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02 Jun 09 - 01:53 PM (#2646668) Subject: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: wysiwyg I like to find my own shortcuts using any software program. Many never do make it into the FAQ or Tips section of the software-- just like using Mudcat features, an adventurous mind can do more than any indexer can capture. I've been using Firefox a few months now, and the connections are really starting to form in my brain. For instance, I got tired of the slow approach to opening the 6 tabs I usually bounce between while working at my desk. So I put them all into a Bookmarks folder called FAST OPEN, which I can just "open all in tabs." What quickie tricks do YOU use? In Firefox. (IE and other browsers can jolly well have their OWN thread!) ~S~ |
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02 Jun 09 - 05:32 PM (#2646881) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: GUEST,Geoff the Duck the reverse is useful. If you have a bunch of tabs open, you can save them as a group of bookmarks . |
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02 Jun 09 - 07:29 PM (#2646974) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Bill D Be VERY careful with that trick...I accidently hit the 'open all' button on a folder with many bookmarks.....locked up the whole computer. I prefer to use tabs and the "Session Manager" extension to keep my favorite tabs available. The "recently closed" option under 'history' also allows me to recover tabs accidently closed. The best advice I know about Firefox is to study carefully all the possibilities in the myriads of extensions. One of the most amazing extensions is "cache viewer", which will...ummm... show you the contents of your cache and let you do stuff with it. |
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06 Jun 09 - 09:31 AM (#2649875) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Geoff the Duck There are hundreds of add-ons and extensions which let firefox do extra things beyond the usual browsing stuff. The problem is knowing which are worth having and which are just clutter that might slow things down. A lot of the add on bits duplicate each other, so if you have one which does what you need, you don't need a second one which does the same unless it does it better. Some work with earlier versions of Firefox, but not with the Firefox 3, or vice-versa so here would be a good thread to swap ones any of us have found useful, or to warn of extras that turn out to be not as good, or just clutter. My first suggestion for Microsoft PC users is Portable Firefox part of a suite of applications from http://portableapps.com/. The portable applications are designed to load onto a USB stick so you can take them with you and work on other computers without having to worry whether the computer already has compatible programmes installed. It doesn't install ANYTHING into the PC Registry, everything it needs is installed into the one folder which is free-standing. This also means that you can put the portable installation on ANY drive on your PC and run it. If you want to uninstall, all you do is delete the folder. If your PC needs a complete reinstallation of Windows, as long as the folder is saved on a second hard drive, it will still be there waiting to be used. With Portable Firefox on a USB stick, you have all your bookmarks with you if you are mobile, very handy for working across two computers in the same house, or at work, as long as you do not lose the stick. Other tips to follow as separate postings to avoid confusion. Quack! GtD. |
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06 Jun 09 - 09:52 AM (#2649888) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: CarolC Here's three of my favorite add-ons... http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=120160&messages=1 Another one I really like called 'Plain Text Links' allows me to right click on a URL that has not been converted into a link, and then select an option that opens the URL. I also added one that allows me to click a little icon to the left of the tabs in the tab bar and that creates a new tab, so I don't have to go to 'file' or right click on an empty space in the tab bar to open a new tab (I like being able to right click on an empty space in the tab bar to open a new tab, but sometimes there is no empty space there). Adblock Plus is another great one for those who don't know about it. With Adblock Plus, I don't see any ads in any web pages. I've also got two weather related add-ons. One gives me weather information up at the top of the browser window, and the other has all kinds of cool weather related stuff down at the bottom on the status bar. Another one I like a lot allows me to hover my mouse over a link and a little window appears with information about the website in the link, including the IP address. I've got a couple that I've never used, and I don't know what they do. I'm sure the descriptions sounded cool when I added them, though. One feature of Firefox that I really love, that is not an add-on, is the Bookmarks Toolbar just above the tab bar. That's one of my most favorite features of Firefox (along with tabbed browsing). Firefox certainly does disprove the notion that only when people expect financial remuneration will they have the incentive to be innovative and do good work. |
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07 Jun 09 - 08:43 AM (#2650505) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Geoff the Duck CarolC - Interclue is one of the few add ons I have used, and it is certainly one which can be handy. I cannot recall if I discovered it on my own or if I tried it following your earlier thread (linked above). One new trick in Firefox 3 is the addition of "Tags" to the bookmarking system. When you save a page as a bookmark, it allows you to easily add your own additional groupings to the item. An example might be Mudcat, which I have put into at least four categories of tag - Music, Folk, Instruments, Social. DIY web sites would be - Reference and DIY. Recipe sites would be - Reference, Cooking, Food. Online thesaurus or dictionaries would be Reference, Words. Something such as Youtube would be Music, Social, Video (and depending on what type of music - Rock, Folk, Blues etc...). When I go to the Bookmarks menu, I can quickly find tagged sites by category - e.g. If I looked under my tags Actors or TV or Film, I would find the Internet Movie Database but the TV tag would also list Programme listings pages and Tv show online competitions, whereas the Film tag could contain local cinema showings or fan sites for Star Wars? Adding tags takes a little extra effort, but can be worth it. Quack! GtD. |
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08 Jun 09 - 06:01 AM (#2651157) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: GUEST,Mr Red Extensions. Well I recommend FlashBlock if you are on dial-up. It blocks flash movies (usually containing no information anyway) and leaves a linked blank area you can click on for the eye-candy, if you really must see it. I use FireBug - a wonderful de-bugger for JavScript. But it does have a few limitations that are fairly obvious when you encounter them. |
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08 Jun 09 - 11:44 AM (#2651363) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: open mike thanks for the info about "right click on an empty space in the tab bar to open a new tab" also the bookmark bar with the most visted links, which can all be opened in tabs. i used to have an app which gave a new name to the browser each time you opened it....instead of fire fox it was ocean whale or tree baboon or some such...random and amusing...apparently it is not compatile to the current iteration of F.F. |
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08 Jun 09 - 05:28 PM (#2651637) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Artful Codger Minor correction: You can right-click anywhere in the tab bar to bring up the context menu with the "New Tab" option, not just in empty space. For me, there seldom is empty space in the tab bar. But an even faster way to create a new tab is to use the keyboard shortcut Control-T (Command-T on Mac). It's also far more reliable than mouse gestures, which often get trapped by applets; applets seldom trap all keyboard input. I've given up on mouse gestures, which half the time don't work as advertised. A "shortcut" shouldn't waste your time. |
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08 Jun 09 - 05:47 PM (#2651657) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: wysiwyg AK-- "All Kewl." For those of you who posted about add-ons, thanks-- don't use them myself, but interesting to hear what-all is out there. ~S~ |
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08 Jun 09 - 06:42 PM (#2651706) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: JHW This is a help question please to fellow Firefox 3 users. Is there something I have to enable to make clickable url links in emails? My ancient IE does this but in Ff3 I have to paste in and out of Word. Thanks, John |
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08 Jun 09 - 06:56 PM (#2651717) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: wysiwyg What email program are you using? In Hotmail, for instance, as long as I have THAT with rich text enabled, I get clickies. ~S~ |
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09 Jun 09 - 12:59 AM (#2651958) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: CarolC Thanks for the heads up about being able to click anywhere in the tab bar to open a new tab instead of just clicking on an empty space. I might just get rid of that other thing now, since it seems a bit redundant. |
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09 Jun 09 - 05:41 PM (#2652623) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: TonyA F11 toggles the menu bars off and on, making the content display larger or smaller. Ctl+ and Ctrl- increase/decrease text size. Space bar works like PgDn to scroll down a page. And clicking on the mouse wheel makes the mouse into a fast scroller, as in word processing programs. |
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09 Jun 09 - 07:17 PM (#2652710) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Tootler Fire FTP allows me to upload web pages from within Firefox. I can then open the website in another tab and check it has loaded OK. Much more convenient than having two separate programs running. |
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09 Jun 09 - 10:05 PM (#2652827) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: TonyA On an internet forum, if you want to see the HTML code that someone else used to post a link or an image or to change the text style (so that you can do the same in your own post), you can pull down View > Page Source, and then use Ctrl-F to find the text that's included in the HTML code. |
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09 Jun 09 - 10:53 PM (#2652850) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: wysiwyg Oh WOWWWW..... THAT one is GREAT. Thanks! ~S~ |
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10 Jun 09 - 01:09 AM (#2652891) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Artful Codger With the advent of style pages, copy-n-pasting styled text from source HTML is increasingly unlikely to work with pages from different sources, including your own, and when it does, you're probably using deprecated formatting features. Caveat copyor. For useful keyboard shortcuts, pay attention to the right-hand side of the menus you pull down. Mozilla provides some web pages with great tips for using Firefox: click And there's an add-on called Preferential that lets you control many more options than are exposed by the standard Preferences pane: click |
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10 Jun 09 - 01:13 AM (#2652892) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Artful Codger Grrr, just noticed that Preferential doesn't (yet?) work with Firefox 3, only 1 and 2. And Firebug doesn't work yet with Firefox 3.0.5 or 3.1; it's been disabled for quite a while now. |
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11 Jun 09 - 05:12 PM (#2654312) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: JHW WYSIWYG - Thanks, Main a/c is Yahoo (Classic) but Hotmail for a couple of folks who's messages Yahoo ignores. John |
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12 Jun 09 - 04:29 PM (#2655128) Subject: RE: Tech: Cool Tips with Firefox From: Stewart Another vote for the Adblock Plus add-on. I recently encountered a problem when I tried to call up the NY Times web page. Their home page appeared for 1 sec and then reverted to an obnoxious ad for the Cleveland Clinic. But the ad just stayed there (there was no "skip this ad" or any way to get out of it), which sort of prevented me from getting on the NY Times home page. This happened on both of my computers, but only with Firefox. So after I copied the URL of the ad into Adblock the ad never appeared, and I got right onto the NY Times home page. Cheers, S. in Seattle |