Mosey added a link to his comment that pointed to the Firefox add-on Quick Restart in my post about 10 Useful Firefox Add-ons That Don’t Get Glamorised. It’s more often than not the small changes that make a huge difference. I do test many Firefox extensions, tweaks and themes and one thing that bothered me a lot was that not every menu had a restart Firefox option. When you uninstall an extension in Firefox it tells you that you need to restart Firefox but it does not offer the option to do so.

So the only way to restart Firefox would be to close the browser manually and open it again. I never bothered to look for an extension that would automate the process until Mosey presented it to me on a golden platter.

Quick Restart basically adds the possibility to restart Firefox with a keyboard shortcut or by pressing a button. The keyboard shortcut CTRL ALT R does the job for me but you can also add a button to a toolbar by right-clicking a toolbar and selecting customize from the menu that pops up.

continue reading "Firefox Quick Restart"

In the last days I have been looking for a Firefox extension that would make it possible to open multiple bookmarks (and History items) at once. What I mean with this is that I wanted something like the CTRL left-click in Windows Explorer that lets you pick several files at once. My main problem was that the bookmarks menu collapsed as soon as I picked on bookmark that I wanted to load.

I sometimes however would like to load several bookmarks at once, or in rapid succession, and the collapsing bookmarks menu was annoying for that purpose. I did ask the question at the Firefox Mastery website because I knew that some clever Firefox geeks would frequent it and if someone would know the answer they would.

My own research was not successful but a few hours after posting the question over at the website Alex answered and pointed me to two extensions that would prevent the menu from collapsing when middle-clicking items.

continue reading "Open Multiple Bookmarks in Firefox at once"

Not all Firefox add-ons get the news coverage that they deserve. Some are mentioned on every tech site in the world while others are known to only a handful of Firefox users that dug deep into the Firefox add-on directory to find some hidden gems. And it’s those hidden gems that I want to write about today.

I’m not saying that the following Firefox add-ons are totally unknown and never appeared on a website before but if someone mentioned them it got lost in all the noise that the popular Firefox extension are causing.

I’m also hoping that you will comment in this thread and maybe mention one of the lesser known add-ons for Firefox that you are using. I’m here to learn as much as you are here to read this article.

continue reading "10 Useful Firefox Add-ons That Don’t Get Glamorised"

If you perform a search at Yahoo you will notice that the links to the websites are redirects from a Yahoo server starting with rds.yahoo.com. This is quite confusing especially if you want to take a quick look at the url of the destination website. This also means that the loading time of those websites increases slightly because of the redirect. It has happened in the past that the redirects were slowing down the loading time tremendously because of a server problem at Yahoo.

This can be quite frustrating especially if you use Yahoo regularly to search the Internet. A small Greasemonkey script comes to the rescue, at least to the rescue of Firefox users. The Yahoo! Redirect Remover script removes the redirects from the search results including Yahoo video search and virtually every other Yahoo.com page that is using those kind of redirects.

The script obviously requires Greasemonkey to be installed before the Yahoo! Redirect Remover script itself can be installed and used.

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The Windows XP Service Pack 3 is available again and many users have already made the switch to protect their system with the latest security updates. If you have installed Internet Explorer 7 before updating the system to the third Service Pack and decided to uninstall it again you might have noticed that the option to uninstall the browser is grayed out and therefor not possible.

The reason for this behavior is that the system would revert back to an older version of Internet Explorer 6 that would not contain the patches applied by the Service Pack. The Windows XP Service Pack 3 updates the version of Internet Explorer installed on the system during installation of the Service Pack.

The only possible way to uninstall Internet Explorer 7 that has been installed before installing Service Pack 3 is to uninstall the Service Pack first and then Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft suggests that users of IE6 should update their system with Service Pack 3 first and install IE7 afterwards. This would ensure that the browser could be uninstalled normally.

continue reading "Don’t install IE7 before Windows XP SP3"