Open It Online is a Firefox extensions that is compatible with Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 and offering the user a way to open and edit documents directly online. The benefit of this approach is that the user does not need specific tools installed to view and edit the files on his computer, all he needs is Firefox and that extension.

The add-on can currently load most Office file types including doc, xls, ppt but also sxw, csv, rtd and several image formats. Don’t worry, it does not install an Office suite as a Firefox add-on. It makes use of various online services that can display and edit the aforementioned file types.

The add-on displays a configuration dialog after installation that allows the user to pick one out of four services for each file type. The default service for every file type is the Zoho Viewer which can be changed to Zoho Writer, Google Docs and Thinkfree Viewer.

continue reading "Open It Online"

Daniel told everyone yesterday why he would wait another month or so before he would make the switch from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 and I thought I share my Firefox 3 switching experience with everyone. I downloaded Firefox 3 on download day and installed it directly on my system. Bookmarks and RSS Feeds were imported just fine which was one of my major concerns because frankly, everything else could be easily changed again. Talking about options, layouts and stuff like that.

Some of my add-ons were not working in Firefox 3 and I tried to force compatibility on them which somehow did work. One of them however, Snap Links, was causing strange right-click side effects that made it more or less unusable at that time and the author has not created a compatible version yet.

The second add-on that caused problems, or so I thought, was Brief. Brief is a Firefox RSS Reader that uses the Live Bookmarks to display feeds from websites that users are subscribed to. Feeds were displaying find but cpu usage was somehow jumping up to 100% every 45-60 minutes. I thought it was Brief, discovered that it was not and finally found out that it was caused by the Live Bookmarks. I’m not sure what it happening but after exporting them and importing them into Google Reader and deleting them the cpu spikes stopped.

continue reading "My Firefox 3 Switching Experience"

I don’t usually write opinion posts so much here on gHacks, but I thought I’d share my views with you about all major Firefox releases (and all open source major releases in general). Since Firefox, Wordpress and other big-big community oriented projects rely so much on the community force behind them, when a new release comes, initially everyone is a bit lost.

If you’ve installed Firefox 3, chances are that half your addons didn’t work, after some tweaking and tuning you got some to work, but for many you will still need to wait until the author has time to update. Especially since much of the data is now stored in database format instead of simple text files, many of the extensions can’t work. Also, for me even with the very last release candidate Firefox shut down from time to time for no apparent reason, although I haven’t tried, only downloaded the final release.

These are the reasons I’m not upgrading, I’ll wait a month and then make the jump when all the extensions I can’t live without are upgraded. This hassle of upgrading is a problem with all open source stuff, however I think this can hardly be handled as “difference between commercial and open source” type problem.

continue reading "Why I’m not switching to Firefox 3 just yet"

Firefox 3 introduced a new coloring scheme and design for secure websites. You might remember that Firefox 2 displayed a yellow url bar when the user was accessing a https site. This changed drastically in Firefox 3 which is now displaying blue, yellow and green colors in the favicon area on the left side of the url.

To give you a practical example: If you visit https://www.paypal.com/ you notice a large green bar in the favicon area that is displaying the name of the owner of the website. A visit of https://www.amazon.com/ on the other hand is displaying a smaller blue bar around the favicon. Both are secure websites but one is dominant while the other is barely visible.

This can be changed in Firefox 3 so that the url of the website is displayed in the favicon are as well. To do that type in about:config in the Firefox 3 location bar and filter for the term browser.identity.ssl_domain_display. You can change that term to the following values:

continue reading "Visualize blue https sites in Firefox 3 in a better way"

About a month ago I reviewed a Firefox add-on which added numbers to Google’s search results so that the links could be loaded by simply pressing the corresponding number. That add-on was only working with the first ten results in Google, other search engines or websites were not supported by it.

HaH which is an acronym for Hit A Hint is a Firefox add-on that takes that feature to the next level. It adds an identifier to any link on the page and the user has only to type that identifier and hit the enter button to load the link. But first things first. HaH is not compatible to Firefox 3 currently but I was able to make it compatible by downloading the install file locally and editing the install.rdf file that was contained in the archive to change the parameter em:maxVersion to 3.0 so that it could be installed in Firefox 3. The file can be edited with any text editor.

I was at first a bit puzzled and did not knew how to enable the feature. A quick look on the homepage of the add-on revealed that the feature could be enabled by pressing “h”. This automatically adds numbers to all links on the website which can then by typed in and loaded with enter in the same tab.

continue reading "Load Links with the Keyboard in Firefox"