Website owners should create their own favicons that are placed in that tiny space next to your url and consist normally of 16x16 pixels. They show up in the bookmarks section of your browser as well and several extension for Firefox let you replace the text of the tabs with just the favicon of the websites.
If you prefer Open Office over Microsoft Office you might find the following plugin for Open Office useful. The so called Writers Tools for Open Office are a set of new functions that are added as a new menu in the software.
If you are using Google Calendar regularly you might find this little Firefox tip interesting. It is possible to display your current and upcoming events that you added to Google Calendar in the Firefox sidebar. This is actually pretty easy to accomplish.
Pressing F11 in Firefox displays the current website in full screen mode removing many of the toolbars and buttons that are not required to view a website. There is however no obvious possibility to change the appearance of the full screen view mode of Firefox.
I do not like the way all major browsers display and let you manage the bookmarks and favorites. Internet Explorer 7 displays the favorites either in a sidebar or a tiny window and it becomes really annoying if you have to edit a lot of favorites from time to time. I do add a lot of websites to the favorites at work because that is the only computer that I'm forced to use the Internet Explorer.
From time to time, you might want to check whether the contents of certain websites have changed since the last time you visited them.This could be lots of work if you intend to check them out manually and a tool, that would check websites automatically would be really handy in this situation. Especially if we are talking about dozens or even hundreds of websites and not just a handful.
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.
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.
A great feature called SpeedDial has been recently added to Opera. It's a solution providing quick access to your "Top 9" websites and it's faster than using Bookmarks. However the limited number of sites that you can add does not make it a universal feature to speed up surfing in general.
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.
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.
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 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) ?
I found the reference to Auto Ftp 2 at the Donation Coder blog. The free software can be used to copy or synchronize files between one local and multiple remote computers. You configure so called sessions in Auto Ftp 2 that have certain variables set such as local and remote path, the operations that should commence and the login details for the remote computer. Everything is looking pretty straight forward and I would like to explain only some of the options available.
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.
If you are an early adopter and don't want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.
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.
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.
Opera is already a very fast browser, but if you would have the choice between fast and faster than fast, what would you choose ? I took the liberty to compile a list of 10 great tips that speed up Opera in several unique ways. Many of the settings can be changed by simply going to Tools > Preferences in Opera but some can only be used by accessing not so obvious ways like ini files.
Please note that everything that I'm describing here worked fine on my computer. It speed up Opera and increased my browsing experience with it tremendously. While most tips will work for any users no matter their connection to the Internet some tips might only increase performance for broadband users.
I'm normally not writing that many articles with webmasters in mind but I sometimes come upon a remarkable service or site that I like to much that I have to write about it. We all know that webmasters use Social Bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us to bookmark and tag their own articles to drive traffic to their website. This is working well in conjunction with buttons that let visitors of the site add the same article to those bookmarking sites increasing the popularity of the article.
I never had the time and passion to submit my articles to many bookmarking sites and only submitted it occasionally to the most popular services. That is, until I found the site onlywire which handles most of the submitting process for me. I had to signup for the service - it is free of course - and provide login details for all the social bookmarking services that I wanted to combine. I then had to drop a bookmarklet into my browser bar and click on it whenever I was on a page that I wanted to submit to all of the services that I supplied login details for.
Amazon offers a huge product catalogue on their different (country) websites which has one major problem and that is clarity. Navigating through the content can be really painful, especially if you only want to check the current price of several items that you would like to buy. One way to handle this would be to store all products as bookmarks and check them manually every day to see if the price was reduced. This is however not very practicable.
The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores - including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) - using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availabilty including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.
A reader was asking me if there was an easy way to migrate his data - that is cookies and bookmarks - from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I can see that this could pose a problem for some users that want to use Firefox but don't want to manually add all their bookmarks again. The process of exporting and importing cookies and bookmarks on the other hand is relatively easy and can be done in a matter of minutes.
I'm using the Tab Mix Plus Firefox Extension for one simple purpose mainly. I don't like the way Firefox handles if you open more sites in tabs than the width of your screen can display. The default way is that Firefox makes the tab list scrollable which is not a perfect solution. I was looking for an extension that would create an additional row and place all the new tabs in that row. Tab Mix Plus supports this feature, you can select the maximum number of rows that should be added, the default value is three rows which means that two additional rows will be added if necessary.
If you use the Windows Vista Media Center you might have noticed that playback for various formats is not supported by default. You can't playback divx, xvid or h.264 movies or play mp3 or aac files by default which is really annoying if you want or have to use the media center.
Everyone is able to download all the files that he wants and change the preferences of your Firefox browser if he gets access to it. It could be family members that tend to use your profile and add bookmarks to it and change the layout or a public computer in an internet cafe that needs to be protected from users who like to add bookmarks with explicit content or change the startup page to a explicit image or website.
A Firefox profile stores all personal information such as bookmarks and passwords in it. Everyone who is starting up Firefox with that profile is able to use your saved passwords and cookies as well which is a security risk if you ask me. One way to overcome this would be to protect the Firefox profile folder by moving it to a location that is not accessible to anyone except you.
The first time I saw the yubnub website I was thinking that no one would need this website at all but after some testing it became clear that it offers an easy way to access many services very fast without depending on bookmarks or links. If you do work with the command line in Windows or Linux you feel right at home, you enter a command and some parameters and yubnub does the rest.
While downloading the latest version of the bittorrent client BitComet it came to my mind that I never wrote an article about this excellent client here at ghacks. I have written about Azureus and uTorrent which I have tried both but not about the client that I'm personally using because I think it is the best one of the bunch. I like BitComet because of several reasons: speed, usability and because it is using low resources.
Wow those sites seem to popup like nothing else at the moment. Everton from connected internet was writing about streamick and I decided to add an article of my own to give you an alternative to all those other streaming sites out there. Streamick offers more than 300 tv channels to choose from including BBC One, ESPN Starsports, CNN & several other news channels.
Ipods can be compared to small computers that thankfully do not run on a windows operating system. They still tend to spit out an occasional error once in a while. Most of the time it either freezes, is stuck in disk mode or displays other errors that are not that common. (like icons that should not be there).
This extension is sweet. If you like to open many tabs at once and flip around while surfing you might encounter the problem that you can't find a certain article in the massive amount of tabs that are open at the time. I usually flip through them until I find the article that I was searching for. Takes a lot of time and I always was hoping for an extension that would help me optimize this procedure.
While I was searching for a way to reduce the font size of my bookmarks toolbar I came across the extension UI Tweaker for Firefox. It felt strange that I've never heard about this extension before because it has some really nice features that change the appearance of firefox. The extension offers five tabs (Menu hacks, Toolbar hacks, Tab hacks, Findbar hacks and Miscellaneous hacks).
The requested web page was not found. Errors. I hate them. Never know if the server is down because it was taken offline, because it is experiencing traffic spikes or the admin is tampering with the system. My normal solution would be to hit F5 a few times and see if the website loads fine. If it does not I tend to forget about it or save it in the bookmarks if it is worth trying again in a few hours.
Netvibes offers their users a way to create a personalized homepage on the web. I'am using it mainly to display the RSS feeds that I'am subscribed to but Netvibes offers more than that. You can create tabs just like in Firefox and name them, I categorized my feeds this way by giving them names like seo, money and games. You are able to add numerous feeds to every tab plus additional features that come in handy like a bookmarks manager or a todo list.
Coral CDN (content distribution network) might be the solution if you can´t reach a website because it is either blocked by an administrator, slow or even completly unreachable. Filters and restrictions become more common on the internet. Schools and workplaces blocking access to unwanted sites and networks is a prime example. I can understand that a company does not want you to surf at websites like Ebay during worktime but what about breaks ? What if you are in school and some class did not take place and you would like to check your mail accounts ?
Shame on me that I did not discover this firefox extension earlier. Selenium IDE is a firefox extension that is able to automate, record and playback tasks in firefox. It has therefor more than one purposes but here is a great one that you will like. Many people do the same tasks when they start their browsers, check their webmail accounts, log into a forum they visit and check for the latest items on ebay for example.
The Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet is a great way to learn more about the firefox browser. New users will find this one page firefox reference useful because it lists all those little tips and workarounds that speed up your firefox workflow.
Yeah that´s right. I thought it would be nice to have one article for both extensions because they work rather similar. Stealther temporarily disables the following settings in firefox: Browser History, Cookies, Downloaded Files History, Disk Cache, Saved Form Information and Sending Referrer Header.
