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Firefox Hacks
The first of several books on the topic of Firefox hacking (two more are due from other publishers in the coming months) Firefox Hacks sets the bar quite high. The author, Nigel McFarlane, has already written a number of other books and articles on similar topics and knows his subject well. He has also enlisted the help of a number of other cognoscenti to cover the more distant corners covered in the book.
A Web browser is a much more complex piece of software than you may realize on first examination, and Firefox -- with the core Gecko engine surrounded by a large wrapper written in XUL and JavaScript -- provides a fertile ground for any number of changes and enhancements. Firefox Hacks does a good job of mapping out the boundaries of this space.
Over the course of the now-traditional 100 hacks found in the same series' other members, this book covers hacking with, on, and to almost all aspects of Firefox and the 'net. The book is broken up into nine chapters, most worth reading by almost everyone -- even the first, "Firefox Basics," taught me a couple of tricks for getting the best out of a slow (and expensive) GPRS connection. The others are "Security," "Installation," "Web Surfing Enhancements," "Power Tools for Web Developers," "Power XML for Web Pages," "Hack the Chrome Ugly," "Hack the Chrome Cleanly," and "Work More Closely With Firefox." I have to say I felt the chapter on Power XML (with 17 of the 100 hacks) was far too general on Web technologies and a little out of place; easily half the hacks in that chapter could have been dropped without any real loss to a reader's understanding of Firefox. I would have preferred more on the browser itself. No insult intended to Seth Dillingham, who wrote four of the hacks I'd throw out -- they are well written and do show how best to deal with Web technologies inside Firefox. I just felt that the space would have been better devoted to more "core" topics.
The first four chapters will be useful to everyone, covering mainly the use of Firefox. From that point, the hacks become increasingly complex as they cover Web development, then modifying the interface, before covering such arcana as creating extensions and custom builds.
I am hard pressed to think of a corner of Firefox not at least touched, though it must be said that the later hacks only touch on the topics covered without really providing a lot of depth. If you get to the last two chapters in the book, performing and expanding on the hacks, you will probably need a great deal more information and assistance to branch out on your own. McFarlane, however, points out the possibilities and gets you started. I didn't feel this was a flaw, just that a line had been drawn, as it must unless the book was going to be three times the size and price.
The book is fairly well written. The quality of writing and editing fall into that middle ground of "fairly good" that one expects from the average O'Reilly book, though not the "excellent" they can sometimes hit. The structure and flow are excellent, making the book readable in large chunks -- enough sticks that when you are back in front of the computer using Firefox you can remember a few things. (Or, sometimes, I remembered that a hint existed and was able to easily find and use the information.)
For a closer look there is a decent page at O'Reilly with links to six example hacks, the table of contents (listing all 100 hacks) and the index.
To conclude, I'm not sure I could recommend this book to everyone; it spends a little too much time a fair way along the technology curve for those who aren't ready for some programming, though for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty and perform some hardcore hacking on their favourite browser, then this is an above-average volume. For someone who is happy as "just a user," this book may be too much: wait and see what else emerges into the Firefox book market -- including O'Reilly's other offering, the soon-to-be-released Don't Click on the Blue E, which they describe as giving "non-technical users a convenient roadmap for switching to a better web browser--Firefox."
Also watch soon for a review of Prentice Hall's Firefox & Thunderbird Garage. You can purchase Firefox Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This isn't funny - I have the same problem logging into my company intranet page. It requires a username and password. Under IE these stored passwords are sent immediately. With Firefox I have to click the confirmation each time. It's enough of a hassle that I redirected my Firefox home page away from the intranet.
Not that anything was really excluded. They seem to have had a little trouble coming up with 100 hacks. Some I see on the list are interesting, but not strictly about Firefox (CSS, Bugzilla). Some are pretty lame ("Identify and Use Toolbar Icons"). Some are not even hacks (a list of customized prebuilt versions).
Some hacks do look interesting -- integrating Firefox with other apps, making chromes and extensions, and (as I said) XML support. Maybe these are good enough to justify the price of the book. Though a book about these specific topics might be money better spent.
I own several O'Reilly books, many of them relating to Hacks - whether it be for Postfix, OS X, et cetera. It's funny (or perhaps just interesting, depending on your sense of humor) how the term "hack" has evolved over time. Am I a hacker if I utilize a book to balance a shaky table? Of course I'm being a bit facetious with that example!
I understand this might be (mistakenly) modded offtopic, but hopefully the powers that be acknowledge the relevance.
Sahil
He's not a hacker, he's a spammer. He's posting here to help his pagerank, and throwing it in useragent gets him linked on random public web stats pages. It's all about pagerank.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
By the way if you open a link like that and you have Session Saver extension you are out of luck :)
/chrome/sessionsaver.jar file is located, open the jar file, extract sessionsaver.js, modify the onLoad function in the Session Saver by commenting out the piece of code that runs loops for openning new tabs/windows. Then substitute the new sessionsaver.js into the jar file and restart FF. Now the loading portion of SS is disabled. You can uninstall session saver, or you can go into about:config and modify sessionsaver.windows.session1 value by replacing all bad links with whatever other sites (even invalid ones).
What you have to do then is kill FF, then go into the directory where
You can't handle the truth.
More seriously, I've changed my extensions link to point to http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/ . (You can change it via extensions.getMoreExtensionsURL in about:config.) It's far more complete and up-to-date than the official site.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Heh, i always make sure my user-agent contains lotsa quotes, brackets and gibberish - all to mess up the hosts badly written perl/sed/awk tracking scripts.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Try "http://somecompany.com" (without the "*") If it doesn't work, please let us know! ;-)
I have to wonder what random stuff they're getting out of people's clipboards .
every once in a while you'll get a password that looks like
R5tR3e7Ptr
many sites, will send you the password in case you forgot it.
now do you transcribe it? , or Cut & paste ?
-- Avishalom is usually vish
I had no luck getting Mozilla (also with an annoying dl manager) and Getright (which I love) to play nice together either. However, I let Getright monitor the clipboard. So when I want to download something in Moz, I rightclick the link and pick "Copy Link Location", and most of the time Getright will pick it up, and I can then download it with Getright without any extra steps.
Worst case, I might have to open GR's status window and paste the URL as a new download.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?