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)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

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).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

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)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Judging from reader feedback on GigaOM, Yahoo’s outage has a lot of people thinking about making the switch to another email client. We’ve scoured the web for the best information on backing up your email or moving to another mail provider, but it’s important to remember no email provider is perfect. Whether it’s because you’re fed up or just a little spooked, it’s always a good idea to back up your data in more than one place.

• TrueSwitch is a third-party provider of email switching services. The company will copy your messages and contacts, forward your mail to your new address, and notify your contacts about the switch. TrueSwitch is free if you’re migrating to one of its sponsors, which include Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, and others.

• Yippie Move supports migration between colleges and universities. The service costs $15 per account, but it covers a wider number of clients than TrueSwitch, like .edu email addresses at colleges and universities.

• Google has an official “How To” on porting to Gmail from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and others.

• Microsoft jumped on the Yahoo outage news by offering free “Hotmail Plus” accounts to the first 1,000 Yahoo Mail users who make the switch to the “new Hotmail.”

• With Mozilla’s Thunderbird, you can locally back up all your Yahoo email messages (or any other POP-enabled email, like Gmail). Unfortunately, Yahoo requires users buy a $19.99/year premium account for the ability to export POP data.

• Tech how-to site Labnol.org has the most awesome and comprehensive post I’ve found about the ins and outs of migrating email.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

According to Beltzner, the reason for the postponement is that work on the browser is taking longer than anticipated as Mozilla tracks down “regressions and sources of instability.” This has led to a delay in releasing the next iteration of the beta, the “feature complete” Beta 7 (which is the first version that add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop against), so Mozilla has been forced to revise its release schedule.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Visit the Plugin Check site and it’ll check out all of the plugins installed on the computer — it now works in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera, and can also check IE 7 and 8 for the most popular ones. If any of them are out of date, it gives you a handy link so that you can grab the latest versions.

As Mozilla’s Jonathan Nightingale notes, outdated plugins pose a major security and stability risk, citing one study that notes how around 80 percent of web users have a vulnerable version of Flash installed. And Plugin Check will take no more than a few seconds of your time.

Are all of your plugins up to date?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Among them is support for importing contacts LinkedIn  and Plaxo, per-service data display (so you can see where the information about each contact has come from) and per-service refresh (if you update your Twitter contacts, for example, you can quickly update Contacts, too — auto-refresh is planned for a later release).

Additionally, a “person search” facility has been added to Contacts that can scour the web looking for publicly accessible information (such as email addresses, web site URLs, Flickr account, etc.) about your contacts. This feature is similar to Rapportive and MailBrowser, both useful Gmail plug-ins that I’ve written about previously, although with Contacts you have to press a “Search” button to initiate the search — it doesn’t happen automatically. As with Rapportive and MailBrowser, the effectiveness of this search is mixed — some contacts have plenty of publicly available information tied to their email addresses, some none at all. Here’s what Contacts found about me, for example:

Users with Contacts installed should have already been updated to the new version. If you haven’t tried it, it’s definitely worth downloading — if you spend most of your day working in various different web apps, having a universal contact manager available via your browser makes a lot of sense. It’s free, although you should note that as it’s still an experimental add-on there are no guarantees that it’s completely free of bugs.

Have you tried Contacts? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

As much as I like Firefox, I have to say that on my Mac it’s been relegated to second choice behind my new favorite: Google Chrome. Even though Firefox 3.6 is pretty quick, Chrome has blistering speed, and I love the fact that in Chrome a crash in one tab does not kill the entire browser. Chrome doesn’t yet have the massive extension ecosystem that makes Firefox so useful (and is the reason why I will probably never uninstall it), but it’s going to take a lot of improvement to the speed and stability of Firefox to get me to switch back and make it my primary browser again.

How about you? Do you still use Firefox, or have you switched to Chrome?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

As PC World notes, Firefox 3.6 will have a number of enhancements, including faster JavaScript handling, better Bookmark synchronization, page load enhancements, a better approach to restoring sessions, a way of checking for outdated plug-ins, and more. The Mozilla team has steadily been working on some of version 3.5′s stability issues, and there will be lots of bug fixes in version 3.6. Mozilla has also confirmed that a much overhauled Firefox version 4.0 will arrive next year.

The Google Chrome browser’s new Artist Themes are quite eye-popping. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that they could make good conversation starters when you’re working around other people. You can get a sense of how they work and look from this OStatic post. The theme seen atop this post was produced by fine artist and poster maven Yulia Brodskaya, while Wes Craven has supplied a spooky theme. To add a theme to Chrome, you just open Chrome and go to the Chrome Theme Gallery, pick one you like, then click “Apply theme.”

While it’s unlikely to become your primary browser, if you have a need for a very lightweight browser, Arora is out in a new version .10. It’s based on the open source WebKit engine, and you can use it on Windows, the Mac, and Linux. Download Squad notes that you can easily enable ad blocking in Arora with one click. I also think it’s lightweight and snappy enough to make sense as a portable browser to carry on a USB flash drive.

Which open-source browser do you use, and why?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Chrome 3.0. Google’s announcement post on Chrome 3.0 provides walkthroughs of several of the new features in the browser. There are improvements to the Omnibox, which is the combination search/address bar in Chrome. You can now get drop-down lists in the Omnibox that show not only URLs, but also bookmarks, search options and more. Themes are also now supported in Chrome, and there are also HTML5 enhancements, which could make working with video and audio much more flexible.

Probably the biggest news about Chrome of all, though, is that the JavaScript performance is much improved. Below are Google’s own benchmark charts showing JavaScript tests (bigger is better in the first chart, and smaller is better in the second one).

Internet Explorer 8. I rarely use Internet Explorer any more, and I feel that most of the meaningful innovation is going on in the open-source browsers, with Firefox and Chrome leading the way. However, AnandTech came out this week with a very interesting browser face-off, which focused entirely on which browser preserves battery life the best on portable computers. The surprise winner was IE 8. The tests involved constantly loading and unloading various browsers and tracking battery life. I would have thought Chrome or Opera would win in these kinds of tests, but no.

Firefox and SeaMonkey. Mozilla released its Jetpack project a few months ago, and this week it updated Jetpack to version 0.5. Jetpack is an API and framework designed to make building extensions for Firefox easy enough for non-developers. You can get the new Jetpack here, and create your own extensions. Meanwhile, Mozilla has also released a second beta of version 2.0 of its SeaMonkey project, which is a collection of Internet apps. At the core of the collection, there is a speedy browser based on the same engine that Firefox uses. You also get a simple HTML editor, IRC chat functions, and more.

Is IE8′s apparently low power consumption enough of a reason to use it?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities

When Aliza originally reviewed the software, it was free beta release software. Now that it’s reached version 1.0, it comes with a $39.95 price tag for registration. Users can still download a free trial, so you can take Postbox through its paces before deciding to make a purchase.

I tried Postbox back when it was still in beta, right around the time Aliza originally reviewed it, and there are some definite improvements in the 1.0 release.

Better Search

One of Postbox’s main selling points is its advanced search capabilities. In Aliza’s original review, she talked about how you can search for all emails within a certain time period, or search for attachments and links within emails. Postbox also now boasts a number of search operators usable without opening the advanced settings panel, including “from:name” and “subject:keyword” if you prefer doing things all from one window.

Search and email indexing is also much faster than it used to be. Even with a large archive of messages, many of which are heavy on images and links, it took almost no time at all to download and make available my entire MobileMe archive; much less time than Mail takes to perform the same task.

More Add-ons

Add-ons like Lightning for Postbox, which brings your calendar into your Postbox window via a new tab, are a big part of the program’s appeal. There are utilities for Google Calendar access, message import/export, to-do lists, backup services, Growl notifications, and managing multiple identities on a single account. More are being developed every day, so expect the list to continue to grow.

One of my favorite Postbox-compatible plugins is ThunderBrowse, which allows you to view web pages directly in the application, without having to switch over to your browser of choice: great for digging in and really trying to conquer your inbox during a marathon session.

Easier

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what usability changes occurred between earlier betas and this final release, but in general things seem redesigned with greater ease in mind. One great example is the ability to drag and drop email messages across accounts in the sidebar. It’s great for keeping your inboxes organized according to how you want to respond to messages, instead of according to how misinformed senders might try to reach you.

Postbox’s already impressive Conversations view for threaded viewing of replies also got easier, with on-the-fly notification of updates sent while you’re reviewing. That way, if someone sends an email continuing a conversation you’re currently reading, you need only click a button to view the latest response.

A Lot More Social

Maybe the biggest change since Aliza’s early experience with Postbox is the addition of multiple social network support. Postbox users can now sign in to their Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter accounts via the application’s web services menu.

Doing so will not only allow you to post new status updates to those services via Postbox, it will also enable profile photo matching in the links/additional info sidebar to the right of the message reading window. If, for example, you get a DM from someone, Postbox will automatically retrieve that person’s current Twitter profile pic and display it. Messages you receive directly from contacts you also have on Facebook or Twitter will likewise display their profile pic from those services, though I’m not sure which takes precedence in the case of double matches.

For Aliza, the problem with switching to Postbox was that she had become so used to Gmail that learning a different system seemed like re-inventing the wheel. For me, it was that the early betas were actually fairly buggy, and just didn’t feel like something that could be a full-time solution for what is a core tool in my web working arsenal. This final version seems much, much more capable, and will definitely see full-time service on my Windows 7 machine. Will it replace Mail.app? As Aliza pointed out, old habits die hard, so we’ll have to see if I can avoid a relapse.

Let us know your thoughts on Postbox in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

I recently moved to a new computer, which compelled me to revisit my Thunderbird add-ons. Here’s a list of my favorites. I’ve put them into a WebWorkerDaily Thunderbird Collection to make it easy for you to find them all.

AttachmentExtractor: Adds more power to Thunderbird’s attachment management feature. With AttachmentExtractor, you can save all of the attachments to an email to frequently-used folders. You can also save all, delete all and detach all files, rather than having to do it one-by-one.

Enhance attachment management with Attachment Extractor

Attachment Reminder: Most of us will have sent an email from where we have forgotten to include an attachment. Attachment Reminder looks for the presence or certain keywords (attachment, attach, etc.) in the text of your email. If the keyword is present but no file is attached when you go to send the email,  a window will pop up, asking if you need to attach a file.

Check and Send: Checks for keywords in the message body before sending, so can perform the same role as Attachment Reminder; which one you use is a matter of preference.

Contacts Sidebar: Adds a sidebar containing your contacts list for faster access.

Disable Drag and Drop: This genius feature stops you from accidentally moving one folder into another. I’ve had this happen to me before. If you need to move your folders around, disable the feature and then enable it again (you’ll need restart Thunderbird after disabling and enabling).

eMarks: This add-on enables you to bookmark important emails for later reading.

Lightning: Adds a calendar feature to Thunderbird. If you use Google Calendar, Lightning can sync with it, with a little help from Provider for Google Calendar.

Lightning adds a calendar to Thunderbird

LookOut: Have you ever received an email that has an attachment called “winmail.dat” or “body_part”? Sometimes Outlook sends an email and puts the contents in an attached file. LookOut opens up the contents so you can read it rather than go through the complicated process of trying to convert the encoded file into English.

Nostalgy: Improved productivity by creating keyboard shortcuts to instantly change folders, move messages into a specific folder, change between the To, CC and BCC fields, use folder name auto-completion, and more.

Quote Collapse: If you’re bothered by excessive quoting in emails or newsgroup posts, this add-on can help you by automatically collapsing them. You can expand them again by clicking on them.

Signature Switch: An icon appears on the toolbar instant switching between email signatures. You can also set up auto-switching by recipient.

I install new add-ons one at a time rather than a bunch in one sitting. This way I can test each add-on to ensure it works before adding another. Also, before downloading an add-on, remember to verify its compatibility with your version of Thunderbird.

What are your favorite Thunderbird add-ons?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

In addition to improved performance and standards compliance, Firefox 3.5 also features new privacy controls, location-aware browsing, and the ability to play video and audio content without using plugins. A quick video tour of the new version is available here.

Firefox 3.5 is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux from Mozilla.

Share your thoughts on Firefox 3.5 in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Quick overview for those new to Firefox: Add-ons are little free tools that make your application experience better and easier. Add-ons don’t stop at browsers, either. Email applications like Thunderbird have them, too. They’re very easy to install. Just go to Firefox add-ons, browse, click “Add to Firefox” and click “Install” in the popup window. Once installed, you’ll need to restart Firefox to complete the process.

Here’s my list of current favorites (note: if you like this list, be sure to check out the WebWorkerDaily Firefox Add-ons Collection):

Adblock Plus — No. More. Popup. Ads. Or auto-playing videos. You might also want to download a Filter Subscription. You can still create your own filters to block ads on specific sites.

Better Gmail 2. Two great feature additions for Gmail. Folders4Gmail lets you have labels in folder-like sub-folders. Attachment icons replace the useless paperclips with the icons of the app that the attachment uses. If it’s a Word document, it’ll show Word’s blue W icon. Better Gmail 2 has other good features, too.

Download Statusbar. Get rid of the download pop up box. Instead, downloads appear across the bottom of Firefox where they don’t intrude. When you’re ready to open one, just double-click the relevant filename in the status bar.

Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE). Any kind of backup tool for an application is worth it because it restores data with little effort. This one backs up your add-ons and rebuilds them.

Long URL Please. Twitter increased the use of URL-shortening services. But some of us like to know where we’re going before we click. This add-on automatically expands shortened URLs. Even if you can’t see the full URL, you can mouse over the link to see the full link tooltip-style.

Print/Print Preview. Adds a print icon to the tool bar with a down arrow giving you the choices of Print, Print Preview or Page Setup. I limit printing to stay green. This add-on helps because it ensures I print only what I need and nothing more.

Read it Later. I’ve always saved articles to read later by opening them in a tab and keeping it there until I read it. No, it didn’t lead to having a bunch of open tabs. Because I don’t like many tabs, it compels me to read them soon so I can get rid of them. Read it Later took over the job. The add-on puts a checkmark in your browser. Click the checkmark to add the page to Read it Later, click it again to remove.

Web Developer. I’m not a web designer, but this toolbar has helped me out many times. You can disable Java, Javascript and colors, manage cookies, change up styles with CSS, adjust form options and much more.

Word Count Plus. Anyone who writes web content where word counts matter needs this. Simple tool where you highlight the text, click the icon and see the word count. Now it just needs an added feature to count characters for Twittering outside the box.

Xmarks. A bookmarks synchronizer that works between computers and across networks. I first used it back when it was Foxmarks, but encountered issues. Those issues are now gone, and the add-on comes with more features. It can synchronize passwords, give you information about a web page and create separate profiles. You can have a profile for each computer so you can pick and choose which bookmarks to display at each location.

I’m sure I’m still missing some of your favorite add-ons, but I limit how many I install because Firefox does become a memory hog. So here’s your chance to fill in the blanks.

What are your favorite/most frequently used Firefox add-ons?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Mozilla’s post says only that the updates in Release Candidate 3 are in response to “user feedback.” The organization intends to move quickly toward a final release of Firefox Version 3.5. In all likelihood, the differences between this version and RC2 consist of bug and/or security fixes.

I’ve been steadily using both the betas and the Release Candidates of Firefox 3.5, and it’s both speedy and substantially more feature-rich. It’s stable, too. If you’re already running a Firefox 3.5 beta or Release Candidate version, you can obtain an update to RC3 by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu. Here are the official Release Notes for more information.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Mozilla Labs today released a preview version of the next major version of its Ubiquity extension for Firefox: Ubiquity 0.5, downloadable here. I’ve been steadily using the beta releases of it, and Mozilla has ambitious plans to make Ubiquity a standard part of Firefox. It’s a command-line tool, and while that may cause some to roll their eyes at the idea of typing commands in the age of the graphical user interface, it’s actually very useful. The new preview version has many major additions, including localization features.

If you download the Ubiquity Preview Release and restart Firefox, you can hit your Ctrl key and your Space key at any time to conjure the extension. You can hit your Esc key at any time to shut it. There are many built-in commands for Ubiquity, and it becomes very intuitive to figure out which types of commands will perform which types of functions. All you have to do is type the first few letters of a command to conjure up a set of command choices from which you can pick.

For example, in the screenshot above, I have begun to type in an “email” command, and I already have options available to me for sending an email and more. Ubiquity is very web-aware, especially in the new Preview Release, so for many commands, it will immediately know that you might want to check a Wikipedia entry for a given term, or check your primary e-mail application, or convert a web page to PDF, and more.

The new Preview Release is much more globally focused than any of the betas were. It features a new input parser that has been rewritten to support many languages other than English. I also noticed that it does a good job of guessing what I want based on my location. For example, below I am typing in “weather” and Ubiquity guesses that I want the weather for San Francisco, which is where I am. This raises my eyebrows a bit because of the implied privacy concerns, but it is nonetheless useful, and very fast.

As another example of a command in action, below I have started to type the word “calculate,” and before I’m done typing, Ubiquity gives me quick choices for calculating, or for checking a Google calendar:

One major addition to the new Preview Release of Ubiquity is an interactive tutorial to help you get started. You don’t even have to invoke the tutorial. It’s available as soon as Firefox starts, after you install the Ubiquity extension. It consists of pop-ups that provide you with sample commands to try, and explains the suggestions that pop up as results.

This Preview Release is intended mainly for developers who want to test it and suggest improvements. I noticed a little herky-jerky interface behavior here and there, but no major bugs. It’s quite useful, and it works with the new Firefox 3.5. Consider giving it a try, unless you find a command-line interface to be completely retrograde. Sooner or later, Ubiquity will likely be built right into Firefox. Hopefully sooner.

Do you use Ubiquity? What useful commands have you found? What’s the No. 1 reason you’d recommend Ubiquity to people who aren’t yet using it?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?