Tell The Newbie all about FireFox!

In My Humble Opinion
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I’ve finally made the leap from IE to Firefox, at least so long as it doesn’t become a hassle, and I’m hoping to get a little advice and some discussion of favorite extensions and settings you expert users can share with me.

During a search I saw a previous thread detailing favorite extensions and add-ons for FireFox, but the version has changed quite a lot since that 15 month-old thread died a quiet death. I haven’t seen a Firefox discussion in a while, so I figure we’re due.

If you’re wondering why I changed now, well there’s no specific reason, but part of it is that I’m starting to feel that IE (and the multiple windows I tend to use) tends to be something of a resource hog and tabbed browsing should lighten the load on my PC. I’m not a IE or Microsoft hater so I didn’t see a pressing need to dump it before now, and since I’m really comfortable with IE I’m hoping there’s not much of a learning curve. So far so good.

In my short amount of reading I’ve added one extension, the ForecastFox one. I must say it’s a nifty little tool free of the adware/spyware crap that the WeatherBug types carry.

One question I have is how strong is the intergration between Firefox and Outlook? Upon installing it happily imported all my IE settings and favorites which was handy. In the process it added a “Mail” tool for which I can find no setting options. It claims I have 191 new messages which isn’t the case according to Outlook (used to access Hotmail). Anyone using this aspect of FF?

One thing I miss already is the Spell Check option that was included in Google Toolbar. I understand that I can d/l Google Toolbar for Firefox, but considering that FF already has a preset Google Engine in it’s toolbar (and built in pop-up blocking) adding Google Toolbar just for the spell checker seems overly redundant.

So far I haven’t tracked down a FF extension which handles spell checking forms yet, but I’m confident a Doper will reccommend one. hint, hint

So, I’ll open the thread to anyone who wants to discuss their adoption of FF. Feel free to bitch or rave, either way. Share any learning curve issues if you care to as well. If seasoned users would like to pimp their favorite features or add ons please do. Hell, if you want to crucify Micro$oft go right ahead, but if you turn this into a pit thread before I’m done with it I’ll hunt you down and sodomize you with a outdated Microsoft Works Suite.

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OK, found a little peckadillo to bitch and/or ask about. In FF when you use the Shift+Link command it opens up a new FF browser, not a new tab. I don’t want to disable the ability to open up a new instance of the browser entirely, but I’m curious if there’s a alternative to the shift+link command to open a new tab within the current browser.

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ctrl-click or center-click opens a link in a new tab.

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  1. The Tab Mix Plus extensions adds a lot of customizability (is that a word?) to Firefox’s tab behavior. It lets you do neat things like re-open tabs when you accidentally close one; open all new windows in tabs instead; show progress bars and read/unread status for each tab; etc.

  2. QuickSearch is an awesome feature that lets you search directly from the address bar. It’s very similar to the search bar, but if you’re any good with the keyboard, QuickSearch is faster. For example, to Google for something, just click on the address bar (or push Alt-D) and type “goog miserable failure” without the quotes. Or to look up a word in the dictionary, type “dict umbrakinesiosis”. Or you could instantly look up driving directions by typing “drive lancaster rd & palm st, santa claus AK” or “drive 90210” instead of manually typing in www.mapquest.com and then clicking on every field to enter your source and destination information.

It’s faster than clicking/scrolling through the available search engines on the search bar, especially if you shorten the keywords to things like “g” and “d” instead of “goog” and “dict”.

This is also a good way of making your own website keywords. Instead of having a bookmark list that spans several dozen pages and never being able to find any of them again, you could give each bookmark a keyword and use that in the address bar to access the page. For example, the movies listing for your favorite theater could be “movies”; the Straight Dope Message Board could be “sdmb”; Hotmail could be “hm” and your bank could be “bank”. This works in conjunction with your existing favorites, so if you ever forget a keyword, just look for the bookmark in that long list.

I have a dozen or two of these that I use regularly. I’ll post them if you’re interested, or you can make your own using the instructions here.

  1. Grouped bookmarks are a blessing. If you have a bunch of sites that you regularly visit together (such as the various SDMB sub-forums), you can group them together and open them all at once in the future. To do so, first open them all up in your browser and then go to Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark and choose “Add all tabs into a folder” or whatever it’s called. In the future, you can go into that folder, choose “Open in Tabs” and have all the pages magically re-open in tabs.

  2. If you hate websites that spread things out into a lot of pages instead of one long one (forums are a great example of this), check out the antipagnation extension. It’ll let you load subsequent pages and tack them onto the bottom of your current page without refreshing or interrupting your current view. So, for example, you can load that entire 13-page Pit thread at once and read (or print!) it at your leisure.

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Essential for browing the SDMB properly

Popup ALT attributes

Yes, the vB people messed up by using IE default behaviours… so this is a workaround. You may have noticed that mouseover previews are only 10 or so characters long… this extension solves that.

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First create a new profile, actually 2 or 3.

You want one profile that will be the version of FF that you use all the time, with all your extensions and bookmarks.

Another one with all your extensions installed, just to try out new extensions and make sure there are no conflicts (nothing worse than losing everything and having to start from scratch because of a corrupted profile!).

Leave the default profile alone, if something does go wrong, e.g. your main profile won’t load, but the default profile will, you know somethings wrong with the profile and not FF itself.

You could also create some special use profiles, say a SDMB profile, with just the bookmarks, extensions and toolbar buttons you use when your on the boards.

If you don’t check the “Don’t ask at startup” box in the Profile Manager/Chose User Profile window, you’ll always have the option to chose which profile you start in, and you won’t have to go through the Start > Run Windows menu to get to the PM/CUP prompt.
CMC fnord!

BTW, Are you using version 1.5 or 1.5.1?
I’m working on a extensions post for ya!

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My favorite FF feature is the in-page search. When a page is done loading, just hit the “/” key, and start typing. FF automagically starts paging as you type. CTRL-G to cycle through all instances of the word (or words) that you’re searching for.

The Spellbound extension adds spell check capability to FF and form boxes, handy for those times when you don’t want to fire up your primary word processor.

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I’m having problems with cursor sometimes moving to the left when I type a character, so that inputted text comes out in a jumble. Anyone have this problem? Fixes?

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The only small complaint that I can think of is that I would like the address edit box to move most recently used addresses to the top.

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Cool!

I tried that but it said it wouldn’t work with my version. CMC, I’m using version 1.5.0.1. Not sure what the issue is with the Spellbound thing. I’m going to save a second “backup” profile, I had no idea these things could get corrupted and cause you to lose anything. Starts thinking about going back to IE.

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Here is how to install Spellbound on Firefox 1.5.0.1.

Stops when he/she realizes how bad of a security risk that is.

:wink:

Some extensions I can’t live without:
[ul]
[li]Adblock: It blocks ads. It does it well.[/li][li]The Adblock Filterset.G updater: It keeps Adblock updated with patterns you don’t have time to create by hand, thus making it more effective at blocking ads you haven’t ever seen before.[/li][li]Remove It Permanently: It blocks anything. It is very easy to use, and still very powerful.[/li][li]Forecastfox: Get a whole week’s weather forecast in your browser’s status bar.[/li][li]SessionSaver: It remembers what tabs you had open, where they were pointing, what each of their histories was, and where in the tab you had scrolled. It restores all of this each time you start your browser back up, even after a crash. I’ve kept the same session going for months.[/li][li]Tab Clicking Options and Tab Mix Plus: Two extensions that work well together to make tabbed browsing more pleasant than it already is.[/li][/ul]

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I decided to give Tab mix a try (so far I like the close tab button in each tab) and I got Spellbound installed finally. Thanks.

Still wondering what the deal is with that “new mail” issue.

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AFAIK, shift-click will always do this. Use ctrl-click. For further control, use:

Tools => Options Tabs => Force links that open new windows to open in: a new tab.

Also I find:

Open links from other applications in: a new tab in the most recent window

To be very handy.

Then uncheck “Select new tabs opened from links” to get them to open quietly in the background.

If you do any web design, the Web Developer Extension is absolutely jaw-dropping - one of those “how did I live without it” applications - the most impressive feature being editing any page’s CSS on the fly.

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Should read “Options => Tabs”.

I had a similar mail problem as you: it eventually transpired it had grabbed Outlook Express as the default mail, and the mystery mail was from an obscure account my dad’s ISP had set up on my computer - YMMV!

DownThemAll incorporating “Turbo DtA” is a very impressive downloader - it can grab all linked files on a page and seems to accelerate downloading somehow. My only complaint about this is that it doesn’t have a preference to set a default download directory - asks you once, then does that for evermore, unless I’m missing something.

Sage is a simple, handy RSS feed reader extension.

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Played with these yet?

  • Findbar Basics - Adds a statusbar button, clear button, optional toolbar button, and Ctrl-F toggle for the Find Toolbar.
  • Search Marker - Search Marker enhances the “Highlight all” function on Firefoxs findbar. It places tickmarks on the side of the page indicating where in the document the search term was found.

Didn’t mean to scare ya!
Since FF 1.5, I’ve only had one corrupted profile, and I know it was because of an extension conflict.
This extension, Bookmark Backup will backup any FF folder you want it to, and save it to a folder outside of FF. If your profile were to become corrupted, you can just drop an uncorrupted save in its place.
Make that extension testing profile instead!

I’ve been avoiding the update to 1.5.0.1 because I’d lose Spellbound.
You are a god, thanks!

OK, I know there’s a slight difference between SessionSaver and the session manager in Tab Mix Plus, but are the options in Tab Clicking Options different than those in Tab Mix Plus?
Some extensions I can’t live without:

  • BBCode 0.4.1.3 - Adds Formating (BBCode/HTML/XHTML/etc.) to the context menu for Blogs and forums like Mozillazine (PHPBB and others).
    {Must have for any Doper with FF, paste copied text without needing to add tags. 10 custom tags, here’s a couple of mine,
    [/QUOTE=]
    makes it real easy to add comments to quoted posts.
    [RIGHT ]{DarkRed}[/COLOR ][B ]Bold[/B ][U ]Underlined[/U ]=CMC[/RIGHT ] if I add comments to a quote} [RIGHT][COLOR=DarkRed]{DarkRed}BoldUnderlined=CMC[/RIGHT]
  • QuickNote 0.6.0.3 - A note taking extension with advanced features.
    {Another must have for posting cites, highlight some text, right-click, “Send to QuickNote”, the text and the URL are copied to QuickNote}

CMC fnord!

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MozBackup

Scrollbar Anywhere: allows you to scroll a page as if the scrollbar is under your mouse. Also has an Acrobat Reader mode that allows you to scroll by dragging the page with the cursor. With Firefox you lose the IE scroll cursor produced by scrollwheel-click. This extension provides a good substitute for that.

A semi-obscure further tip is that you don’t have to click on “Open in Tabs”. Just middle-click on the folder. See Non-tips in the tips thread • mozillaZine Forums .

That WILL come in handy. :smiley:

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Learn something new every day :slight_smile: Thanks!

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First, I disabled the session manager and crash recovery in Tab Mix Plus. SessionSaver does the same job better, IMHO.

As for why I have both TMP and TCO… uh, does ‘severe brain damage’ count as a reason? I guess I never realized that TMP does everything TCO does at least as well. Off to uninstall TCO then.

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Finally, here is an extension that alone would be enough to convince me to switch to Firefox: Greasemonkey, the only extensible extension.

Greasemonkey is a way to get the browser to execute any code of your choosing at events of your choosing. More commonly, it’s a way to use small extensions called user scripts that can do many little jobs that clean up webpages and add to webpages and so on. It’s easier to write and publish user scripts, so more of them exist, and they are used to do more trivial tasks. There are two main repositories of user scripts, the old wiki and the new(er) dedicated website.

Of course, writing scripts may be easy but the easiest script is one you never have to explicitly write. Platypus makes this form of writing by not-writing possible: It is an extension that implements a largely graphical method of creating user scripts. It can be used for all of the same things Remove It Permanently is used for, but it is a lot more flexible.

(It’s worth it to have RIP and Platypus at the same time. You can download RIP scripts (see the extension’s homepage) and take advantage of someone else’s cutting assuming you have RIP installed.)

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From a performance perspective, superior to IE and safari on the mac, inferior to IE on the PC. If you tend to enjoy tweaking and playing with your favorites, and really getting into the geeky stuff with browsers, then Firefox is open and easier to customize. If you just want to get on the web and dont give a ** what logo is in the top corner of your browser, IE is a bit faster and a bit more integrated with windows UI so theres less of a learning curve.