after I have logged out of my online baking site. It is not the problem of the site but Firefox. I have confirmed this.

Now that it just moronic.

Firefox PROMPTS YOU the first time it saves a password, and gives you all the info you need to disable that functionality...

If you just click "OK" on every dialog box that pops up, you've got much more serious problems to deal with than a browser that saves your password.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[angrykeyboarder]

I dunno, I think Firefox is worth that "huge chunk of code".

I run Gaim and GIMP on Windows 2000. I too, had to download the GT2 libraries. I didn't mind at all.

And I have a "tiny" 20 GB hard drive.

Re:I haven't switched...my reasons are...

[juhaz]

Do you seriously need GTK+ support to get decent fonts?

No. You need GTK+ support to get Mozilla at all, because that's what it uses on *nix. GTK2 just happens to have font support that is light years ahead GTK1 (doh).

You wouldn't suggest someone who "just wants to run Konqueror" to use a version that links against QT1, even if there was a recent one, would you?

Extensions are the Killer App

[plasticmillion]

Although I couldn't RTFA (slashdotted already) I feel compelled to comment on this. We are considering deploying a multiplatform version of our product developed on top of Mozilla, so I downloaded Firefox a few weeks ago to check it out. My intention was to download it, play with it and then go back to IE which I was perfectly happy with on my 2 XP boxes.

Well guess what, I'm still using the damn thing and have become a huge evangelist for it. And 99.9% of the reason is the great extension mechanism and growing library of how-did-I-live-without-this extensions. If the browser wars really do take off, I think that XUL might have a bigger impact long term, but definitely for now extensions are the killer app that is pulling people onto the Mozilla platform.

Re:Extensions are the Killer App

[Yer Mom]

Maybe they'd be less slashdotted if they hadn't split the article across six teeny-tiny pages just to force people to view more adverts. The ads are about three times the length of the body text!

There isn't even a link for a printable version, so if you want to print the article, you have to waste half a tree.

Perhaps Flexbeta should whack the marketroids over the head with a clue bat?

Re:Extensions are the Killer App

[Foole]

Another benefit is you don't get feature bloat in the main app.

My hope is that the GNOME people consider this as an alternative to hiding options so that the user isnt overwhelmed. They could just shift chunks of functionality into extensions (eg non-spacial browsing) that interested people could choose to install.

Re:Switch tabs ?

[qshapadooy]

You were so close. Control+[1-9] goes to tab 1-9.

Then there's always Control+Tab/Shift Tab or Control+PageUp/Down to go to next/previous tabs.

Wikalong

[phUnBalanced]

A little blatant self promotion. (I apologize)

I've written up a little extension called Wikalong.

Basically, it puts a wiki in your sidebar, that is indexed off the current page you are viewing. The wiki is online so anyone using the plugin, that visits a page you make notes on will see your notes, and vice versa.

It doesn't work perfectly yet, but I'm hoping to attract some smarter people than I to help get it straightened out.

More details on the site I linked above.

Re:Wikalong

[jrumney]

Mosaic supported annotations (both personal and group) waaay back. For some reason the feature got dropped when the Netscape guys broke away into a commerical company and is only recently coming back as the in thing. No doubt someone will patent it soon.

Re:Wikalong

[jb.hl.com]

Downloaded, installed, and tested. It pwns.

Re:Wikalong

[Tyreth]

I've had an idea to do something like this too for a while. Great idea.

Builti-in features vs Extensions

[cloudless.net]

I am quite interested in how the Mozilla team decide what goes into the browser, and what should be left as an extension. Many built-in features of Firefox can actually made made as an extension instead, which could make the browser more lightweight and start up faster. Yes it would require the user to download more extensions, and I think it could be solved by providing extension packs with several useful extensions put into one easy-to-install package.

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[jdkane]

Many built-in features of Firefox can actually made made as an extension instead

Out of curiosity, what built-in features would you consider as good extensions? (This question is to everybody, not just the parent post). I would be interested to see a discussion here about the leanness of the Firefox browser vs trade-offs by abstracting built-in functionality into extension packs.

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[Epistax]

My reply to this is make everything that can possibly be an extension, an extension, and then make them all default installed extensions. Users can then subtract either at install or runtime. I'd personally prefer runtime since the browser is already very lightweight and we don't want to scare people off.

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[cloudless.net]

my list of optional features:
- The whole online help system (I don't need help)
- Tab browsing (not everybody likes it)
- Toolbar customization (most people have no clue)
- Download manager (I love single progress dialog)
- Search field (just visit google)
- RSS (not every read blogs)
- Page source viewer (Joe doesn't read source)
- Print and print preview (I don't have a printer)
- Import/Export (what is Netscape anyway?)
- Themes (just give me one good theme)
- Cooking manager
- Password manager

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[Crayon Kid]

Some of the things you listed are pretty "core". If they did this they'd have to have a dependency system, because extensions like "Tabbrowser extensions" would depend on "Tabbed browsing". Which idea may not sit well with everybody.

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[alex_ware]

Hey lets have an html viewing extension!
Seriously why do that I want firefox to beat ie out of the box. Not after installing the help tabs etc.

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[AbbyNormal]

I think that's a great idea! What could be done, is to create a few "modules" ala Morphix, and pack some of these extensions into a single package. The "Power users", could contain the DOM explorer, toolbar extender, etc.

Re:Builti-in features vs Extensions

[kavau]

I agree. The best way, imho, would be to turn every possible feature into an extension, and then let the user select extensions during install. That is, you'd have a choice between a default install, which automatically installs a "standard extensions" package, or a customized install, which lets you choose exactly which extensions you want to have on your system.

Target Alert not too useful...

[jdreed1024]

my favorite is the Target Alert extension which displays a small graphic next to links that are not web pages.

I came across this a while ago and thought it would be useful for helping out some novice users who don't understand helper applications and the like. Alas, it's mostly useless. It uses the 3 digit extension, not the MIME type. So it's useless for content served dynamically via CGI scripts. It would also be trivial for a malicious user to create a website, post some .doc files, which would show up as Word Documents, and instead change the MIME type and serve up JavaScript or VBScript to do something evil.

The right way to do this is to get the HTTP Headers and see what MIME type is being returned by the server.

I'm a FireFox user - have been since it was Phoenix - but so many of the skins and plugins have too much of a "Oooh, shiny!" factor to them. How about more flexible X.509 configuration or a harcore Kiosk mode (that's the reason most kiosks run IE) or something like that. It has the same problem as WinAMP - there are far too many skins (40% of which have UI design issues; 40% of which are identical to each other, and 20% might be useful) and not enough technical plugins.

To pre-emptively fend off trolls, yes I know it's free, you get what you pay for, if you don't like it go code it yourself, etc, etc.

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[BenjyD]

You might fool the user with a wrong icon, but Firefox will still use the MIME type when it downloads the file, so it's hardly a major problem.

Wouldn't getting the HTTP headers for every non-HTML file linked to on a web page be a bit bandwidth and processor intensive for an extension?

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[BHearsum]

I saw a kiosk last week that was running an odd looking browser. about:config did not do anything so after a few minutes I realized I could just lookup a page that did browser detection. Much to my surprise it was Mozilla 0.9 (a very stripped down, weirdly themed) running on NT 4.51.

(For anyone who cares this what as a Casey's Bar and Grill at Yorkdale mall Toronto)

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[Cylix]

There is a kiosk plugin for firefox too.

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

Wouldn't getting the HTTP headers for every non-HTML file linked to on a web page be a bit bandwidth and processor intensive for an extension?

Yes, but how else can it detect and place a goat icon next to goatse.cx links?

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[entrigant]

Since when is it possible to have TOO MUCH of an "Oooh, shiny!" factor? I like Oooh, Shiny!

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[varebel]

Right now, it would be more like a "suspended domain" icon. Go ahead. Check it out. The Goat Man is no more.

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[qbwiz]

Target Alert sounds like an utter bullshit extension to me, it's trivial to achieve this with a user style sheet, I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what it does.
Trivial, maybe, but it saves time for most users who would want to do this, including the users who otherwise wouldn't know how. It's not like it's costing anybody money.

Re:Target Alert not too useful...

[juhaz]

The right way to do this is to get the HTTP Headers and see what MIME type is being returned by the server.

Which would make it, instead of "mostly useless", though it's pretty useful to me, even for just recognizing mailto and new window links, totally useless (it'd be too slow to be usable), because it would have to do HEAD for every damn href on the page.

FF Extensions

[wongn]

I use webdeveloper - it certainly is very useful... I also use session saver, which is a bit like an extremely scaled down Tabbrowser extensions. It has in problem in that if you don't close the main browser window as the last Firefox window, it is extremely hard (well, I haven't found a way) to get Firefox back to opening in a mode that includes any toolbars, an address bar, and from a website that isn't "Sign up for Gmail" (as was the last window that I closed -.-). Oh - is it just me or doesn't the webpage the article is linked to work at the moment? :S

Fav Firefox extension

[kinrowan]

for this inveterate /. reader is ReloadEvery. I can reload /. every minute (although that still doesn't help me get the first post).

I also love WebDeveloper, DownThemAll, GMailCompose, SwitchProxy, and the ever-popular TabBrowser Prefs.

OK, maybe I'm a little over-extensioned.

Wanted Extension:

[tratten]

'Apply new extension without Firefox restart'-Extension

Re:Wanted Extension:

[Yer Mom]

If I hadn't already posted in this thread, I'd be modding you up right about now.

Even Windows lets you change and install stuff without having to reboot every time these days...

Re:Wanted Extension:

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

In order to install it, you have to restart Firefox.

(Which leads to an infinite loop somehow....)

Re:Wanted Extension:

[mewphobia]

Even if there is some architectural problem with extensions that make it require a restart, it would be nice if something like session saver: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/sessions aver

When you install an extension, it could automatically save your session, restart your browser and restore your session on reload.

but yeah, having to restart your browser is a bit of a pain!

What plugin is this?

[leomekenkamp]

There is a problem with the database that is preventing the site from working.

An email has been sent to the administrator notifying them of the problem. Please try again later.

Is this a direct effect of the slashddos plugin?

Re:What plugin is this?

[leomekenkamp]

Yet again the level of my former English teacher becomes painfully apparent...

Re:What plugin is this?

[kooshvt]

"they" and "them" can be used in place of "he/she" and "him/her" in order to be gender-neutral

Well not according to a previous English teacher I had. They/them is plural. The problem with this case is that administrator would need to change administrator to administrators to keep the same plurality through out.

An email has been sent to the administrator notifying him of the problem.
or
An email has been sent to the administrators notifying them of the problem.

I am not sure if email would need to be plural in the second case. Is it one email being sent to multiple recipients, or is it multiple emails? Is emails a word? My head is going to explode. I hate words.

Me fail English? That's unpossible!

Re:What plugin is this?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

What happens when the admin's inbox fills up? It adds a notice to the database?

Re:What plugin is this?

[Glenn R-P]

Sorry to reply to my own posting, but would this imply that the administrator is

1. suffering from a multiple personalities disorder
2. a siamese twin
3. undergoing a sex-change at this very moment
4. a monarch
5. God

?
6. author was using nonsexist language.

Firefox Game

[matrem]

Linux users can select text in a webpage and middle-click: this will take them to the first hit in Google with the selected text as search term. This is amazing!

So I propose a new internet game. Start from a page, e.g. slashdot, and try to reach a certain other page, say somethingawful.com, by just selecting text and middle-clicking. Clicking hyperlinks is not allowed! Have fun!

Re:Firefox Game

[neglige]

Start from a page, e.g. slashdot, and try to reach a certain other page, say somethingawful.com, by just selecting text and middle-clicking.

Try to reach your target with no more than, say... 6 clicks? ;)

Re:Firefox Game

[maskedbishounen]

It's actually designed for loading URIs from text (ie, non-hyperlinks). If it's a valid URI, it works; if not, it pulls the first Google result (I believe?). I'm also pretty sure that it works on Windows (and OS X?), but the little auto scroll indicator when you middle click intercepts your click, causing it to not activate. The mouse gestures extension lets you enable the said auto scroll features across platforms, and also disable it.

So, from your post, I can highlight somethingawful.com and middle click to go there, as it's a valid URI. ;-) One click win!

Extensions = extensive crashes

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Maybe it's my installation, but every time I try to install an extension either it doesn't install or I have to reinstall firefox because it won't start anymore. I'm writing this in konqueror as I just tried to install adblocker and firefox won't start anymore after quitting.
I'd say the extensions system needs just a bit more work. And mind you, I've seen a lot of mozilla bugs as I've been with mozilla since version 0.8.x

Re:Extensions = extensive crashes

[fadir]

I had a very similar problem the first time I noticed all the extensions out there. After installing the 25th extension my browser was almost unusable and I realized that installing everything is not the best idea. So for the next try I was way more careful and it worked out.
Still alot to do for the Firefox team and the extension programmers but the idea itself is splendid, I really like it and if you are careful enough it already works quite fine.

Re:Extensions = extensive crashes

[DigiDarkCloud]

Maybe it's my installation, but every time I try to install an extension either it doesn't install or I have to reinstall firefox because it won't start anymore.

That's been a major problem for a while, because extensions are/were essentially becoming part of the main program. You could uninstall them manually, but it was a tricky, fragile practice. Fortunately, Firefox 0.9 introduced a new extension manager that makes the process much easier -- if the extension author supports it. Which leads us to the next point.

I'd say the extensions system needs just a bit more work. And mind you, I've seen a lot of mozilla bugs as I've been with mozilla since version 0.8.x

Not all of the problems are with the extension system itself. An extension can be well or poorly written; it can have bugs, incompatibilities, etc., just like you won't always have a success with every program you see on freshmeat and try out. It's not automatically stable just because it's an extension. If the extension author has written their extension to support the new extension manager, it's easy to uninstall if you determine it's of no use to you, but ideally, a bit of research should be done before you try an extension out. Sites like ExtensionRoom and update.mozilla.org have a place for users to put reviews and comments, so it's a good idea to glance over those, and see if lots of other people have problems, before taking the plunge.

Some useful links

[t7]

Texturizer.net has a nice collection of extensions you may not find on mozilla's dev site.

Some extensions I'm currently using:
Flat Bookmark Editing
Add Bookmark Here
CuteMenus
Paste and Go
Gmail Notifier(Still works)

Free iPods? Sure. freeipods.com

Nuke Anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuke Anything is a favorite of mine. Right click an image, table, or even a frame, select "Remove this object" and it's zapped from the page layout. Quite useful for removing images or overly large margins.

Re:Nuke Anything

[Peripherus]

I'd like to see a version of this that removes every instance of the image from the page e.g. images in sigs (but not permanently like "block images from this site").

Re:Nuke Anything

[Rie Beam]

My only real problem with Nuke Anything is that it's only temporary - reload the page, and any ads / annoying colors / et cetera return. Of course, this is good in case you kill something you didn't mean to - perhaps the extension needs a few enhancements: An undo option (I haven't used it in awhile, so it may already exist), a "Save Configuration" option, a and of course, just in case, a "Remove Configuration". Mind you, considering how much some pages change, the functionality of this might be a bit limited - perhaps introduce element ID wildcard blocking?

Flashblock

[Artichoke]

Flashblock replaces Macromedia Flash animations with a button you have to click to download and run the animation. Most uses of Flash are abominations to me; I like to choose when to consume it.

Gripe wrt Macromedia: a couple of days back I installed the latest and greatest Flash player from Macromedia on my WinXP box and it uninstalled Flashblock for me.

Better yet: it also prevents subsequent (re-)installation of Flashblock.

Solution: download Flaskblock.xpi, unzip it, mod so that it installs under a nom de guerre, rezip and install.

Anybody at Macromedia, if you're listening: STOP BEING NAUGHTY.

Re:Flashblock

[fishdan]

Yea, I must agree -- macromedia employs the same tactics as most spyware companies to install stuff without your permission, and with the same excuses. I've stopped allowing Flash on our 300 workstation computers here, and I've banned Flash from the sites we host until I can see Macromedia showing higher level of ethical programming -- namely, I should not need an extension to selectively disable flash.

I talked to a Flash evangelist about this, and he essentially told me " our real business is showing you ads that you cannot avoid. "

Re:Flashblock

[base3]

Is that uninstallation addressed in the EULA (which I know no one reads) or is Macromedia engaging in violation of computer fraud and abuse statutes?

Re:Flashblock

[Qwavel]

Flashblock was my favorite extension, but apparently there are a number of bugs, particularly when used with 0.9, so I stopped using it when I upgraded my FireFox.

Also, I'd be hesitant to convict MM based on just one user's experience. Flakey stuff happens and often we don't know why. I don't think you should be so quick to come to a conclusion.

Re:Flashblock

[Artichoke]

Yes, you're quite correct wrt the unsound conclusion. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I've investigated further and eaten my original words.

Re:Great features, huh?

[Jarlsberg]

...Or maybe you mean the way that every new version is incompatible not only with the settings and profiles of the old one but the extensions too, forcing me to uninstall and delete the old version before upgrading?...

Yeah, if there's one thing that annoys me about Firefox, it's the really annoying hoops you got to go through when you update it. You'd think it'd be a easy thing keeping your preferences, themes and extensions when updating the browser - but na-ah, no such thing...

and hosts file.

[Janek Kozicki]

not only adblock is great. Custom hosts file greatly increases browsing sanity.

my extensions:

[fadir]

Tabbrowser Preferences - very useful, nearly everything you can dream of to configure the tab-behaviour
ReloadEvery - the only reason why I use Firefox, autoreload is a must and just perfect for pages like /.
Linkification - alot of boards that I use have clickable links disabled for "security reasons". This extension brings back the link.
googlebar - not really necessary but nice to have
Dict - not used yet, but sounds promising
BookmarksHome - great thing, always missed it
Autofill - not used yet, but sounds good

Did I miss anything necessary?

Re:my extensions:

[silentbozo]

One extension I've been looking for would allow you to search your open windows and tabs. I have the sessionsaver extension installed, so when I fire up FireFox, it brings up every window and tab that I had open during my last session. Over time, this means I have dozens of windows, and hundreds of tabs open, and it's a pain to click on every tab, looking for a bit of info that I've seen before.

Anyone know if such an extension exists, or what you'd have to do to write one like it?

Re:Great features, huh?

[Brando_Calrisean]

What? I've NEVER had a problem importing settings/profiles between versions of Firefox.

Yeah great, but what about...

[Begemot]

...signed XPI?

I mean before all those bells and whistles. As a plugin developer i greatly miss them
(not this, but one that really works).

And pleaaaaaaase before you tell me it's useless, go ahead and try to convince some Joe user to install "unsigned hence possibly dangerous" plugin.

Re:your step-daughter's a what ??

[ptomblin]

Shouldn't you be getting to your "Nazis for Bush" meeting?

mouse gestures

[BraveSlice]

I changed recently from IE to Opera. It took one week to give up using IE by mistake. Opera is far superior for everyday use BUT I still have use IE sometimes when pages are not looking otherwise readable. Two favourite functionalities, without I can not live and well not sure if you really need anything else :) Mouse gestures and mouse zoom for pages with too small print (too common mistake).

Re:mouse gestures

[Hast]

You can get gestures in Mozilla/Firefox with some extentions. My favourite is is Radial Menues which really is a circular menu system and not "gestures" per se. The functionality is the same though, but you get visual feedback as well as text hints. From a useability perspective I guess it's a lot better than plain gestures. (Doesn't look as magical though.)

Increasing/decreasing font size can be done with ctrl-(+ or -).

Besides that I personally can't live without tabbed browsing which exist in both Opera and Mozilla.

Online articles that are broken into pages...

[sean@thingsihate.org]

...like this one piss me off. Why do I need to read the intro text and then click "Next" to go to page 2? And then later to go to page 3, 4, 5, etc?

Why do people think it's cool to split articles up into pages like this, making the user click a "Next page" link? Are they aware that web browsers have a veritcal scroll bar? Do they know they could show us the whole thing at once?

It's not as though simple text will take too long to transfer. Do they just want us to see a wider array of their ads?

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[Oddly_Drac]

"Why do I need to read the intro text and then click "Next" to go to page 2?"

More room for advertising.

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[PatrickThomson]

Do they just want us to see a wider array of their ads?

Yes?

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[Bagels]

Mostly to avoid bandwidth problems - if someone starts reading an article and decides that he/she doesn't like it or isn't interested, the site hasn't already served up the entire article to them (usually just a fourth or a sixth). Also, it gives them an opportunity to flash different ads at you on every page. Finally, if you're in the middle of the article, it makes it harder for you to back out (which is a pain for you, but marketing people would love it).

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[ptomblin]

Two reasons, actually. You guessed the "more ads" reason already. A book I read about web design some years ago said that user studies proved that many users either don't like to or don't know how to use scroll bars, and won't scroll down to read more, but will click a "next page" link. That's why MS-NBC (I think it's them) has an opening paragraph and then an advertising graphic but a link at the bottom of the opening paragraph to the rest of the article that just jumps down to the rest of the page below the advertisement.

I don't know if this reluctance/inability to use scroll bars still true - I suspect it's not, and that web users have gotten a tiny bit more sophisticated, but these big companies have web design guidelines that haven't kept up.

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[reboot246]

They want us to view the ads as many times as possible, but the nicer sites will have a link to a "printer friendly" page where the article is all on one page.

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[TFGeditor]

"Do they just want us to see a wider array of their ads?" Of course it is about ads. Website content is there for no reason other than to get you to visit the site. The site exists solely as a venue for ads, period. The ads pay the costs associated with operating the site, and make the owners sufficient profit to make it worthwhile to keep the site up. In short, capitalism at work. Gotta love it.

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[TiggsPanther]

Finally, if you're in the middle of the article, it makes it harder for you to back out (which is a pain for you, but marketing people would love it).

Heh. Whenever I find an article like that linked from /. I always cause page 2 to open in a new tab, then send the first one back to wherever I linked from (unless I'd already opened in a new tab).
I guess if I was browsing Slashdot from IE then I'd do a similar thing opening into a new window instead.

Tiggs

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[Crayon Kid]

"Why do I need to read the intro text and then click "Next" to go to page 2?"

More room for advertising.

True, but to be fair most such articles have a "print" mode which displays the entire article in one page, with most of the bells and whistles gone. So look for the printer icon and use it, I sure do.

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[Hast]

I believe that was Jakob Nielsen who presented that. Furthermore he has presented new data that show that people now know how to use the scroll bar on his site.

So those designing WWW pages should know they can't use that excuse any longer. ;-)

Re:Online articles that are broken into pages...

[angrykeyboarder]

From an aesthetic point of view, multiple pages look better.

But I agree with you. This is one thing I like about The New York Times. Each of their stories has a "view as one page" link, which I often take advantage of.

Re:Great features, huh?

[drmancini]

Maybe you should be aware of the fact, that Firefox is still pre 1.0 ... so you shouldn't vote against it based on such bugs...

Re:adblock I have a question ....

[jdkane]

Advertisers seem to be finding a way around AdBlock by using those floating DHTML ads that fly across your screen and land in the middle of the screen and block the story you're trying to read. (Wow, that's annoying).

Does anyone know of a way to stop this kind of advertising besides turning off JavaScript in the browser?
Are there any Firefox extensions in place that can recognize these types of adverts and squash them? There are often enough DHTML layes in a page these days that I assume it's hard to tell the difference between one meant for advertising and another meant to hold helpful content to support the page.

Re:Switch tabs ?

[arcanumas]

Holly shit!!
I pressed Ctrl+1 on my Mozilla 1.6 on Linux and guess what?!
I got a page with a huge image saying "WTF?!"
the URL pointed to http://null/

I,ve been using mozilla for a long time and i had never seen this before.

Re:Great features, huh?

[WIAKywbfatw]

You miss the damn point. Firefox and other browsers are trying to take market share from IE, not the other way around, so it's far more important that new Firefox users can successfully import settings from IE than the other way around.

I would have thought that that much would be obvious to even the most fanatical Firefox/Mozilla user.

The bottom line is that a key tool used to help migrate users from IE to Firefox doesn't always work, so that's a clear minus point against Firefox. If the first thing that you try do when moving to Firefox from IE causes crash after crash wouldn't that curb your enthusiasm for carrying on with the transition? After all, switching to any new piece of software is often a leap of faith, and it's hard to make that leap successfully if you find a brick wall in your way.

You might not see things that way, and these things might not bother you, but that doesn't make them any less frustrating to others.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[bani]

it's a link to yet another 'Gay Nigger Association of America' domain.

Open link in next available tab

[gini_]

Well since everyone is asking something in this thread I'll ask too :)
Is it possible to open link in next available tab in mozilla? You see, I may have tabs 1 and 2 reserved for browsing slashdot, 1:st tab for main level comments and 2:nd tab for comment threads. I would like to open threads to 2:nd tab just by clicking a link, not by drag & drop.

I know its possible to open a link into a new tab but I dont want that because I may have tabs 3,4,5 etc. reserved for something else.

Re:Open link in next available tab

[frankthechicken]

If you mean something like, Website A currently in tab 1 website B currently in tab 2. If you click on a link in A, the link appears in tab 2, moving B to tab 3. Click a link on tab 2, link appears in tab 3, moving B to 4 etc.

Then yes, in the tabbrowser extension preferences, look at the option Open new tab at etc in the Advanced Startup and New tab and change it to Rightside of current tab, or whatever.

There is another neat little option of colour coding grouped tabs, in the TabGroups option of the tabbrowser extension, which could be useful for you.

Re: as opposed to

[BitterAndDrunk]

simply surfing to websites to compromise your machine? I agree, there's lots more hoops to jump through to compromise your box with firefox.

Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[ubiquitin]

Pssssst. What really revolutionized my browsing and will make it very hard for me to switch away from FireFox is AdBlock. Right-click on any image, flash animation, or iframe, and you can permanently add it to a block list. (Sshhhhh Don't tell anyone, but I don't see ads on slashdot, CNN, NYTimes, or any of my favorite periodicals any more.) If there was a way to keep a centralized list of blocked sites or an easy way to import and export the lists, then you'd have a real-time distributed content-blocking system.

My extensions

[Sunspire]

Here's some extensions I like that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Magpie. Those who've used FlashGet with IE will love this little thing. It'll snatch all the files pointed to by links from a page according to some pattern, for example *jpg, and save them to disk or open them up as tabs. Great for collecting "nature pictures".

Firefox's bookmark dialog's "Create in" feature pisses me off. It never, ever, has the folders you need in it's puny little drop down. OpenBook removes it and replaces it with the full bookmarks folder tree.

You can reorder tabs with MiniT using simple drag and drop on the tab bar. I think this should maybe be added to Firefox itself, it's pretty basic functionality.

Re:My extensions

[angrykeyboarder]

MinIT conflicts with another extension I have that I find more useful (I forget what it is now) so I got rid of it.

I've never seen Maggpie before. Thanks to you, I just installed it. :-)

While we're on the topic of extensions

[jdkane]

... does an extension exist that can be used to target the contents of Firefox dialogue boxes elsewhere?

For example, the Alert box that appears when you type an invalid address like this which brings up the dialogue [xyz could not be found. Please check the name and try again.]

I would like to have all those types of dialogue messages appear inside one of those seamless alert notice thingies that a lot of software uses nowadays -- the one that appears in the bottom right-hand side of the desktop of application and displays the message (much like some IM programs, the latest Norton AV -- "Automatic updates are complete", etc, etc) and then disappears (usually scrolls off the screen) automatically after a few seconds without any user interaction required.

Re:While we're on the topic of extensions

[jdkane]

Thanks for the tip, that's great. For anybody else readin this, the setting to target Firefox error messages into web pages (that normally would appear in dialogue boxes) is

browser.xul.error_pages.enabled = true

by accessing the URL: about:config

Warning Parent link is to Goat.sec! and Scat pic!

[spineboy]

just a warning, if you look at it wash your eyes with gasoline.

Annoying forum bug prevents me...

[sracer]

...from using Firefox. When posting to forums, Firefox's input text box is way too narrow. FF Developers have said that it is a bug in the html generated by forum software. Both MSIE and Opera handle this "bug" just fine. It is one thing to adhere to a standard, but when it impacts usability, a little flexibility is needed.

If it weren't for that annoyance, I'd use FF.

Re:Annoying forum bug prevents me...

[iamsure]

Which forum software?

I regularly post on phpbb, invision, postnuke, phpnuke, slash (like right now), and other forum software's just fine.

If you mention the forum software, perhaps some coders could help fix the bug where it exists - in the forum software, not in the browser.

Re:Annoying forum bug prevents me...

[sracer]

vBulletin Version 2.3.0, and vBulletin Version 2.3.2 (at least) are two of the culprits. People who follow the FF/Moz support forums suggested to contact the forum owner to upgrade their software to newer versions (that supposedly fix the problem).

The problem is that the sites that use these versions of software are pretty big, DVDTalk and Brighthand. They're not likely to disrupt service to upgrade in order to provide a fix for the handful of people who use FF/Moz

I suspect...

[Kjella]

you'd have to create an "environment value" indicating you used the middle button instead, and all javascript functions triggered by that event should be tabbed.

Kjella

Can't get extentions to work

[Peale]

Try as I might, I can't get the bloody things to work! Is there some secret to these?

Re:adblock I have a question ....

[ticklemeozmo]

Advertisers seem to be finding a way around AdBlock by using those floating DHTML ads that fly across your screen and land in the middle of the screen and block the story you're trying to read. (Wow, that's annoying).
Does anyone know of a way to stop this kind of advertising besides turning off JavaScript in the browser?

You can block the individual JS files that load. Try blocking http://www.tek-tips.com/jsource.js

OT I know, but how do you....

[acebone]

Prevent pop-up windows from being not-resizable ?

I often use the 'print this page' link - because when reading news it's often a far better layout for reading. Some sites pops up the printer page in a non-resizable puny little window. I'd like to be able to override the non-resizability ?

Re:OT I know, but how do you....

[tr3y]

Create a user.js file inside your profile directory, add this:
// Make sure all pop-up windows are resizable:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.resiz able", true);

// Make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.minim izable", true);

Re:OT I know, but how do you....

[acebone]

Thnx a bundle - u just gotta love Firefox :)

BTW. I did it thru about:config instead.

Is there an overview over all these settings somewhere ?

Re:If you didn't like those changes, you'll hate t

[MP3Chuck]

I love Firesomething ... it really is fun for those who are moderately easy to amuse. Seeing Mozilla Megachinchilla or Mozilla Powerlemur always cracks me up... you can add your own prefixes and animals, too.

The waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possiple to have Firefox logging how much time I spend on Slashdot?

Re:Great features, huh?

[WIAKywbfatw]

I didn't brand anyone as fanatical. What I said was "I would have thought that that much would be obvious to even the most fanatical Firefox/Mozilla user".

So stop putting words into my mouth and learn to appreciate how English works.

Use Firefox "AllOnOnePage" plugin.

[Bazman]

except I haven't written it yet.

Baz

Re:MOD DOWN PARENT - RACIST TROLL

[Mant]

Uses a raial slur towards people of African-American descent. Very offensive.

That is what the group is called. It isn't the parent posters fault they called themselves that. They (the parent poster) aren't trolling, just warning users.

Try this Wikipedia link explaining it.

Extensions in the Default Installation

[Phoinix]

It would be much better if they can include at least a couple of the top rated/popular extensions as an option in the custom installation of Firefox's new RC/release?

As a start, I would like to suggest:
- "All-in-One Gestures" (very similar to the Opera interface)
- "Adblock"
- Target Alert (mentioned above).

The included extensions should customizable during setup.

Later, it would be nice if the installer could offer a (dynamically retrieved) list of available extensions.

Please also post your comments in the Mozillazine forum:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.ph p?f=8

Target Alert - yuk!

[troon]

File extensions are so 1990s. My site doesn't use them, so TA would be useless there unless it does a HEAD request for every link and looks at the returned media type.

Re:Target Alert - yuk!

[angrykeyboarder]

That's nice. But most sites aren't yours.....

Macromedia goes onto the NEVER AGAIN list

[obtuse]

Uninstalling user-installed software? That's unforgivable. Too bad. I used to think Flash was annoying. I guess it's not just flash that sucks, but all of Macromedia.

Here's a rule of thumb: How much can you afford to annoy your customers? That's exactly how much flash you want to inflict on visitors to your site.

What proportion of people sit through a flash movie, versus the number who click "skip intro?" I've asked that question a lot, and never gotten an answer. Web developers aren't tracking it. They aren't about to point out that an expensive feature only drives customers away. Nobody is actually looking at those statistics. These irritating time wasters are just put up without any concern for whether they are an asset or a liability.

Only a few people are so dumb that they are impressed with an online movie that they didn't choose to watch. "Ooh! Looky! Stuff on the screen is MOVING!" Maybe those people are the ideal targets for marketing.

Re:adblock I have a question ....

[Ayrehtek]

There is also the tried-and-true trick of null-routing the advertisers' domain name(s) to your local host. Just add the following to your hosts file:
127.0.0.1 server.that.you.are.blocking.com

BugMeNot

[Takkuri]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned BugMeNot yet. It connects to a database of usernames and passwords, allowing you to log in as the public BugMeNot account.

This is especially useful for a one-time posting on a site, or to read members-only newspapers and things like IGN Insider.

Re:BugMeNot

[Pfhreakaz0id]

bugMeNot is the proverbial shizznit. Anyone I've shown this to has been impressed.

Re:BugMeNot

[evilviper]

I think it would be better not to mention it...

Does it hurt members-only sites if people log-in with common usernames? No.

Does it hurt members-only sites if people see the log-in page and leave? YES!

This is a case where a little extra convience in the beginning leads to a BIG inconvience later.

Re:BugMeNot

[uncoolcentral]

My pal used the bugmenot extension, and it automatically posted his web email login and password to the bugmenot site. He only found out about it when alerted by a thorough friend. I'm sure there're some settings with which to screw around, but it's unfortunate that some don't bother. Great extension - if you're careful.

mozilla suite

[zogger]

--the browser component, has the animated images turn on or off or adjust times directly in easy for joe user to find preferences where it should be. I don't know why it isn't in firefox, have to ask them boys about that. I want a browser and email and editor, so I run the suite, and will continue to do so as long as mozilla keeps offering it. I always preferred the full netscape communicator over the stand alone navigator anyway... The chat client in Mozilla, ehh, tried it, I still prefer x-chat though, although I'll retry it with every new release, maybe it will get better.

Consider going further

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

There have been too many buffer overflows and exploits in the Flash player for my professional comfort. Policy on my own network is to uninstall Flash from Windows machines. If something comes along like the howstuffworks.com animation of the Prius transmission that justifies running Flash, then it has to be good enough to justify installing Flash.

>it uninstalled Flashblock for me
My network policy may get stricter because of this news.

extensions and upgrades

[harlows_monkeys]

One thing to be careful with...Firefox doesn't handle upgrades well when you have extensions. For example, if you had the Flash blocker (which makes it so you have to explicitly click to play Flash) installed in 0.8x, and upgraded to 0.9x, and let it import your settings, it also imports whatever it is that tells it that Flash is handled by that extension. But you no longer have that extension, so you simply cannot see Flash.

And since you don't have that externsion...you can't conveniently uninstall it to restore Flash, and since that externsion wasn't available for 0.9x you could not reinstall it (it may have since become available). What you had to do was poke around in Firefox's files and figure out what to delete to remove the extension. Yuck!

So, before doing a major upgrade, uninstall all extensions.

Re:extensions and upgrades

[typhoonius]

it also imports whatever it is that tells it that Flash is handled by that extension

That'd be userChrome.css, in the chrome directory of your profile directory. Just remove it.

The Weatherfox extension is pretty neat. It shows you your local weather in your status bar. I showed it to my sister so she wouldn't have to use crappy programs like WeatherBug.

Re:extensions and upgrades

[angrykeyboarder]

What makes weatherbug "crappy"? I like it. I checked out the Weatherfox extension. It's nice, but you get no where near the detail you get from Weatherbug.

Re:extensions and upgrades

[Jon_Aquino]

That's why I skimp on extensions and go for *bookmarklets*. Here are my bookmarks and bookmarklets: http://www.geocities.com/jonathan_aquino/bookmarks .html. Firefox has a load-bookmark-as-sidebar feature that is perfect for this narrow page. (Some of the cooler bookmarklets here are text-to-speech on the selected text, and highlighting all occurrences of a regular expression).

Re:Flashblock-ahem

[linuxislandsucks]

ahem why not just not install the player browser plugin?

or is that somehow too easy?

Re:MOD DOWN PARENT - RACIST TROLL

[Mant]

Getting way off topic here but...

You never, ever use a racial slur, even just to repeat the words of others.

You may never, but the rest of the world is generally aware of something called "context". If the poster was using it as an insult, it would be bad. They weren't though.

Tell me, do you get offended when one black person calls another "nigger" not as an insult? Or even themselves? Or if someone repeated such a conversation to you? It is quite common for minority groups to take insulting terms and reclaim them.

The poster could have used asterisks or put N-word, but it was horrible to use the word itself!

Surely it is the concept of slavery and discrimination that is horrible, not the word in a context of a non-insult? If someone wrote "n****r", from context your brain is just going to subsitiute "nigger" anyway. Asteriks and euphamisms are pointless, either you completely obscure what you are trying to say, so why say it, or everyone know what you are saying, so why hide it?

If you are really that easily offended (and not just trolling as I suspect) then I suggest you avoid Slashdot, and webforums in general, and definately stay clear of usenet.

Better version of miniT

[superyooser]

I like miniT, which lets you rearrange the tabs. There's an improved version of the original.

miniT (drag+indicator) is a modification of Dorando's miniT (drag) which adds an indicator to where the tab will be inserted when you drop it. Installing it will replace the original miniT (drag).

Extension manager still has problems

[jeti]

The new extension manager was rushed out with Firefox 0.9, and had a number of major bugs. While most of those have been fixed, some problems seem to persist.

This is really frustrating. I am the developer of a Firefox extension. Problems with installing and uninstalling get blamed on it. However, extensions for Firefox 0.9+ no longer contain any installer or uinstaller code.

Are you sure about that?

[bogie]

Flashblock has received a ton of complaints about it not working or Flash sites stopping working etc. Many people seem to think its a buggy extension. Plus considering 90%+ of users use IE I'm surprised they would go to that length for a minority used browser and an even more minority used extension.

Anyway if what you said is true that's aweful and probably illegal to boot. I'd verify what you think is happening is really happening or at least get someone else to verify it. Then file complaints with Macromedia and then spread the word to the big tech sites. Start with the Mozillazine forums first though and make sure that you can get others to reproduce this.

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Artichoke]

The sequence of events was:

1) Flashblock was installed and working
2) I installed Flash Player from the Macromedia site
3) Flashblock no longer functioned or showed up in Firefox's Extensions window
4) I tried re-installing Flashblock. The installation process appeared to ruyn okay, but resulted in the same situation as (3).
5) I downloaded the XPI file, modded it to install under a <i>nom de guerre</i>
6) It installed and functions okay

If anyone can try replicating this I'd be grateful. Any ideas on uninstalling Flash Player 7?

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Pausanias]

I've been using Flashblock on Mozilla since it first came out a few years ago. I have never had any problems with it. The most important thing to remember about flashblock is that it doesn't block flash---it was originally named "Flash Click to View," and that's just what it does. For example, I like to view the New York Times's multimedia specials, which are done in flash. I can block most garbage flash content with Flashblock but still view the NYT materials.

The only issue I've ever had with flashblock is that under some systems (Mozilla 1.7 Mac user here), it doesn't want to install under the user's profile. It will only work when installed while running Mozilla as root. No big deal---just do a sudo open -a /Application/Mozilla.app, install Flashblock, and then quit. It will then work for most users running as themselves.

I love Flashblock. And yes, Macromedia is evil for disallowing selective viewing of Flash content. And even more evil for uninstalling Flashblock, if that's true. May they join their buddies at MS in a very, very hot place.

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Artichoke]

> And even more evil for uninstalling Flashblock, if that's true. I am ashamed to discover that it is not true. Abject apologies to Macromedia.

I've failed to entirely recreate my previous findings. My best guess is that Flashblock lets some through its net and I mistook this for Flash Player circumventing Flashblock. Yes, Flash Click To View is a better name, if more unwieldy.

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Artichoke]

> And even more evil for uninstalling Flashblock, if that's true.

I am ashamed to discover that it is not true. Abject apologies to Macromedia.

I've failed to entirely recreate my previous findings. My best guess is that Flashblock lets some through its net and I mistook this for Flash Player circumventing Flashblock.

Yes, Flash Click To View is a better name, if more unwieldy.

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of those posts that few people will see because it'll never get modded up and the story is already low on the front page, but anyway...

My experience with this extension was that the first version was decent, but couldn't block all flash (I've heard that this is due to a bug in Firefox itself) and lacked some features that would have been nice (especially white-listing). The second version blocked more things (some kind of work-around, I guess), and had a nicer looking replacement button, but overall it was a big step down. It would display the flash animation briefly before replacing it, so I guess it didn't block downloading like the first one did. But the biggest problem was that it made it impossible to view a flash animation locally. If I had a .swf file that I had downloaded, and I opened it in the browser, it would be replaced with the Flashblock button, and clicking it didn't do any good.

I stopped using Flashblock at this point and went to Adblock instead. It's better in some ways, worse in others, but they are considering adding Flashblock-like functionality down the road, and I expect they'll do it right.

Re:adblock I have a question ....

[PReDiToR]

Does anyone know of a way to stop this kind of advertising besides turning off JavaScript in the browser?

Try emailing them and telling them. Then stop visiting their site. Websites depend on traffic and ads like that and the ones that happen during a page transition are the kind of thing that make my blood boil.

Page Down Problems?

[NetJunkie]

I use the PageUp/PageDown keys a lot on my notebook...but it seems the cursor always gets hung up in a frame or on a graphic.

Any way to fix that?

Flash as DOS

[bill_mcgonigle]

The Flash plug-in on Mac is such that under Mozilla it causes high CPU usage. A webpage with several Flash ads on a G3-class Mac will peg the CPU at 100% effectively DOS-ing your browser. You lose any browser context you have, hence dataloss.

So, flashblock is mandatory on these computers.

Some more good ones

[Fredge]

Here's some more extensions I use that I haven't seen mentioned.

Dictionary Search: Lets you set up various online encyclopedias and dictionaries (e.g. Wikipedia, M-W.com) so you can highlight any word in a website, right click and get a definition for it.

Allow Right-Click: Allows you to right click on sites/objects that have that option disabled.

IEView: Adds the option to open the page in IE to the right-click context menu for those few sites who won't come out of the stone ages and believe MS is the end-all, be-all of browsers.

Basics: Adds a button to the tab bar to open new tabs. This was available in Mozilla and I missed it when I first moved to Firefox.

Unclose Tab: Sometimes I'll close the wrong tab by mistake. This extension allows you to right click the tab bar and re-open a tab you just closed.

Re:Flashblock-ahem

[Artichoke]

Sometimes Flash is either useful or necessary. Mostly it's neither.

*cough* ShowOldExtensions *cough*

[Azureflare]

You will love this extension then:

Show Old Extensions 0.1.6

Money back?

[Etone]

>> it has been something thats bugged me from day one.
>So ask for your money back.

Yeah, and since IE came to me free of charge too, I guess I can't complain about that either, huh?

It's this kind of "the-software-was-free-so-love-it-or-else" attitude that impedes FOSS progress. Making something free doesn't make it bulletproof or impervious to critique.

-E-

Re:Money back?

[tonyr60]

"Yeah, and since IE came to me free of charge too"

IE cannot come to anyone free of chage now. It sort of used to when it was available for Solaris and a few people could get Solaris for nix. But now you cannot legitimately be using IE without having paid money to Microsoft.

Prepositions can end sentences too

[uptownguy]

Thanks for the tip on the infinitive. I hadn't had my morning coffee yet and it showed. You are correct. The "to" that went with "to do" was part of an infinitive. If I had been sharper, I would have included infinitives in my post to the AC. As for ending sentences with a preposition: there is nothing in English that prevents sentences from ending in a preposition. I would invite you to google at your leisure. You will discover that your high school english teacher was wrong and/or a snob. I am too lazy to do more than include these two links which I now point you to:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/words/prepositions. html

http://www.grammartips.homestead.com/prepositions2 .html

Target Altert Extension

[cuban321]

This target alert extension looks really cool. Too bad I just installed it in Linux, restarted and see nothing.

I gave up on extensions a long time ago in
Linux, I don't know if they work in Windows or what but 90% do not work right in Linux. Right now the only one I use that works is the bugmenot extension.

Re:Target Altert Extension

[cuban321]

In fact, now it won't let me uninstall! Not only does it not work, but it won't remove from my extensions list!

Re:Target Altert Extension

[angrykeyboarder]

I'm running Windows 2000 and 90% of the extensions I've tried, work (like they are supposed to).

A good idea - But

[rudy_wayne]

Extensions are a great idea - in theory. However, in reality there is a serious problem.

The Mozilla/Firefox developers keep changing basic structures in the program and as a result, each new release tends to break many themes/extensions. This problem is further compounded when the creator of an extension doesn't constantly release new versions of their extension (because they have a life, or just lost interest or whatever).

As a long time Mozilla user this is becoming quite annoying.

Who mourns for Flash?

[Quinn_Inuit]

I was one of those people that installed Firefox over a version with Adblock and Flash Click to View installed. Now, my Firefox can't see Flash files and I have to fire up Mozilla 1.31 when I want to play Defend Your Castle or something.

At first, I was kind of annoyed about this, but then I began to realize how many ads aren't showing up. There are all kinds of stupid flash things out there, and I don't have to see them anymore. Now, I just tell people that I broke my Flash on purpose.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to fire up Moz. 1.31 and go fling some stick figures so hard that they go splat behind my castle.

Re:Who mourns for Flash?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I had the same problem when moving from Mozilla 1.6 w/ 'Flash Click to View' installed to Firefox. Try deleting (or renaming) the UserContent.css file in the ~/.mozilla/default/$RANDOM.slt/chrome directory.

Why don't most of these work on Mozilla?

[mbourgon]

For work I use Firefox. But on my home machine I use Mozilla, since I actually like having browsing and mail handy. But several of these that I tried to install said "no install script found". What gives?

Re:Why don't most of these work on Mozilla?

[Hast]

AFAIK Firefox uses the new plug-in engine and will replace Mozilla in the future. Because of this many extention makers do only a Firefox version since that is what "power users" have anyways.

I'm not sure in what version the Mozilla browser will be completely replaced with Firefox.

I use Opera you insensitove clod

[Shinglor]

If you haven't made the switch to Mozilla Firefox it may be because you aren't aware of the great benefits Firefox has over IE

Or because you use Opera, Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror, Camino or OmniWeb. IE and Firefox are not the only two browsers out there.

Firefox switch.

[bob beta]

What I haven't done is make the switch to Firefox from Mozilla. Because I like the ability to do things like cut/paste/save formatted web content, and casually compose web pages.

Why did they remove the Composer component of Mozilla in Firefox? Why is Firefox being heralded, when it's just another consumer-grade browser engineered to discourage content creation.

Here's to the full Mozilla suite, forever.

Re:Firefox switch.

[Pausanias]

I agree entirely... I've been running Mozilla since 0.9? and I'll never switch. I use all parts of it frequently, except chatzilla. Long live the (monstrously) big gecko!

Re:Firefox switch.

[zarpa11]

yeah, I like the suite better than firefox

Re:Firefox switch.

[angrykeyboarder]

Eventually you'll be left in the dust from a technology standpoint. Mozilla plans to stop developing the suite and focus on individual components. They will maintain it, but not develop it

Re:Firefox switch.

[angrykeyboarder]

Why did they remove composer from Firefox? They didn't. It was never there to begin with.

Thew whole point of Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird and (standalone) Composer is that less bulk is better.

Personally I've never liked having to load an email program, and html editor when all I wanted to do was look at a web site. I never liked that about Netscape years ago and I don't like it about Netscape (and Mozilla) now.

I was thrilled when Firefox came out. Played with all the major players on Windows recently (Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Opera and IE) and the bottom line is, Firefox boasts the best feature/bloat balance of the bunch.

And the Mozilla swuite will be around forever, it just won't be developed (just maintained).

Standards? What standards?

[isomeme]

And how precisely does Firefox know that a given link leads to a PDF file (or doesn't lead to one, for that matter)? Content type is determined by examining the response header, not the URL. Failing to obey this rule is the cause of endless browser woes.

It may be the case that guessing based on extension gives the right answer often enough to make this extension useful, but users should beware of trusting it completely.

(Note that the mailto: check *is* entirely safe, since that's a protocol check on the URL itself.)

Too bad...

[Crouching Turbo]

... almost every extension I've tried had produced unstable behavior from Mozilla. Now I stick to the default, although admittedly I miss the extension behavior.

A database which prevents the site from working?

[Gnavpot]

Good thing the database has a problem so we can visit a working site.

RETRACTION

[Artichoke]

I've investigated this further and can't reproduce my results.

My best guess is that Flashblock is not hooking all the possible ways of triggering a Flash object, and I mistook this for untoward behaviour by the latest Flash Player.

Abject apologies to Macromedia.

Re:RETRACTION

[base3]

Noted--thanks for being honest enough to post the later results. Now I can put away my pitchforks and torches, too :).

Re:RETRACTION

[Al Dimond]

Well that's good.

One would hope that any kind of plugin installer that's built into Firefox wouldn't allow that plugin to kill extensions. Now if it's an OS native installer, that's another story.

That's cool

[Platinum Dragon]

I haven't switched [from Konqueror], and will not switch anytime soon

That's perfectly KO--the main thing is, you haven't gone back to Windows and IE.

I think all of these intra-OSS browser wars, while perhaps useful for creating a bit of competition, ultimately can do greater harm to browser development. Instead of poaching users from other non-IE browsers, one purpose of these OSS browsers should be to get enough people off IE that Microsoft no longer has a browser monopoly. Gecko-based browsers are good. KHTML-based browsers are good. I personally use the latest version of Galeon; many others here use Firefox on Windows. Ultimately, the pages we look at should all look close to the same, and not require the use of proprietary, OS-specific extensions or allowances for bad coding practices, like IE often does.

If the new browsers can become widespread enough that the IE monopoly is cracked, webpage writers will have to write standards-compliant pages that don't require MS-only functionality, lest they lock out, say, 20% of their potential market. Once that happens, there will be fewer IE-only coders going into corporate settings to design intranets, fewer people growing up on writing VB apps for their own uses before going into the corporate world, presenting an even greater threat to the other MS monopoly--the desktop.

I use Galeon, you use Konq--neither of us use IE, and that's a good thing.

I once saw a plugin to solve this somewhat

[Gnavpot]

I often find myself using keyboard for everything else than clicking "next page" when I read a long article split across multiple pages. Having to use the mouse for navigation to next page is really an annoyance.

Around version 0.5, I saw a plugin to solve this somewhat. I have been searching for it ever since without any luck.

This plugin was able to recognize typical variations of links leading to "next page", and then you could go to that page with a keyboard shortcut.

Anyone who knows what happened to that plugin?

Re:I once saw a plugin to solve this somewhat

[juhaz]

It's not quite as handy as what you're describing, but extensions that have (mostly) been designed for pr0n also work somewhat for that with the most common format that has numbered pages in url.

For example magpie lets you specify a part of url (numeric) that changes and go to next/previous with ctrl+shift+x/z

Re:Why drag an Indian Doctor in to this??

[LiquidCoooled]

I wasn't actually thinking about the job side of it.

It was an extreme example of "mission critical" - We don't have the infrastructure, skills or technology to deal with local surgery by IP, let alone internationally.

There are a remarkable amount of jobs where offsite working is a tremendous benefit, there are also jobs which work better with local knowledge, and I do blame the management for moving the wrong ones.

On that subject, how would management react if the outsourcing happened to them? :)

What about search engines?

[carlmenezes]

Customizable search plugins are another really great feature. How come nobody has mentioned them?

If you're a power user and you want a bunch of extensions that put you in immediate browser heaven try these :

1) Adblock (block ads) from update.mozilla.org
2) Tabbrowser Extensions (supercharged tabbed browsing) from extensionroom.mozdev.org
3) Mousegestures (mouse & rocker gestures) from update.mozilla.org
4) WebDeveloper (a must for anyone curious about a web page's construction) from update.mozilla.org
5) Bug Me Not (no need to register with those pesky sites like NY Times - requires Java tho)
6) Foxytunes (control Winamp/XMMS/Noatun/Windows Media Player/RealPlayer or any other Linux/Win media player from Firefox) from update.mozilla.org
7) PasteAndGo (no more pasting a URL and then hitting "Go" or hitting Enter) from update.mozilla.org

Re:What about search engines?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want to install Java to have a convenient link to Bugmenot, there's always the bookmarklet, to be found in the Bugmenot FAQ. I haven't used the extension, but the bookmarklet more than suffices for my needs.

How about an easy way to save your configuration?

[Fiz Ocelot]

I like how I have everything set up in Firefox. All of my favorite extensions, rss feeds, booksmarks, etc. Is there an easy way to back this all up? I'd also like to configure a single install package that install all of the extensions I want. Possibly by saving the extension files in subfolders?

Re:Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[OneFix]

Try the filters listed here. They block most ads for most people and very little else. The only one I've found a problem with is IMP...it has a "redirect.php" script that it runs on login which triggers one of the filters. I think there should be an adblock exclution list. It's actually interesting how popular adblock has remained even though there hasn't been a major update since at least Firefox 0.7...

I would think someone would have designed a new extention with more bells and whistles.

My favorite

[Joe Tie.]

And one I never see mentioned, spellbound. It allows one to right click on a webpages text entry box, and do a spellcheck on what has been typed.

Re:My favorite

[angrykeyboarder]

AMEN! That has got to be my #1, most used extension. Especially since Usenet seems to be on it's last legs these days...

I will use it regularily when..

[HumanTorch]

They fix the memory usage problem in Windows. You know, when Firefox hasn't been in focus for a while, its virtual memory is really large compared to the mem usage (in Taskbar) and when you switch to it it sits there for a few dozen seconds slooooowly increasing its mem usage. I KNOW Windows is capable of allocating a GB of memory in a few seconds, so what the heck is the problem?

Re:I will use it regularily when..

[t_allardyce]

Windows requires 512MB of ram at entry level for the average desktop, atleast 1GB is best if you want to open more then a couple of of windows at once. Now that memory is cheap Windows finally runs decently for every-day use. At work i sometimes use an old win95 machine with about 32MB of ram (which was a shit load back then) - loading IE is painful on that :(

Re:I will use it regularily when..

[Rassendyll]

I'll add my bit here. Firefox is great on my Linux box with 768MB of RAM, but when running it on my old decrepit win2000 laptop, I find the memory usage renders it useless. The laptop only has 64MB of RAM and Firefox uses ~33MB even when I only have one simple text based page loaded. Mozilla 1.7.2 runs much faster on the same machine as it's memory usage runs from ~5MB to ~16MB depending on how many tabs I have open and how complicated the pages are. I haven't had time to experiment to try to find the cause. Has anyone else noticed this?

Re:I will use it regularily when..

[HumanTorch]

I have 1GB of physical memory on my W2K box.. and there is always lots of free memory when this happens. It seems the rate at which Firefox reclaims memory is artificially low.

Having said that the overall memory use is quite good - certainly less than the same number of IE windows open.

Re:MOD DOWN PARENT - RACIST TROLL

[bani]

you do realize it was the original AC desperately trying to avoid getting his original post modded down.

he still failed miserably.

Bigups

[t_allardyce]

Extensions rock! but unfortunately allot of them arn't all in one place - you gotta look! :( what im missing from opera is tabs that depress when you click them (yeah i know its stupid but its an interface thing - you need to make it look like somethings happening the instant you click) and what i really loved about opera is that if it crashed it would save the session automatically! any ideas?

MOD PARENT DOWN

[danila]

Mode parent down, he is a free ipod spammer.

Mission Critical

[cbr2702]

One could be using Firefox on a corporate intranet for some web-based accounting software, could one not?

No

[Master of Transhuman]

"If you haven't made the switch to Mozilla Firefox it may be because you aren't aware of the great benefits Firefox has over IE."

It's because I'm not aware of any great benefits over Opera.

And yes, I use the ad-supported version.

We're Too Lazy to Mouse Over?

[Master of Transhuman]

"my favorite is the Target Alert extension which displays a small graphic next to links that are not web pages. For example a mailto: link will display a small envelope, a link to a PDF file will display a small Adobe icon, etc."

Although I will admit I get caught by the PDF links sometimes. It would be better if the site designer carefully noted in his text which links are to non-Web pages. That works in ANY browser.

Re:We're Too Lazy to Mouse Over?

[angrykeyboarder]

Yes, but the fact is they usually don't. Therefore, that extension rocks.

I like it

[wldkos]

Hell yeah, it works great. Long live firefox

I love Firefox

[Orion Blastar]

I just don't like the fact that every time I upgrade Firefox to a new version, I lose all my extensions and I have to download them all over again. Fbog!

Will it kill them to have a feature to download the latest version of extensions during an upgrade?

Re:I love Firefox

[angrykeyboarder]

I've only had that happen once. When I went from .09 to 0.9. But then they said they'd changed the extension manager so this would be necessary.

Otherwise prior to that and since then I've never lost (most of) my extensions. That generally only happens if you install the extension in the application instead of the (a) user profile.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

Moji and Toolbar Enhancements

[jarsyl]

Two more great extensions I haven't seen mentioned.

• Toolbar Enhancements adds many features to the toolbar. My favorite is that it allows me to put my navigation buttons in the tab bar, conserving valuable screen space.
• Moji is a Japanese->English lookup sidebar

OT: alternatives to weather.com

[varebel]

I used to think Weather.com was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Of course, it took Firefox's popup blocking along with the Adblock extension to make browsing it tolerable.

However, since discovering the following resources, I don't even bother with Weather.com anymore.

http://www.weather.gov/
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
http://weather.unisys.com/

These sites offer much more in-depth technical information and are not funded by ad revenue.

Re:OT: alternatives to weather.com

[Cheetahfeathers]

Let's compare for my town... weather.com: Fremont, CA will be 90F tommorow... cooling down a bit. weather.gov forwards me to the noaa.gov site... it says it'll be 102F tomorrow. Finally unisys... 68F. Wow!

Somewhere between weather.com and weather.gov the local thermometers agreed, for todays high.

Re:OT: alternatives to weather.com

[BandwidthHog]

While it's not free-as-in-beer, wunderground.com is more than worth the $5 a year I pay to a) dispense with the ads, and b) get full-on animations of radar images. It's the most in-depth, technical, detailed weather site I have ever seen. Granted, different regions have different levels of detail (here in NC I get forecast of the humidity in three hours blocks, while my mom in Waikiki gets just temp for the day I think), but for my needs, it's unbeatable. A friend is a flight instructor and says that while his more technical charts and forecasts are a bit better in theory, wunderground.com does the job for him, too.

Re:Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[DMUTPeregrine]

It uses regular expressions. Very little (If anything, you can always just add &&!site to the end of the math parts of the regexes to "whitelist") needs to be ubdated.

Re:Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[OneFix]

While writing a regex for most ppl here isn't a problem, it isn't easy for the majority of the general public. The point is that making AdBlock easier to use would make it an option for more mainstream users.

Re:adblock I have a question ....

[whereiswaldo]

Does anyone know of a way to stop this kind of advertising besides turning off JavaScript in the browser?

Yeah, don't visit the site and send the feedback department a nasty letter. Float-over ads like that should be considered a traffic killer and avoided.

Re:Standards? What standards?

[angrykeyboarder]

You're right thate. That extension sees a word ending in "doc" and if that word is hyperlinked it assumes it's a Word Document and adds the "W" logo.

So, it's not perfect, but then, you get what you pay for.

Re:Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[angrykeyboarder]

As usual, I'm in the minority. But of all the extensions you can get for Firefox, Adblock is not one that I bother with.

I really don't mind ads. As long as they are not popups (and Firefox's built-in popup blocker kills most of those) I'm cool.

Re:Standards? What standards?

[Hast]

As has been mentioned before the extention is only used to give the user a hint on what link it is. Mozilla/Firefox will naturally do a proper determination if the link is hit.

It would be possible to do a real MIME lookup but that would cause unnecessary load on the receiving WWW server. I guess HTTP1.1 allows multiple requests so coupled with only headers it wouldn't be that bad. Still since it's not exactly critical I don't see the point in doing that.

Mozilla as a window manager?

[Lord Bitman]

Has anybody seriously considered this? Does anyone know what would be involved in creating it? A window manager that's as easily extensible as Firefox would be great... does it exist and I just dont know what to google for? Seems like the kind of thing somebody would have at least tried and given up on by now. Only reference I've found is somebody else saying it would be neat, and doing nothing about it. (guys like me are everywhere, I guess :)

Google's PageRank extension

[zboubi]

That's my favorite extension for firefox : Google Pagerank extension.

Re:Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[ubiquitin]

You may not be in the minority - it could be me. With a 400mghz laptop as my primary machine, if a web page loads one of those damned .swf ads, then my whole web experience slows to a crawl. Being able to effectively kill off those ads makes web browsing enjoyable again.

More sweet extensions

[JPyObjC Dude]

Some more unmentioned nice extensions:

• Download Statusbar - No more download windows :]
• JavaScript Console Status - Non modal warning for JS errors :]
• Tab X - Closing `x` icon on tab like Safari/Camino/netbeans/eclipse/...

Re:Ssshhhhhhh. (Have you tried AdBlock?)

[angrykeyboarder]

You say I may not be?

No problem in Mozilla 1.7

[billstewart]

I gave up on Firefox around 0.8 because it was crashing too often the same week Mozilla 1.7 came out. Moz's been pretty reliable, though of course Slashdot and a few other web sites often render incorrectly because somebody's playing games with vertical spacing, but a redraw usually fixes that.

Firefox vs. Mozilla 1.7 - Why Switch?

[billstewart]

I'm currently running Mozilla 1.7, because Firefox was too flaky around 0.8. Is there any reason I should switch back? (Of course it's worth switching from IE to Moz or FF whenever possible - I'm trying to ask the harder question here.)

Firefox was a bit faster, but not really that much, and it would occasionally crash, losing all my tabs and windows, which very seldom happens on Mozilla. It was nice to have extensions (most of the Firefox extensions don't work on Mozilla), but very few of them were that important compared to not crashing.

Re:Switch tabs ?

[julesh]

You were so close. Control+[1-9] goes to tab 1-9.

Then there's always Control+Tab/Shift Tab or Control+PageUp/Down to go to next/previous tabs.

Problem is that when you switch tabs with the keyboard, the focus stays on the old tab if it has a form in it. This is very annoying, because it means you cannot scroll the tab you've switched to without using the mouse.

I've reported it as a bug, but apparently this is "correct" behaviour, and the dev. team aren't going to fix it. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253228

My Favorite Extensions

[shantanuo]

• Session Saver: remembers all the open tabs and opens them all next time.
• Clone Window: When you use Ctrl + t for new tab you can copy the current URL
• Nuke Anything: Remove a paragraph before printing or saving.
• Nuke Image: Remove image before printing.
• UndoClosetab: Recover the closed tab
• QuickNote: Select the text from web, right click and select "Send to Quicknote" or use Ctrl F7 to activate quicknote
• deskCut: The 'Create Shortcut' context menu item like IE
• Deepest Sender: Post to Live Journal blog.
• StockTicker: Display the current stock price in the status bar!