10.14.05

Firefox Tips

Posted in html/css, Mac OS X, computers at 7:31 pm by Haris

I was just reading a nice article about some neat tricks that make Firefox such an awesome browser, and I just thought I’d list some of them here:

1. Well, to begin with it supports tabbed browsing. This means that you can have lots of tabs open in the same window. Lots of other browsers support that, but Firefox actually enables you to save of the tabs together as one bookmark, and load them all at the same time when you need them again! You also set your home page to be multiple tabs.

2. It has an excellent “search as you type” feature: When you press Command-F to start a search, it does not generate a new window. Instead it opens up a search bar at the bottom of the window, and as you type it highlights the area of text where there is a match. Very addictive once you get hooked on it.

3. This was something new to me: You can associate keywords to the various search boxes of sites, and then use those keywords in the location bar to initiate a search from that site. For instance one of my favorite sites, on which I search all the time, is Wikipedia. This is a huge online encyclopedia that has a search box on its main page, used to search for articles. Now, from Firefox I right-click on the box and select “Add a Keyword to this Search…” from the context menu. Then I fill in the information, and put “wp” as a keyword for for the bookmark. What this means is that if I go to the location bar now, and type “wp greece” it will perform a search in Wikipedia for the term “greece”, and will come back with the page for Greece. you can also assign keywords for regular bookmarks as well, not just search boxes.

4. Firefox is also super-customizable, a bit too much indeed. Luckily for regular users most of this customization is hidden, since it does not appear in the preferences menu. Instead, you have to type “about:config” in the location bar, and you are taken to a screen that allows you to change almost every single behavior of Firefox. The article gives some ideas of things to change. Be very careful here. You could make Firefox unusable this way.

5. And last but not least, it’s very extendable. First off, there is a huge collection of themes to choose from, to change the look and feel, and make it more Mac-like. Further, a series of extensions allows you to do a lot of cool stuff. Some of the most interesting ones:

   1. Scrapbook, allows you to save the content or part of the content of a page, edit it, all sorts of cool stuff.
   2. SessionSaver, saves everything the way you left it, for when you come back. Very handy if you press Command-Q instead of Command-W, or of Firefox crashes.
   3. Greasemonkey, allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using Javascript. You can find lots of idea in this online book.
   4. You can find more extensions that you would ever need here.

Ok, enough for now. Got any other tips to add? (Sameer, I’m looking at you.)

Later

Edit: That last point should read: more extensions than you would ever need

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