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Gui:Config makes tweaking Firefox advanced settings a snap

Simon Mackie — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:03:51 +0000

Firefox is a very customizable browser. As well as add-ons, it has a large number of advanced settings that you can tweak, some of which enable you to do pretty useful things like stopping Firefox from switching into “Work Offline” mode if your Internet connection drops. Firefox’s advanced preferences page is accessed by entering “about:config” into the location bar and hitting return. However, the problem with that page is that there’s no information about what each setting actually does, and the user interface isn’t easy to figure out for less technical folks, either. Gui:Config is an add-on that provides a simple interface for many of the most-tweaked about:config settings via a familiar options-style window. It makes it much easier to change the settings that can normally only be found in the about:config screen.

Once installed, you can access Gui:Config via Tools > Advanced Settings … The options are organized under two tabs: Accessibility and Browser. Under Accessibility, you have settings for Mouse Behavior, Awesomebar, Websites, Session Restore and Miscellaneous. Under Browser you get settings for Browser Cache, Websites, Extensions, Bookmarks and Security and Privacy. Each setting is adjusted via checkboxes and drop-down menus. Helpfully, hovering your mouse pointer over any of the options provides a short description of what it does in a pane at the bottom of the window.

The organization of Gui:Config’s options window may take a little while to get used to, and it doesn’t provide access to all of Firefox’s advanced settings, but it does make tweaking many commonly-used settings really easy. If you need to adjust any other settings, you can still get to the regular about:config page.

Gui:Config can be downloaded from the Firefox add-ons repository. It’s compatible with Firefox version 3.5 to 5.

(via Ghacks)

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Chrome breaks 20 percent global browser market share

Simon Mackie — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:59:59 +0000

Google’s Chrome browser is continuing to grow in popularity. According to StatCounter, a website analytics company, Chrome is now used by a fifth of Internet users worldwide, taking 20.7 percent of the global browser market in June, up from just 2.8 percent in June 2009. In the same two-year period, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer share has fallen from 59 to 44 percent, and Mozilla’s Firefox also dropped slightly, from 30 to 28 percent.

That’s an impressive result for Google’s WebKit-based browser, which was only released in December 2008. One of the reasons Chrome originally gained so much traction, apart from its novelty, was its clean design, blisteringly fast V8 JavaScript engine and support for newer web standards, which, when Chrome was released, meant it ran complex web applications, like Gmail and Google Docs, much faster than the crop of browsers that existed at the time. Its release forced the other browsers vendors to catch up, even Microsoft, sparking a new round of browser wars. This resulted in an across-the-board improvement of browsers that’s not only good news for users, it’s good for Google, too, as the company wants to make using its web apps feel as close to a desktop experience as possible.

Note: Browser market share statistics should always be viewed with a healthy slice of skepticism, as they can be skewed depending on where the data is collected from. StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the U.S.) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites, but it should be pointed out that Net Applications, for example, reports Chrome’s marketshare at 12.5 percent in May.

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How to back up your Firefox about:config settings

Simon Mackie — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:58:05 +0000

Firefox is a very customizable browser. As well as add-ons, it has a vast number of advanced settings you can adjust via a special “about:config” page, which enable you to do all kinds of useful things, such as stopping the browser from switching into “Work Offline” mode if your Internet connection drops. But what happens if you’ve spent ages tweaking those settings to customize your browser perfectly, only to have to re-install it due to a hard drive crash, or you want to install Firefox on another machine with the same settings? A backup would be very handy.

Firefox stores your about:config settings in a file called prefs.js, which is kept in your profile directory. So to back it up, all you need to do is find your prefs.js file (on my Mac, my profile directory is stored in /Users/simon/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles, while on Windows it’s in \Users\Simon\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\) and copy it to a safe location (Dropbox account, USB stick, etc.). Then if you ever need to reinstall Firefox, you can simply overwrite the prefs.js file in the profile directory with your backup. Restart Firefox and your settings will be restored.

If you want to backup both add-ons and preferences, there are add-ons that can help, such as the Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE), which can back up extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and more. You can also use Firefox’s built-in Sync tool or MozBackup (a third-party Windows app) to back up profile data, as I detailed in this post.

(Note: Be careful when fiddling with Firefox’s about:config settings. If you want to know what each setting actually does — and some of the descriptions are quite arcane — you may want to install the What’s That Preference add-on that I’ve written about previously).

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Quick Tip: How to Use QuickFox Notes With Google Docs

Simon Mackie — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 21:04:00 +0000

QuickFox Notes is a great little note-taking add-on for Firefox, packed with an array of features. Its notes can be synced between different machines, and it also works with Simplenote. But by using an extension, you can modify QuickFox Notes to save notes to Google Docs.

Installing an extension to QuickFox Notes is not quite as straightforward as installing a browser add-on. You’ll firstly need to download the extension script, which is found here (right-click, and save it as a .js file). To install the script, open QuickFox Notes and then click on Tools->Add-ons->Open add-ons folder, then move the .js file you downloaded into that folder. You’ll need to restart QuickFox Notes for the change to take effect.

Once restarted, you’ll find that you now have an extra button in your QuickFox Notes window for uploading the note to Google Docs, as shown in the screenshot above. Hitting that button will pop up a window asking for your username and password before saving the note to Google Docs. Note that notes are only saved to Google Docs — this extension does not provide a two-way sync.

(Via Addictive Tips)

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Google Apps to Drop Support for Older Browsers

Simon Mackie — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:22:54 +0000

In a blog post, Google has announced that it will soon discontinue support for older browsers in Google Apps. Beginning Aug. 1, Google Apps will only officially support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, on a rolling basis. So after Aug. 1, Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3 will no longer be supported. Certain features may stop working in those browsers (and in previous versions), and eventually, Google Apps may stop working entirely. Each time a new browser version is released, Google will begin supporting that update, and then stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As Google’s Venkat Panchapakesan noted in his post, Google Apps takes advantage of the newer technologies supported by more recent browsers, such as HTML5, to power some of its advanced features, like drag-and-drop file uploads. Maintaining support for older browsers that don’t include these newer technologies, or only have partial implementation, means not being able to implement certain features, or having to invest considerable engineering efforts to produce workarounds in order to implement them. As more vendors come to rely on the capabilities and power offered by HTML5 and related technologies to produce web apps that can match the power and functionality offered by desktop applications, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more web apps going down this route.

It’s probably not a decision Google took lightly, as this change will affect a significant number of Google Apps users. Taking a look at WebWorkerDaily’s stats, for example, shows that a small percentage of users do continue to use the older browser versions affected. However, as Google will simply stop testing new features and bug fixes in unsupported browsers, it’s unlikely that affected users will see any serious degradation in functionality for some time.

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What’s That Preference? Get the Lowdown on Firefox’s about:config Preferences

Simon Mackie — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:02:13 +0000

One of the great things about Firefox is that it’s a very customizable browser. As well as add-ons, it has a vast number of advanced settings that you can tweak, some of which enable you to do useful things like stopping Firefox from switching into “Work Offline” mode if your Internet connection drops.

Firefox’s advanced preferences page is accessed by entering “about:config” into the location bar and hitting return. If you look at that page, you’ll see a very long list of settings, mostly with hard-to-decipher names. Unfortunately there’s no built-in documentation to tell you what each setting actually does, and whether changing it might break your browser in some way. What’s That Preference? is a handy add-on that enables you to quickly look up any preference on the MozillaZine knowledge base.

Once installed, What’s That Preference? adds a new “MozillaZine Reference” option to your about:config context (right-click) menu, as shown in the screenshot above. Hitting that takes you to the setting’s entry on the MozillaZine knowledge base, complete with a description, its possible values, and any associated caveats:

Of course, the MozillaZine description may still prove fairly tricky to figure out (and in a small number of cases the documentation is non-existent), and the add-on doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t achieve with a manual search of the knowledge base yourself. But it does make the process considerably faster, which makes for much easier (and probably safer) browser tinkering.

What’s That Preference? works with Firefox 4 and later; you can download it here.

(Via ghacks)

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Trails, a Firefox Add-On to Help With Research

Simon Mackie — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:03:18 +0000

As part of my efforts to improve my productivity, I’ve been looking for tools that can help me during research. One such tool is The Cafe Society’s Trails, a useful Firefox add-on that can collect and edit text snippets and images from the web, and structure them into a clean booklet layout that you can then easily share with others.

Once installed, Trails stores the text and images that you clip onto pages that it calls “spreads.” These are viewable in a sidebar (via View->Sidebar->Trails or a keyboard shortcut). You can create as many spreads in your booklet as you like, and they can be can be set up as one-, two- or three-column pages.

Adding content to your booklet is done via some new Firefox context menu items: As you’re browsing, highlight some text or select an image and right-click to select to add it to your booklet. Before text is added to the spread, it pops up in a window giving you the opportunity to edit it. Content can be deleted and edited after insertion on the page, too. Trails automatically puts the URL a particular snippet or text or image came from below each piece of content on the page, as well as recording the time and date that it was clipped on.

Once your booklet is complete, it can be printed, exported in PDF format or published to the Trails Public Library online.

As a note-taking tool, Trails is nowhere as powerful and flexible as more full-featured, multi-user solutions like Evernote or OneNote. However, it does fit seamlessly into a Firefox-based workflow, and as the booklets that it creates are nicely-formatted and can be exported as a PDF, it makes for a very easy way to share well-presented research with colleagues or clients.

Trails can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-Ons repository.

(via ghacks)

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Faster Firefox Searches Using Drag & DropZones

Simon Mackie — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:00:27 +0000

If you tend to use a few different search engines, check out Drag & DropZones, a nifty Firefox add-on that makes searching for snippets of text in a variety of search engines a snap. It works by dividing the browser window up into a series of “dropzones;” one for each search engine that you use. Grab some text and start to drag it with your mouse; the dropzones will appear. Drop the text a zone and the appropriate search will be performed in a new tab.

Out of the box, Drag & DropZones is automatically set up with your current set of search engines, but you can customize it by repositioning the dropzones, changing the grid size and coloring the zones, as well as altering its behavior, like whether Drag & DropZones activates when dragging images and links.

Drag & DropZones can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox Add-Ons Gallery. It works with Firefox 2 and later (including Firefox 4).

(via Ghacks)

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Firefox Feeling Sluggish? Disable Your Add-Ons

Simon Mackie — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:00:32 +0000

Firefox 4 included an update to its JavaScript engine, which made for some serious performance gains. Now Mozilla is going after another cause of sluggishness: slow start-up times caused by add-ons. If your install of Firefox feels slow to start up, you may want to try disabling some add-ons. According to Mozilla, on average, each add-on a user has installed adds 10 percent to Firefox’s start-up time. But that’s only for the average extension; some add-ons have a much worse start-up time impact than others.

To encourage add-on developers to consider this performance hit and optimize their add-ons, Mozilla has started testing the 100 most popular Firefox add-ons and releasing a weekly-updated list of their impact on browser start-up time. Here is a “rogue’s gallery” of the 10 add-ons with the worst impact on start-up time:

The two worst-performing add-ons in the list, FoxLingo and Firebug, add a whopping 76 percent each to Firefox’s start-up time.

As well as publishing the slow add-ons list, Mozilla will also be adding warnings to the Add-On Gallery listing of any add-on that slows Firefox’s start-up time by 25 percent or more. The Mozilla effort to improve add-on performance is not just about “naming and shaming” poor performing add-ons, though, Mozilla is also providing assistance to developers to optimize add-ons by updating its performance best practices documentation, and by releasing tools to help developers test their products.

The availability of a wide range of useful extensions is one of the reasons I use Firefox; I compiled a list of my favorites here. But Mozilla’s testing data shows that it’s good idea to regularly review the add-ons you have installed and disable those you no longer or rarely use, particularly if they appear on the list of the worst offenders above. Disabling an add-on stops Firefox from loading it, so it will no longer affect start-up time, but keeps the add-on in your add-on manager list so it can be re-enabled when you need it. Firebug, for example, is a really useful debugging tool, but I only use it very occasionally, so from now on I’m going to keep it disabled.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Photo Monkey

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11 Must-Have Add-Ons for Firefox 4

Simon Mackie — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:00:30 +0000

One of the best things about Firefox is the huge number of useful add-ons that can be downloaded for it, enabling users to customize the browser to their needs. Some time ago, we put together an official WWD add-ons collection for Firefox, gathering together our favorite add-ons at the time. The speedy Firefox 4 was released this week and some of you may be giving it a try, so I thought I’d update the collection. I’ve removed those add-ons from the list that are now redundant or incompatible with Firefox 4, and added a couple of newer favorites:

Adblock Plus. Gets rid of annoying adverts and auto-playing videos. You can subscribe to filter subscriptions in dozens of languages which can automatically configure it for purposes ranging from removing online advertising to blocking all known malware domains.
Better Gmail 2. Gina Trapani’s extension adds a bunch of useful extra features to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, an unread message icon on your browser tab, file attachment icons and more.
Download Statusbar. View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar, without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.
Gmail Manager. A Gmail notifier for multiple accounts; it allows you to receive new mail notifications, along with the ability to view account details.
LastPass Password Manager. A free online password manager and form filler that makes your web browsing more secure.
Greasemonkey. Allows you to customize the way a web page displays or behaves, by using small bits of JavaScript. You can write your own scripts, or download one from the hundreds available at http://userscripts.org.
Read It Later. Save pages to read later with a click, then when you have time, access your reading list from any computer or phone, even offline.
Shareaholic. This add-on provides an easy way to share interesting links using Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and more.
After the Deadline. After the Deadline is an intelligent grammar, style and spell checker. It works with most web sites.
Web Developer. Even if you’re not a web developer, this extension offers a raft of useful features: manage cookies, change up styles with CSS, adjust form options and much more.
Awesome Screenshot. Diigo’s handy screenshot tool lets you capture the whole web page or any portion, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, blur sensitive info, and then share the output.

What are your favorite Firefox add-ons?

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