I recently received the error message "The associated helper application does not exist" whenever I tried to download - and run - a torrent file from within Firefox. The associated helper application is a third party application that is either added to the download actions list be default or when a user is selecting to always open a file type with an application.
Most textfields or textareas on websites accept only text input. Even more advanced textareas like those that Bloggers use to write articles offer only a handful of options and the webmaster needs to know a fair share of html to be able to arrange the text the way he wants. Ever tried to have an image on the left side and float the text around it ? This can't be done with Wordpress unless you use the float command explicitly.
I encountered a problem in Firefox after installing the Piclens extension. My Bookmarks toolbar was not showing my bookmarks anymore, just a blank toolbar. It was also not possible to add new bookmarks to it. A quick check of my bookmarks revealed that the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder was still there so it had to be a different problem.
Piclens is a great Firefox extension that adds image viewer capabilities to Firefox. It adds a full screen display on supported sites showing the selected image plus all other images in a thumbnail bar at the bottom. The extension does not work on all sites but on some major ones such as Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Friendster, Picase Web Albums and RSS Media Feeds.
Many Firefox extensions that you install can be configured by accessing the Tools > Add-ons menu and clicking on the Options button of the extension that you want to configure. This is not an elegant way if you have to change options frequently. That is probably the same thought that James R. Skinner had who developed the Firefox extension 'Options Menu'.
I recently read an article about Firefox tweaks that would speed up page loading time by changing several settings in the about:config dialog. I knew those tweaks but decided to take a look if my settings were different from the ones mentioned in the article.
I found out - to my big surprise - that I was running Firefox with the default settings and not the tweaked settings. I had the feeling that Firefox was running slower than before after the latest update but I was not able to determine the cause, until now that is.
Firefox's build in spell checker is a great asset for everyone who is working with Firefox. It does not matter if you update your blog, are a regular in a forum or like to write reviews on travel sites - the spell checker is a tool that you do not want to miss. New words can be added to the Firefox spell checker by right-clicking the word and choosing Add to Dictionary from the menu.
One Click Installer is a Firefox extension and Wordpress plugin combination for Wordpress blog owners replacing the need to upload themes and plugins by ftp with a one click installation in Firefox. The extension will take any link pointing to a plugin or theme and upload it to the right folder of your Wordpress installation without the need to do that manually.
Firefox remembers what you write which can lead to some troubles if you misspelled a domain name, login name or other information in the past. The auto complete feature displays all possible results which means that the misspelled names are always shown as well which can lead to some confusion - especially when only one letter is missing or wrong.
Firefox 3 codename Gran Paradiso will most likely leave alpha phase in September. The release of Gran Paradiso alpha 7 could be the last alpha version and I decided to take a look and see what we can expect in the new version. The first thing that I noticed when starting the new Firefox release was the incredible speed.
There are not many features that the Internet Explorer posses that Firefox users have to be jealous about. The image toolbar which is the popup that appears when you hover the mouse over an image to be able to quickly access the most used image commands could be one of the features that you would like to see implemented in Firefox as well.
One of my readers Rico posted a link to the excellent Hyperwords extension for Firefox in the comments of my article about the Easy Gestures extension and I was heading out immediately to take a look and see if the extension was really that good as he claimed it to be. I know that many of my readers have some gems up their sleeves that they seldom share but when they do I'm often in for a surprise.
Easy Gestures is in my opinion one of the best Firefox extensions comparable to great extensions such as Greasemonkey or Adblock Plus. The Easy Gestures extension gives you access to commands that can be performed with mouse gestures, to be more precise with a simple mouse click and click on the desired action. Almost everything can be customized.
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was looking over your shoulder to see what sites you were visiting at the moment ? The currently active site might be a harmless one but the text of the tabs that are open as well might reveal something that you would love to keep secret.
Firefox is still on the rise in Europe where it reached an impressive overall 27.8% market share in June 2007. Finland, Slovakia and Slovenia lead the pack with 45.4%, 40.4% and 47.9% market share while Great Britain, Spain and Italy still linger at the bottom with a market share below 20%.
You can download and install many Firefox extensions that display a preview image or text of a link on the Internet. There are also several scripts for webmasters to enable the feature by default on their websites. Archer, who is a regular reader of my blog, send me a link to a new Firefox extension called Interclue which provides a better way of previewing links in Firefox.
The Firefox Environment Backup Extension -short FEBE - offers a great and easy way to backup all Firefox settings, themes and extensions. I was looking for a way to synchronize all of my settings from my desktop computer to Firefox that was also installed on my notebook.
The new version of Opera introduced a so called Speed Dial feature which displays nine thumbnails of websites for fast access that have been selected by the user. The nine websites are displayed when the user opens a new blank tab or a new blank window and can be accessed by either clicking on the thumbnails or pressing the corresponding numbers (1-9).
The exact same feature is now available as a Firefox extension Speed Dial. Websites can be assigned to the nine spots by using the "Set as Speed Dial" entry in the Bookmarks menu. This is slightly more uncomfortable than in Opera where it is possible to click one of the nine spots and select an entry from the bookmarks.
Firefox is not optimized for widescreen or dualscreen monitors leaving lots of empty space when surfing the Internet. Jonathon Weare came up with a solid way to change the layout of Firefox to suit the needs of widescreen monitors by moving several elements of Firefox to different positions.
His first idea was to move the bar with all the tabs from the top location into the sidebar which adds two benefits. The first benefit is that the space on the sides is used to store elements that are needed for browsing while the second is that the tab bar is removed from the top location adding more space for the actual website.
There is no obvious way in Firefox to reduce the size of the menu toolbar. I always thought that it was a big waste of space to have this bar enabled all the time. I'm personally using the Tiny Menu Firefox extension which displays just a Menu item next to the usual buttons such as forward, back and reload. I added a screenshot of how my setup looks like at the end of the article.
I did find another interesting Firefox extension called Personal Menu which reduces the menu bar to three buttons that can be placed in the other toolbars. Two buttons are for the bookmarks and the history function while the third is fully customizable. You can add any kind of menu from the menu bar for instance to this personal menu.
I really hate the behavior of Firefox in Windows when you open the options. The complete browser is not accessible anymore until you close the options again. This is extremely frustrating if you want to test a few settings. There is however a really nice way to change the behavior and make it that the options are independent from the Firefox browser.
To do this you only need change one setting in Firefox and restart the browser afterwards. Type about:config in the address bar and search for the string browser.preferences.instantApply and change the setting from false to true. This ensures that the options can be accessed and changed while it is still possible to surf the Internet.
Did you know that it is possible to override the way a website is displayed by default in Firefox. This can be useful for instance if a webmaster decided to use CSS code to remove the underline of links, change the color for links that open in new windows or display additional information for certain file type downloads.
The first thing that you need to do is locate or create the file usercontent.css in your Mozilla Firefox profile directory. It can usually be located in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
Secure Login is a Firefox extension that is similar to Opera's Wand feature. Instead of logging into a website by filling out the username and password form you login by clicking a button or using a shortcut. This is a great way to prevent the execution of malicious Javascript code that could "phish" your data.
Javascript will be temporarily disabled during login and the data is send right to the website that you want to login to. The Domain that you are currently on and that you want to login to are compared to ensure that you are indeed at the right website. A mismatch would result in a popup warning.
I was looking for a way to automatically scan specific file types immediately after finishing the download instead of scanning them when unpacking or executing them. This way I could sort out malicious files immediately without having to worry about some files that contain viruses or other sorts of malware sitting on my hard drives for a longer period of time.
I prefer to watch videos in my favorite video player VLC instead of watching them embedded on the web. If you click on a video file on a website you open it either in your default video viewer or view it right in your browser using a plugin. You may also open websites in different browsers which is great for developers who were using several add-ons to view a website in different browsers.
Just right-click the link and select the application that you want to use to view it from the menu. Launchy, that is the name of the Firefox add-on, supports more than 60 applications right out of the box with the ability to add more applications using an XML file.
Firefox is already really comfortable when it comes to searching the web. One search box is displayed by default which is great if you want to do a fast search for something. Did you know that there is another way, even faster and better than this one ? Firefox supports so called keyword searches which means that you define a keyword for a certain search engine and can use that keyword to search it without visiting the website of that search engine.
Let me give you an example to clear things up. You may right-click any form field in Firefox and select the menu entry Add a Keyword for this search. Selecting this opens a new Add Bookmark menu which asks for a name and a keyword. I went to ebay.com and did a right-click on their site search. I entered the keyword "e" and the name eBay.
I found this interesting article at the Lifehacker website. The articles lists 15 tweaks and tips for Firefox of which several have not been known by me. Did you for instance know that you could move a page down by pressing the spacebar, that you could move around tabs by pressing CTRL + TAB or that you could use so called smart keywords for searching IMDB in the Address Bar (try typing in imdb Johnny Depp) ?
It is not happening that often that you have to accented characters or umlauts but it sometimes happens. Maybe you want to write a name like Søren or a unique German street name such as Bachstraße. If you never had to type those characters before you might wonder how it would be possible to write them down using your keyboard. They are obviously not printed on the keys of it.
If you want to make sure that you never miss a change on your favorite website again and stay ahead of the crowd by always knowing when the website has been updated you do need the Update Scanner Firefox extension. It basically monitors any website that you have added to it and informs you whenever a change has been made on the website. You may alter the change threshold so that you are not informed about minor changes on the website.
I'm always looking for ways to reduce the toolbars and menus to have more space for the websites. I have already written about extensions such as Hide Menubar or the Firefox UI Tweaker that change the appearance of Firefox. The Tiny Menu Extension is another great add-on to this list. What it does is that it compresses all entries from the menu toolbar (File, Edit, View, History and so on) into one entry that lists the compressed items beneath each other. Take a look at the screenshot to get an impression of how this looks like.
Some users prefer to have as much space in Firefox for websites as possible. One way to get rid of some of the toolbars and menus temporarily would be to press F11 which removes the title, the bookmarks toolbar and the menubar. Another way would be to just remove the menubar which is not needed most of the time anyway. To do that you simply need the Firefox extension called Hide Menubar which removes the menubar once installed.
Some users are switching between Firefox and Internet Explorer on their computer depending on the task at hand. It is for instance essential for webmasters to check their websites in the most commonly used web browsers. I thought it would be nice to share bookmarks between Firefox and Internet Explorer to use the same bookmarks in both browsers. This can be done easily with the Firefox extension Plain old Favorites which adds the favorites from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The favorites menu is placed next to the bookmarks menu in Firefox.
I'm still using Firefox and I thought it would be nice to share some advanced configuration tips that helped me a lot with you. This article was inspired by Lifehackers Top Firefox 2 config tweaks but adds advanced tips to the mix. Rest assured that the configuration tweaks will not list the same tips that you see on every other site nowadays, I promise new unseen tips.
Google displays 10 search results by default which is probably enough for most users who statistically use the first ten results most of the time ignoring the rest of the results. I on the other hand tend to view more than one page normally and was looking for a way to increase my productivity by displaying more than 10 results on a single search result page. I found a Greasemonkey script which changes the value from 10 to 100 for normal Google searches.
If you have hundreds of bookmarks in different folders like I do you might know the problem that bookmarks are added from time to time that already exist in your list. It is not that easy to manage the bookmarks and keep an overview over them all. A complicated folder structure with many subfolders is adding to the problem. It really does not help to check your bookmarks manually every know and then, this takes to long and does not prevent that duplicate bookmarks are added at a later date again. The Firefox extension Bookmark Duplicate Detector is helpful for users with a lot of bookmarks.
It is not that easy to download all images from a page with many images in Firefox. It would be possible to use a download manager or wget to get all the images but this would mean that you would have to rely on external tools and know how to use them. A far easier method is to use the Firefox extension Batch Downloader. It does exactly what the name suggests, it downloads all images that have a resolution of 200x200 or more in one batch to your hard drive.
Did you ever have the problem that you needed information from two websites at once and had to switch between them all the time to access them ? I usually have the problem when I write a new article for Ghacks and have to take a look at another website to find the information that I need for my article. This gets extremely irritating if many tabs are open at once and I miss the tab that I want. To much clicks in my opinion, that is why I was searching for a way to display two websites next to each other in Firefox.
I visit Apples Trailers website occasionally to take a look at the newest upcoming movies and get a first impression that helps me decided whether I want to see a movie or not. It happens that I sometimes come upon a trailer that I want to download to watch again, or show a friend who does not have internet. There are unfortunately no download links at Apples Trailers site and I was beginning my search for an easy way to download the trailers I wanted in the quality I selected.
I took a quick look at the Gspace extension for Firefox in 2005 and it happened so much that I thought it was a good idea to take another look at it. Gmail gives its users lots of space, currently about 2.8 gigabytes of it which is of course to much for most mail accounts and this is where the Gspace extension for Firefox steps in. It basically makes it possible to use gmail storage in a way to store files online which seems a lot securer in my opinion than using a file hoster. The interface looks similar to most ftp clients out there, it should not be a problem getting used to gspace quickly.
We all know that it is possible to load more than one default homepage in Firefox by separating each page that should be loaded at startup with a "|". If I wanted to load ghacks and Google by default I would add https://www.ghacks.net/ | http://www.google.com/ in the home page tab of Firefox.
