Firefox

UPDATE:
Here's a list of the pros I found about 2.0 so far:

• Memory usage actually seems to have gone down somewhat - ok ok it probably couldn't have gotten any worse! I was half expecting memory to go through the roof with 2.0, but surprisingly it seems to actually free up memory ok when you close a lot of tabs or excess windows.
  
• Generally speed wise, pages seem to load a lot faster than before.
  
• Recently closed tabs are available via the history file menu. Can't remember that being there in 1.5.
  The number of days of browsing history to keep track of also seems to be configurable in Firefox 2.0 - maybe it was in 1.5, can't remember seeing it obviously though.
  
• Built in anti phishing tool is pretty nifty. Tried browsing to a phishing spam mail sent to my gmail account and Firefox spotted the site was fake, blacked the window out and popped up a warning instead with a few options on it - all in a jedi mind concentrate stylee. Smart.
  
• Updates to extensions are now listed in a separate tab when they're found in the 'add ons' window (Tools, Options). Makes it easier than paging down through pages of extensions looking for the ones that have updates.
  
• Interface is v snazmondo :D
  

And here's a list of the cons I have so far - so far it's mainly to do with tabs:

• Tabs in 2.0 now have individual 'X'/close buttons on them. I find this quite annoying - apart from taking up extra space on the tab bar, the close buttons are now harder to hit with the mouse than they used to be. In 1.5 the X button was always to the far right of the tab bar, but now it's in a more random place on the tab bar depending on what tab you're reading/wanting to close. In 1.5 I'd just hover over to the right of the tab bar, whack on the close button and job done. Now though in 2.0 there's a split second where I have to think 'mmm where's the X this time then...?'. Minor annoyance but no doubt I'll get used to it.
  
  UPDATE:As soon as I'd written this, sods law, the first thing I read was an article about pros/cons of Firefox 2.0 on Wired with a fix for the problem - just change 'browser.tabs.CloseButtons' in about:config to 3 instead of the default of 1. Still think this sucks though having to use about:config to change this kind of thing. Also there's something in those comments about setting Firefox to not resize images automatically - the option to do that has now dissappeared in Firefox 2.0 - you have to change stuff in about:config to fix the problem. That's another gripe I did notice but didn't think too much about last night.
  
  
• Come to think about it I don't like the drop down button that lists all the current tabs open either. Again there's a fix but it involves editing the userChrome.css file found in the Firefox profile folder.
  
  Here is a list of other tab tweaks for Firefox 2.0.
  
  
• There's a new feature to allow Firefox to restart itself after extensions etc have installed themselves. Unfortunately though this useful feature doesn't seem to have a user interface - it's only available to extension installations (and themes?). It'd be good to be able to restart the browser when you make changes in the 'Addons' window - for example when you disable/enable some extension or another and want to restart the browser but keep your session going.
  
  
• Too much faffing around in about:config!!!
  
  
• Ok, yet another problem that needs config changing to fix it. I'm not mad about the 'restore from crash' functionality - if firefox crashes it automatically restores the last 'session' - group of windows/tabs. Unfortunately I often close my machine down using the power button on the PC and any open windows are 'gracelessly' killed - so next time I boot up, Firefox cheerfully asks me if I want to restore the crashed session which isn't really what I want and is quite annoying tbh.
  
  The resolution is - surprise surprise yet another hack - to edit the config so the value of the boolean config option browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash is set to false. In my case the key didn't even exist so I had to create it first and set it to 'false'. Haven't actually tested it out yet but presumably it works and doesn't give the annoying nag about resuming the session after a 'crash'.
  

Have to say all these config changes I've had to make so far are pretty tedious and if it weren't for this article I'd probably forget how I did it all if I needed to reinstall. By the same token though the very fact you can hack away at the config at all via about:config so easily is quite nice.

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Mozilla have just released a new point version of Firefox, version 2.0. I held off installing and testing the beta/release candidate versions for a while because so many of the extensions I use wouldn't work with 2.0, but now 2.0 is officially out it seems most of my extensions now work ok.

There were 6 extensions that weren't compatible with 2.0 - most of them I could live without, but there was one, Clone Window, that I really couldn't do without. Clone window allows you to create a new tab/window with the history of the tab/window it was cloned from, without this the world just isn't right, bit like going out on the tiles for a few beers and waking up the next morning wondering how the fsck you ended up in a tent. :D

I ended up finding a similar extension called Duplicate Tabs which effectively does the same thing as Clone Window and more even. As well as creating clone tabs/windows, it even allows you to merge all open windows or a selection of open tabs into one window which is quite cool (not sure how much I'll use it but it's a good idea none the less).

Only trouble with the Duplicate Tabs extension is that the default key mapping to clone a tab - ctrl-shift-t - wouldn't work. Turns out that mapping was already in use by the Web Developer extension - tried changing the mapping in the web developer options, but that didn't seem to make any difference which was annoying.

Eventually tried to change the mapping using yet another extension called keyconfig - although annoyingly keyconfig wouldn't install because it wasn't compatible with 2.0! Grr... so I've now kind of hacked things up so it WOULD install by adding a boolean key extensions.checkCompatibility in about:config in Firefox and setting it to false - this stops Firefox checking the compatibility of extensions when they're installed or started with Firefox. Not entirely sure this is a good thing yet since it's now enabled all the extensions (those 6 above) that weren't compatible with 2.0 and there's a chance that might cause problems. Will see.

Generally though moving to Firefox 2.0 actually seems like a positive experience - browsing does seem to be faster in some unquantifiable way. Whether this is just the smoother looking interface making things seem quicker... I don't think it is... pages actually do seem to load faster now so I'm a happy bunny right now. Once all my extensions are compatible without forcing them I'll be even happier :)

If you've not upgraded as yet, I'd recommend it now it's offical.

I'll add any extra comments about my experience as I go on.

After reading an excellent article on lifehacker about speed browsing with Firefox bookmark keywords, I thought I'd share a few tips on one of my favourite Firefox Extension - the All-in-one Mouse Gestures Extension. I wanted to add a comment on the lifehacker article but apparently you have to be invited. :( If anyone's feeling generous an invite would be much appreciated!

Whilst I'm not overly fond of the mouse and generally use keyboard shortcuts for just about anything that uses a keyboard shortcut, there are often times when your hand ends up resting on the mouse anyway. On those occasions it's actually quicker using mouse gestures to perform actions in Firefox than hitting the keyboard shortcuts.

The idea is that after installing the All-in-one Mouse Gestures Extension, you can right-click and drag the mouse to draw shapes or 'make gestures' on the Firefox browser window. Each shape is assigned an individual task or action such that when you release the right mouse button, the action or task is performed for you. The gesture you perform is highlighted in red on the Firefox window whilst you're holding the right mouse button down.

At first I thought it sounded somewhat bizarre, but I must admit. In all honesty though it's one extension I really can't do without in Firefox having used it for a couple of years at least. I often move from Firefox into Windows Explorer and carry on using the mouse gestures in Explorer expecting them to work... doh.

The two main gestures I find the most useful are simple single strokes:

• a horizontal line from a right to left takes me back one page in the browser history
  
• a vertical line in the up direction takes me up one directory in the current website's directory hierarchy - up to the parent directory. For example if you're at the URL http://example.com/folder1/folder2/, performing the 'up' gesture takes you up to http://example.com/folder1/. If you're already at the top level/site root folder, the gesture takes you up to the parent domain - ie if you're at http://freebsd.munk.me.uk/, the gesture takes you up to http://munk.me.uk/.

The bonus of these gestures is you can perform them *very* rapidly, probably more rapidly than hitting 'alt-backspace' to perform the keyboard equivalent of the horizontal line gesture above. However there's no equivalent to the 'up a directory' gesture in keyboard shortcuts as far as I know, would be nice if there was.

Another excellent feature I use a lot is the ability to map gestures to the mouse scroll wheel. By right clicking and scrolling the mouse simultaneously, the browser history list is brought up and you can scroll through the list of previous pages you visited. Releasing the mouse button takes you to the page you have highlighted.

Along with the two gestures above, for me this makes the all-in-one mouse gestures extension at least as powerful as the keyword shortcut feature in Firefox - although I must admit I find the keyword hacking probably more revolutionary in terms of making content more available to users more quickly. I like the idea of the GUI based web browser taking on more of a 'command-line' feel where you enter a command (the bookmark keyword) followed by the command argument (the text string you want the bookmarked keyword to act upon). I don't know if the ability to enter more than one 'argument' to a keyword would give any additional flexibility or just make things confusing... could be interesting.

On the subject of using keywords in Firefox to create easy to use searches in the address bar - I'm actually addicted to the 'alt-d' keystroke to put the cursor in the address bar and can't get used to 'ctrl-l' at all - there's another great extension that allows you to extend the usability of Firefox along the lines of better searching - Conquery.

Conquery allows you to highlight text within a document being displayed in the browser, and then select a custom query to perform on that highlighted text. The simplest version of this might be where you highlight some text that you want more information on, right-click, then select the search engine you want to run the search on from the conquery context menu. I think that functionality is already in Firefox by default, just a simple example though.

The main way I usually use it is to add torrents to my web based torrent client torrentflux - by right clicking on a torrent download link, I select the torrentflux entry from the conquery menu and the torrent is automatically uploaded to the server. This works just the same way as a bookmark keyword query and the conquery recipe for torrentflux was probably taken directly from my bookmark keyword :)


To end off, here are some of the keywords I use in my bookmarks.

In this list the bookmark keyword points to the bookmark URL. To test them, drag and drop the link to a bookmark, create the keyword and follow the example instructions. Anyone reading this far probably knows this already anyway :o

a -> http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/external-search/002-3100725-4260029?field-keywords=%s&index=blended&tag=edazzlenet-20
- this one I use in the address bar along the lines of 'a dj shadow' to search for 'dj shadow' stuff on amazon.co.uk

am -> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/core.html#%s
- 'am virtualhost' in the address bar takes me to the apache manual page for the 'virtualhost' httpd.conf directive.

ebay -> http://search.ebay.co.uk//search/search.dll?from=R40&satitle=%s
- this one can be used like 'ebay foobar widget' to search for a foobar widget on ebay!

toolhaus -> http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs?User=%s&Dirn=Received+by
- this is an excellent one for ebayers - type in 'toolhaus jezhanco' and you get the skinny on what kind of negative feedback the user 'jezhanco' gets on ebay.

bbc -> http://www.bbc.co.uk/%s
- I use the BBC website quite a lot so this one comes in handy. It basically saves me typing 'bbc.co.uk' out in full - to goto 'http://bbc.co.uk/radio1' I just type in 'bbc radio1'.

tfu -> http://torrentflux.munk.me.uk/index.php?url_upload=%s
- this is a very useful one for me, tfu stands for 'torrentflux upload' and it lets me upload a torrent file to my server directly from the server it's available for download on. Right-click on torrent link, copy link location, hit alt-d, type in 'tfu ctrl-v' to paste in the link and bang, torrent uploaded direct to the server.

d -> http://del.icio.us/tag/%s
- easy search for tags on del.iciou.us.

abuse -> http://openrbl.org/dnsbl?i=%s&t=s&odddWH=xceX9220&j=1
- check openrbl for an IP addresses abuse listing 'abuse 213.152.51.194' etc.

fp -> http://www.freshports.org/%s
- check the freebsd ports site freshports.org for latest info on ports - ie 'fp www/apache13' for info on apache 1.3.

imdb -> http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s
- another one I use very frequently. Search for info on The Godfather movie by typing in 'imdb the godfather'. No idea why I don't shorten this to just 'i', I certainly use it enough :)

php -> http://php.net/%s
- this one is very useful as well for PHP scripting reference. Type in 'php include' to get detailed info and examples on the usage of the PHP include() function from the PHP manual.

g -> http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s
- without doubt the most used keyword of all - search for 'foobar' on google by typing in 'g foobar'. I think this keyword is even in the default bookmarks for Firefox isn't it?

dict -> http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s
- search for the correct spelling of the word permanant using 'dict permanant'.

ep -> http://epguides.com/%s/
- find information about the TV show 'scrubs' by typing in 'ep scrubs'

wayback -> http://web.archive.org/web/*/%s
- another excellent keyword shortcut IMO. The wayback archive at archive.org allows you to view the state of a website as it appeared in the past - effectively 'timewarping' you back to the way a site looked days, months or years ago. Very useful if a site recently expired like munk.me.uk did yesterday!. Use the keyword as 'wayback munk.me.uk' to view munk.me.uk as it looked in the past.


Well, that's all the shortcuts I think people might be interested in. There are in total 41 shortcuts I have, didn't bother pasting them all because some are pretty mundane (ok some of the above are probably a bit mundane to most folk to but w/e :o). Hopefully it gives someone an idea about getting stuff done quicker in Firefox.

Happy browsing!