Posts Tagged ‘Firefox’

If you visit many sites often, chances are you either don’t use the bookmark toolbar because it would get crowded, or you have a bulging toolbar. To save a load of space, and make the toolbar look better, you can force it to show only the website favicons with a simple tweak to Firefox, read on!

A lot of what you see in Firefox can be changed (this is why themes are possible), and molding your browser to your own needs is not that hard. The first thing to do is find the location of your userChrome.css file. If you’re in Windows you can open any folder and type “%appdata%\Mozilla\” in the url bar (without quotes) and you should be transported to the folder where your application data is held. In most cases this is located in “C:\Users\Your-Windows-Username\AppData\Roaming\”. If you’re on Linux you can find this folder in “~/.mozilla/” and if you’re on a Mac, you’ll see it in “~/Library/Mozilla/”.

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My first time installing a Google Chrome extension was an extremely positive experience, no restarts, quick install, and an awesome plugin called Feedly. Feedly is essentially a feed reader, but it does its job in such an elegant way, that it rises out of all the other readers I’ve seen.

It’s available for Firefox and Chrome as an extension, and will pull your feeds from your Google account. Once installed you can go to the Feedly page to view your feeds, in a very user-friendly, magazine style view. You can view your feeds in a number of ways, my favorite is the cover view, which shows large thumbnails for most recent items on the left, and smaller thumbnails and excerpts for a list on the right. All the views offer great visuals, and good ways to browse, but where Feedly also excels is the reading/sharing/organization options.

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Over at Lifehacker, they do some  browser speed tests now and again, and I thought the results worthy to share with you guys. The subjects of this round were Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4 and Opera 10.5. In some areas you’ll find surprising results, especially in javascript use (Opera wins by a mile), and memory usage with extensions, which is won by Firefox.

Since I’ve been using Firefox for 10 minutes with about 6 tabs, and its eating away at half a Gb of memory, I find that hard to accept. I might have a really badly written extensions somewhere I guess, but compared to a lot of people, I hardly use any extensions at all.

To be completely honest, until now, I didn’t really care about browser speed tests because Firefox was just so ahead of the game, that the features it offered far surpassed any speed problems. Even if you had to reboot, or restart Firefox every hour, it was still worth it for your productivity. However, nowadays that Chrome is right behind Firefox (Opera is fine as well, I just never really made a connection to it) I just might change browsers for speed reasons.

For the complete list of comparisons, along with nice bar charts, take a look at the full post on Lifehacker.

I found an extension for Firefox on gHacks today I’ve always been looking for, it gives you the ability to reach specific websites with a keyboard shortut. With Launchy and the new Awesome Bar in Firefox 3 getting to sites has become much easier, but Site Launcher is a different kind of wonderful.

Once installed you can configure it by adding URL-s and keyboard shortcuts for them. You can also remove existing ones from the list, so you can tailor this addon to yourself.  The greatest thig about it is that it caters for the shortcut junkies and the occasional users too with two types of usage available, an easy to follow overlay, and simple shortcut key type operation.

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If you know about Firefox 3.1 details, you know that it contains TraceMonkey, which is the new javascript engine in Firefox. Yawn, yawn? I think not! While this may seem something developer oriented, it actually speeds up javascript a lot, and I mean a lot!

I’m not really into the technical details yet, but I am currently writing this post from a nightly build of Firefox, and Gmail loading time was astoundingly fast, I didn’t even see the loading bar. For me Gmail took somewhere between 4-6 seconds to load, it now took about 1-2. I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but many javascript intensive sites like Gmail, Remember The Milk and so on were much faster. I am running four addons at the moment, if you have more you might not see such a significant increase in speed, but I think Mozilla’s going in the right direction!

If you want to try out this new tech, take a look at Lifehacker’s article, where they have some speed comparisons and explain how to get to this newest version.

Stylish is a cool tool for Firefox which lets you add custom stylesheets to any page. What this means is that you can essentially redesign your favorite sites like Google’s search page, Remember The Milk, or even Hack Your Day if you want.

It’s obviously cool to do this, but in reality using stylish for your own purpose can have all sorts of benefits, even productivity benefits. For example, if you click on the image to the top you can see that I have redesigned my Google page. I made it blend into my theme, and I also limited the results’ width to 500px. I then use a plugin called Split Browser to keep google on the left all the time. This enables me to use the space my 22″ monitor gives me, and by applying to other sites I can create all sorts of wonders! Read on to see how.

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