Archive | April, 2008

Monitor Everything with StatusbarEx

Apr/07 in Add-ons Reviews, Settings

The web browser is a handy thing to have your monitoring tools in because it is open a lot of the time, and so then the information is always there and in your face. One of the monitoring tools that has caught my eye the most these days is StatusbarEx. It will show you a little ‘bit of everything.

monitor-firefox

It shows tons of useful information right inside of your Firefox status bar. You can find out the memory usage (of the system and Firefox), the network speed, CPU details and more. You can also select which details you would like to have shown and the text color that it uses to do so.

As you can tell from the above screenshot – you’ll also look like a real geek when doing so (which is what we love to do) and impress your non-geeky friends. How many add-ons can do that?

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Feedback Needed, How Many Posts?

Apr/05 in Firefox News

I’ve got a quick question for all the wonderful Firefox Facts fans out there. In a dream world, where you got everything you ever wanted – how many posts a day would you like to see here on FirefoxFacts.com? Leave a comment and take our poll to let me know your thoughts.

Also if you have any other feedback to share, feel free to pass it to me here too in comment form. Always love to hear all of it, good, bad and Internet Explorer.. umm I mean ugly.

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Make Menus Stay Open!

Apr/04 in Add-ons Reviews, Usability

It can become a nuisance when you want to click on multiple items in a menu inside of Firefox and right before you get to click that second or third link, the menu disappears and you have to go hunt it down again. If you want to make your menus stay open then you need to pick up the Stay-Open Menu add-on for Firefox.

stay-open-menus

With this addon you can lock your menus in place so you can go in and select multiple items before you are ready to close. Here are a few additional notes from the developer:

  • Middle-clicking each Bookmarked item in the Bookmarks Menu will open it in a tab, while leaving the menu open for further selections. (Left-click the desired menu to open it, find the items you wish to open, then middle-click each desired item to open it in a tab.) When you are done making selections, click somewhere outside the menu (or press ESC) to close the menu.
  • Also works in the same way with the Bookmarks Toolbar. This applies to the new ‘Smart Bookmarks’ as well, since by default it is a folder residing in the Bookmarks Toolbar.
  • Same functionality in History Menu (added in version 0.5).
  • The Bookmarks Sidebar stays open by default even without this extension, but I prefer the Bookmarks Menu because I like the way the folders automatically open when hovered.

You can pickup Stay-Open menu on the developer’s web site or if you have a login to Mozilla’s Add-on site you can pick it up there too.

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Twitzer – Twitter More Text

Apr/03 in Add-ons Reviews, Usability

I twitter, you twitter, we all twitter – right?  Wouldn’t you like to break the character limit there though every once in a while?  Twitzer, and addon for Firefox will allow you to go over that 140 character limit.

twitzer-twitter

Here is a little more about this Firefox extension from the developers:

If you want to post more than the 140 character limit at Twitter, install this extension. Now type away as much as you want and before posting just click on “Twitzer text”. The extension will automatically save the full text at shortText.com, create a URL and replace the typed text with the summary and URL.

All you do is select to Twitzer your text and your good to go.  On it’s own shortText.com is a really neat and unique service with another Firefox addon too.  The purpose of it is to give you a simple tool to post text online with no fuss.  No signing up, logging in just type, baby!

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Firefox 3 Beta 5 is Out

Apr/03 in Firefox News

beta-5-preview

The last of the Firefox 3 betas has hit the scene, and at this point it is hard to believe they are still finding things to improve on.  So where are the improvements from Beta 4 to Beta 5 of Firefox 3?  Well this is what Mozilla says:

Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Be sure to check out all of the release notes, and to take a full tour – Mozilla Links has you covered yet again.  So if this is the latest of the betas, what does come next?  The next release should be a release candidate version which will be what we can expect to see in the final process.  With the release candidates they will be having more people test things out and kind of polishing little things here and there. 

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IE6 is an Ugly Unbeatable Stepsister?

Apr/02 in Firefox News

Joe Wilcox over at eWeek has put together a pretty interesting graph charting the adoption rate for the web browsers out there in 2007.  The graph and story along with it are both pulling information from the recent Forrester Research report, “Enterprise Desktop and Web 2.0/SAAS Platform Trends, 2007.”

Web Browser Adoption in 2007

As you can see Internet Explorer is still pulling head as you would assume it would do, but Firefox still is holding a healthy share of the market.  Internet Explorer 7 itself still can’t beat the ugly stepsister that is Internet Explorer 6 though. 

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Giving Up on Firefox, Go IE Go!

Apr/01 in Firefox News

april-fools I got a surprise in the mail yesterday, there was a large Publishers Clearing House sized check laying by my mail box from our friends at Microsoft. Seems like they think they can buy me off and have me sell Internet Explorer to the masses.

You know what, if you saw all the zeros that came after the one on this check you would do the same thing I am about to do. Who needs Firefox and Mozilla? Here are your Internet Explorer Facts!

Who Wants to Customize the Look and Feel?

Internet Explorer doesn’t bother me with the ability of being able to decide what the browser looks like. That damn Firefox keeps tossing themes and customizations I can make to the browser interface. Who needs it? I just want a browser with an address bar and those wonderful Internet Explorer icons.

Add-ons? Extensions? Who Needs Them?

Oh please Mozilla. Are you doing to tell me that your users know best when it comes to picking additional features to add via extensions or addons to the browser? Sure if somebody wanted to download a web developer toolbar and the next guy didn’t, is that really a good thing to do?

I know with Internet Explorer I don’t have to worry about getting to customize too much.

Standard are for Sissies!

Come on, Microsoft doesn’t have to live up to standards. IE7 only supports 54% of the CSS 2.1 standard, as compared to 52% in IE6 and 93% in Firefox 1.5 and 96% in Opera 9. Internet Explorer went up two percent, is that not good enough for you? I guess next you are going to say you want the menu bar back on the top of your Windows.

Microsoft has done what is best for you hidden it because you don’t need it. If you do need it, well – we can toss it in the middle somewhere because the day we were working on that was also “cake” day at Redmond.

On an additional note I wanted to let the Opera guys know I got their buyout offer too for my soul. Unfortunately, the bank said they couldn’t cash the “I OWE U” note you left, sorry!

*cough* April Fools! */cough*

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Award Winning Shirt Design

Apr/01 in Entertainment, Firefox News

firefox-shirt-contest

Big congratulations to Tracie Andrews, the winner of the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest!  I have to say this wasn’t on my radar much (the contest that is) but this design is really awesome.  I would wear it, that is for sure!  If you want to see the other t-shirt designs – check them out at Flickr.  You have to join the group (yes, that even confused me) but there were a lot of cool designs to choose from.

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