Print Only What You Want in Firefox 3

Comments (9) · August 20, 2008 at 6:56 am · Most Wanted

Checking out Michael Horowitz printing tale of woe from Firefox, I have to say he is right.  Trying to print this page (test it yourself using print preview) looks like a horrible jumbled mess.  Try playing with the example article yourself - it is true!  Hold on, there has to be a fix for printing a badly formatted page, right?

If you said yes, you win… well, you win nothing, but you do have the pride of knowing Firefox is a crafty tool in the right hands.  What I want Michael to do is left-click on his mouse and select all the text he wishes to print.

Got all the text from the article highlighted?  Good.  The next step is to go to the File menu and then select “Print…”. (You can also hit Ctrl + P)  That will bring up the Print Options box.  Under Print range make sure you select “Selection”.

Doing so will make sure you are only printing what you have highlighted from the article.  This way you can get rid of the useless junk like the sidebars and headers.  You only print what you need!  Hit the “OK” button and you should only print the article and none of the rest of the information on the web page.

The final result is a nicely formatted article without any of the rest of the junk you don’t need. 

The Super Essential Ultimate Unofficial MySpace Toolbar

Comments (5) · August 19, 2008 at 6:25 am · Firefox Usability

How is that for a Firefox add-on name?  Alright, truth be told I might have added a little to it.  The toolbar’s name is really just the Ultimate MySpace Toolbar.  I think my name has a little more flare though.  This MySpace toolbar offers a lot of nice features including:

• Easily navigate MySpace from anywhere on the web
• Stay connected to MySpace.com with persistent login
• Receive notifications with updating messages
• Clean up messy profile pages with the “Simplify” button
• Make your profile look good with My Space or Yours.net custom layouts
• Navigate everything on your MySpace profile and other users MySpace profiles with dual menu controls

Ok, so where is the catch?  This MySpace toolbar is brought to you by the same people who developed Me.dium.  You get to merge two of the Web’s darlings, MySpace and Me.dium… kind of.  The MySpace toolbar comes with Me.dium’s Social Search, which they describe as “the world’s first crowd-powered search engine”. 

It will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the entire internet with search results generated by what the crowds are surfing right now!  Just be careful for those oddball Firefox loving freaks out there on MySpace.  

Rein Theme for Firefox Does Monochrome Right!

Comments (2) · August 18, 2008 at 6:56 am · Firefox Themes

Rein, which in German means “pure”, is one of the best looking simple themes I have seen in a while.  Usually the more colorful themes catch my eye the most but this one is well worth checking into.

Here is a screenshot of this awesome monochrome flavored theme:

You could definitely say this theme was offbeat and a ‘bit different for sure.  You can pick up the Rein theme for Firefox 3 and up over at the Firefox Add-ons web site.  Also, when your there scroll down to the “advanced details” section for a few more tweaks of your own you can add to this elegant skin for Firefox.

Add Tab Clicking Options

Comments (1) · August 18, 2008 at 6:33 am · Tabbed Browsing

Need a few more options for your Firefox tabs?  Twanno’s Tab Clicking Options extension for Firefox should do the trick.  With the Tab Clicking Options extension it is possible to set various actions to different clicking events on the tab bar or a tab in the Firefox browser.

The events you can assign an action to are:

• Double clicking
• Clicking with middle mouse button
• Left clicking with control-key (or meta-key on Mac) pressed
• Left clicking with alt-key pressed
• Left clicking with shift-key pressed

And the actions which you can choose from are:

• Open a new tab
• Reload the tab
• Reload all tabs
• Close tab
• Close other tabs
• Close all tabs
• Duplicate Tab
• Duplicate Tab in New Window
• Undo Close Tab (only in Firefox 2.0 beta or with extensions)
• Bookmark Tab
• Bookmark All Tabs (not in Firefox 1.0)
• No Action

This is no doubt that Tab Clicking Options makes it easier to work with your tabs in a number of different ways.  Also, because I know somebody will bring it up - Tab Mix Plus will also do a lot of these same things too. So if you want an alternative - there you go.  (via Download Squad)

Bonus:  Via Twanno’s Firefox extensions page you can also pick up his Duplicate Tab add-on for the browser.  It allows you to clone a tab along with its history.

Vixpa Theme Has Vista Style is XP Feeling

Comments (3) · August 16, 2008 at 9:41 am · Firefox Themes

The Vixpa theme for Firefox is an attempt to refresh the Windows XP-style icons with the more polished Windows Vista feeling.  Your not getting the same old icons though.  All icons have been redrawn from the ground up, with a few original icons to replace those of XP’s. 

Here you have Vixpa with the normal sized icons:

Here you have Vixpa with the small sized icons:

Well worth checking out if you are missing that old Windows XP look and feel.  You can download the Vixpa theme over at the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Troubleshooting Firefox Problems

Comments (1) · August 15, 2008 at 7:00 am · Firefox Settings

Firefox works fine, but then the worst might happen (even to you!).  Something goes wonky and Firefox goes from a browsing tool to an annoyance.  So how exactly do you troubleshoot an issue with Firefox?

For most people, I would suggest trying to run Firefox in Safe Mode first.  You can use the command line:  firefox -safe-mode to get there (for Windows users).

On Linux, you can go to your Terminal and run (for Firefox): /path/to/firefox/firefox -safe-mode

On Mac OS X, go to Utilities (in the Applications folder) and open Terminal, then run (for Firefox): /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -safe-mode

From there you can disable add-ons, reset toolbars and controls, reset bookmarks to Firefox defaults, reset all user preferences to Firefox defaults and restore the default search engines. 

What if Safe Mode Does Not Help?

If that does not do the trick for you, you might want to try opening up a clean profile to see if you are still getting the problem.  Check out this previous post to fine out how to launch the profile manager to do so.

Key thing to remember here is if it is a problem with all of your Firefox profiles (your current one or a new one) then you might want to backup and do a clean install of Firefox.  If not, then you might be able to cure you problem by creating a new profile for yourself to use from now on.

Tagmarks - Better Tagging Through Icons

Comments (2) · August 14, 2008 at 6:55 am · Bookmark Help

Want to make tagging your bookmarks as easy as clicking an icon?  Tagmarks, the add-on for Firefox, hopes to do just that.  The idea here is to bring one-click bookmarking in Firefox together with the tagging power of the browser.

With Tagmarks, you have a lot of different icons that popup whenever you hover over the traditional bookmarking star you see in the Firefox 3 address bar.  When you click in each icon, it will add the page to the bookmarks and associate that icon with that page, through the use of tags.

Selecting one icon has the same effect as clicking on the bookmarking star. It will add the page to the bookmark.   The perk here is that it will also apply a tag to the page and always remember and show that icon when you are at that page.  Think of it as a visual tool for you too, to say for example, “oh that is a search magnifying glass, this must be a search site”.

Watch the Screencast of Tagmarks in Action!

You can pickup Tagmarks on the Firefox Add-ons site.  It is still sandboxed, so if you need a login to download it, check out this list of user names and passwords you can use.  Also check out the author of the add-on’s web site for more information on how to get the most out of Tagmarks.