I visit http://dictionary.reference.com/ and http://thesaurus.reference.com/ several times a day, to the point that I modified Firefox’s behavior to allow me to simply type terms directly into the search bar.
However, this particular solution isn’t ideal for everyone, so I thought I’d report on a new solution Dictionary.com is offering: Firefox search plug-ins!
Like most of you, I spend bunches of time downloading large files from the Web, typically podcasts and PDF whitepapers. In spite of a blazing fast connection, the download can never complete fast enough, with the process made worse by not knowing exactly how much has been downloaded (at least, without opening Firefox’ Downloads window – Ctrl+J).
Now the download progress can be known at a glance with the Statusbar extension. In addition to providing a progress bar at the bottom of the Firefox window, you can right-click on the bar to open the download’s containing folder, rename the file, and even delete it.
Jason
I’ve not really been following Firefox 2 progress other than knowing it was nearing the official release date, which happened yesterday. Firefox seems to be a case where the product is so perfect that any changes to it seem unnecessary, but nonetheless this morning I couldn’t resist the urge and gave it a try.
Two minutes later I uninstalled it, because as it turns out most of my extensions have yet to be updated for the new version. Beyond not being able to use most of the developer extensions, my personal favorite extension, ForecastFox, remains incompatible. And Firefox just wouldn’t be the same without up-to-the-minute weather information at my fingertips.
However, a quick look at the Firefox 2 developer wiki indicates the necessary compatibility changes are minimal, and in fact could be as simple as changing the install manifest to reflect the extension’s maximum compatible version.
That said, I’ll await further news on progress made regarding updates to my extensions, and will make the upgrade at the appropriate time.
Jason
The article is brave because the free software community has a habit of thinking those who make criticisms about its philosophies are automatically enemies. The message seems clear: You’re either with us, or against us.
Firefox is easily one of my most used applications, and remains constantly open throughout the day. However, for this reason I find it clutters the taskbar unnecessarily. For instance, my indexing service and RSS Bandit aggregator run constantly, yet they do so almost invisibly in the system tray area. Why not do the same with Firefox when not using it?
Apparently other users feel the same, and two fine fellows (“Mook” and Brad Peterson, notably) took it upon themselves to write an extension that minimizes not only Firefox, but also Thunderbird and SeaMonkey to the system tray. I installed it a few hours ago, and it works like a charm.
I currently have 59 different passwords (you’ll learn how I know this in a moment), and that doesn’t include the financial accounts I’m too paranoid to save. It’s clearly the only presently viable solution for account protection, but let’s face it, this solution sucks.
Of course, it’s impossible to remember all of these passwords, and accordingly I make regular use of Firefox’s password caching feature. But did you ever forget a saved password, or want to remove one or all of them from Firefox? You can, using what I’d venture is a little known Firefox feature.
To view all of your saved logins, open Firefox and navigate to Tools -> Options and click on the Privacy tab. Then click on the Passwords tab, and finally click on the “View Saved Passwords” button. A list of all of your saved accounts will appear, but with the passwords not displayed for security reasons. You can click on the “Show Passwords” button to view the passwords. To remove an account you can highlight an account and click the “Remove” button, or remove all accounts by clicking the “Remove All” button.
Jason
In response to an earlier post in this series, fellow editor Keir Thomas commented:
“What would be useful is to be able to have two search boxes. One could be set to search one engine, the other to search a different one. I search Amazon pretty much all day long and usually have to go straight to Amazon home page to search.”
While adding another search box would require a fair amount of work, there’s an acceptable alternative that’s easy to configure. By default, Firefox will send any keywords you enter into the address bar to Google’s “Feeling Lucky” search feature, which simply redirects you to the first page found matching those keywords. However you can change this to whatever search destination you please. To do so, follow these steps:
The result is that the keyword is tacked onto the end of whatever URL you specify.
Jason
Yesterday I blogged about extending Firefox’s search bar width, which makes it much easier to view lengthy keyword strings. Today I’d like to pass along another search bar-related tip.
By default Firefox ships with six different search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Answers.com, the Creative Commons, and eBay. While Google is the default engine you can easily switch to the others by clicking on the “G” and choosing from the list that appears.
Call it a bad habit, but it’s typical for me to have at least 10 Firefox tabs open at any given time. Sometimes it’s many more, for instance I recall a time not too long ago when my girlfriend sat down in front of my laptop to check her email, and was aghast as she counted something like 36 tabs open in several sessions.
On the occasion I need to shut down the laptop, it would be highly annoying to lose my place within all of these tabs. The solution is Tab Mix Plus, a tab management extension granting you the ability to do things like rearrange tabs, duplicate them, and recover previous sessions.
If you like to wield manic control over your tabs, and recover previous sessions with the click of the mouse, check out Tab Mix Plus.
Jason
This isn’t open source related, so excuse the off-topic post, but I thought this well-worth passing along. This morning I happened across a link to Google Notebook, which is a tool for organizing notes as you travel the Web. Note management is made easy through a sweet Firefox extension which adds an icon to the status bar for easy access to your notebook, and an item to the context menu for quickly annotating a page.
This service seems to me particularly compelling because it’s basically a bookmark organizer with additional features. It’s nothing new of course, I’ve used del.icio.us for some time, however for some reason I like Google Notebook even more.
I’m presently working on a few new book projects, and it’s clear I’ll be making regular use of this in the coming months.
Seattle Times reporter Todd Bishop’s recent conversation with Firefox project co-founder Blake Ross demonstrates Ross possesses a level of maturity well beyond his 21 years. His comments on the future of Firefox, thoughts on Internet Explorer 7, and startup aspirations are fascinating, and well-worth the read.
This interview, coupled with my own experiences using the IE 7 beta over the past few months, has left me wondering what MSFT has really gained as a result of winning the browser wars of the 90’s. It seems to me the answer is really nothing at all, and in fact one could argue its decision to enter the browser market at all was a huge mistake.
Matt Wade: Matt is an Editor and technical reviewer of several different titles.
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