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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."
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
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We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind
Dude, 2003 called, they want their joke back.
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.
...has to be Web Developer.
A MUST for every webnerd.
It even lets you edit CSS live on the web.
adblock is one of the greatest extensions I must say. Adblock along with the following filter block 98% of ads..
/[\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/
[Adblock]
http://seanism.com/
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
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Firefox is the ultimate porn browser !
As extensions go, nothing beats adblock.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
'Apply new extension without Firefox restart'-Extension
1. Right-click on an image
2. Select 'Copy Image'
3. Paste into mspaint, Photoshop, etc.
This works fine in FireFox 0.9.3
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 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.
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.
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Arse
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.
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.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
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.
It's like deja vu all over again.
just a warning, if you look at it wash your eyes with gasoline.
..........FULL STOP.
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
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
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.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
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Arse
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.
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.