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What to Backup Before Moving to Firefox 3

Jun/19 in Settings

bookmark-backups If you haven’t made the jump yet, there are a few files you may want to make sure you back up before going from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3.  The first would be your password files.  These files are located in your profile folder. 

Backup the Firefox files called:

  • signons.txt
  • signons2.txt
  • key3.db

Copy and past them into the place you want to back them up to, and you are done.  To restore them, make sure you don’t have Firefox running and then go into your current profile folder and copy and move them in.  They should replace the ones in there currently.

Now to backup your Firefox 2 boomarks, dive back into your profile folder and look for a file called “bookmarkbackups”.  Double-click that folder, and there you have some of your saved bookmarks that you thought you had lost waiting for you to restore them.

bookmark-manager-firefox-3

To restore your bookmarks in Firefox 3, go to Bookmarks and then Organize Bookmarks.  In the Library, click on Import and Backup and click on “Import HTML”.  The on screen wizard should walk you through the rest of the steps.

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Add Many Regional Clocks (or just one) to Your Statusbar

May/14 in Add-ons Reviews, Settings, Usability

FoxClocks for Firefox Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.  The FoxClocks add-on for Firefox allows you keep an eye on the time around the world – or just your local time – by putting small clocks in your statusbar.

This has been one of Mozilla’s favorite featured extensions for some time, due to the fact that well… people like to know what time it is?

Here is a little more about FoxClocks from the developer:

You can set each clock’s colour, or even have a clock change colour during certain hours (perhaps green when it’s a good time to Skype your friends in Japan). Too much stuff in your statusbar? Move your clocks to a toolbar, or switch to ‘icon’ mode and hover over the FoxClocks icon to see your clocks.  FoxClocks’ Zone Picker tree lets you browse virtually all the world’s time zones by country, region or city. Enable automatic database updates and you’ll always have the right time.

One more neat feature of FoxClocks is if you have Google Earth installed, you can right click on a region’s clock and it will take you right there.  A simple addon to add a clock, or for travelers – to keep track of many clocks.  If this is an itch you have to scratch, you can now do so with Firefox.

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Death to the Multi-paged Article or Post?

May/01 in Add-ons Reviews, Settings, Usability

combine-multiple-pages Repagination is an add-on for Firefox that promises to end the need to click here to go to part two, part three and part four. At the end of some articles, you often see the links to more pages and for some people, that is a bothersome trait of Online publishing.

They want to see everything all at once. That is what Repagination has come to the dance to do.

For example, here is how you would use it on a Google search:

To use, right-click on a “Next” link (it works with other languages, too) or a “2″ link, select Re-Pagination, All. Or select Re-pagination, Limited and the number of pages to append. For an example, see the previews of this extension. For photos, right-click on the “Next” link, select Re-pagination, Slideshow and the duration in seconds of each page display. The pages will replace each other instead of appending.

So if your looking for an easy way to combine a multi-paged article into one single web page, give Repagination a shot.

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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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Simpler Mail in the Browser

Feb/26 in Add-ons Reviews, Settings, Usability

Not really a mail client, and not really a part of your browser either – Simple Mail wants to be the lightweight e-mail client you thought you always wanted but never thought you could have.  The Simple Mail extension allows you to write, read and get notified about message from inside of Firefox.

Simple Mail Screenshot

Some of the features include:

  • Color coded messages
  • Search
  • Can set to “download headers only”
  • Delete messages from the server
  • Address book

If you are used to using a heavy duty e-mail client, this might not be the addon for you.  If mail management isn’t that important to your day to day life and you just need an easy way of checking it, then Simple Mail is the client for you.

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Fixing Firefox Popup Annoyances

Feb/07 in Settings

Two popup window annoyances that come up are when you yourself can not resize a window because the designer has locked it down to that one shape and size and when a web site resizes your windows or moves them around without asking. We will start with that one first.

Stop Resizing and Moving My Firefox Browser

Want to stop the ability for web sites to resize your browser window or move it around? In Firefox go to Tools, then Options the the Content tab. Where you see the check mark box for “Enable JavaScript” hit the Advanced button next to it. Here you can enable or disable the ability for web sites to resize or move your existing window.

Turn Back on My Ability to Resize Any Popup Myself

Now the second situation you might find yourself in is when you want to resize the window but the designer locked it down so that you can’t. Thanks to gHacks.net though for finding this next tweak, you can override the “cannot resize popup” setting when you run into popups that can not be resized.

There is however a way in Firefox to override the “cannot resize popup” setting which in turn makes it possible to resize any popup that you might come across. To do so you need to type about:config in the address bar of Firefox and filter for the term dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable. Set the value of this setting to true to be able to resize all windows in Firefox.

Restart Firefox and you should be able to resize those popup windows on any web site.

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Best Screen Grabs Come From FireShot

Jan/24 in Add-ons Reviews, Settings

I’m back to using FireShot. This extension that allows you to take screenshots of what is inside your browser window enticed me to no end when it first came out – but with it’s lack of features I had to let it go. Here is a little more about the extension just in case you missed it the first time around…

What is FireShot and Why Do I Need It?

FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.

FireShot in Action

Some of these newest features include:

  • Screenshot can be uploaded to server for resizing, commenting and blogging.
  • Added Undo/Redo feature
  • Added “Resume editing” option
  • Line width can be specified
  • Improved page extents detection mechanism (now supports GMail, E-Bay and other frame-based sites)
  • Improved memory management routines and error handling messages.
  • Added MS Outlook support
  • Working folder can be set up and periodically erased.

As you can see there is even more to love here. More now than ever before! Give the FireShot extension another shot. It is the perfect compainion for anybody who works with screen grabs a lot.

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More Command Line Firefox Tips

Jan/03 in Settings

After yesterday’s post about launching tabs from the run box I thought I would share with you some other command line Firefox tips worth getting familiar with.

Open the Firefox profile manager: firefox -p

Start Firefox with a specific profile: firefox -p “user name”

Open a Specific URL: firefox -url http://www.firefoxfacts.com

Open a URL in a New Window: firefox -new-window http://www.firefoxfacts.com

Open a URL in a New Tab: firefox http://www.firefoxfacts.com

Search Your Default Search Box Search Engine: firefox -search yourtermhere

For more that you can try I would suggest checking out the command line article over at MozillaZine.org or at Mozilla.org. Some still work, and some might not – but these are the best of the ones I found. If you have any suggestions for alternatives you know feel free to drop in a comment here and let us all know about your favorite.

Check out the other posts in this series:

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Copy Your URLs in Every Open Tab

Dec/28 in Settings

Copy All URLsIf you are looking for an extension to copy all the URLs in the open tabs you have in Firefox, there is only one choice you have. Copy All URLs does the job and it does it well.

After installing – all you need to do is right click on any web site, then pick  Copy All URLs from the menu.  From there you can copy all the URLs for the open tabs, or paste them.  Simple enough, right?

After copying the URLs into any text area or document of your choice they will come out as URL, then title, URL, then title, URL.. well you get the idea.  This extension could come in really handy if you were wanting to send somebody a list of links or wanted a good way to start a super list on your own blog of some of your favorite web sites.

Be sure to pick it up over at the Mozilla Addons site, and let me know if you find any other copy and pasting tools you enjoy.

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More Than 6 Ways to Make Images Better

Dec/18 in Settings

Without images on the Web, we would be filled with a black and white text bonanza. Boring, dull and without personality and flair. So pictures, graphics – stupid kung-fu fighing kittens with even stupider sayings attached to you, I salute you. With Firefox you can get a little more out of your images other than just viewing them. Any browser could do that, but can your browser…

Zoom into images?

Image Zooming in FirefoxOk, maybe image zoom isn’t the hardest thing to do. With the use of either the Image Zoom or zoomFox extentions you can get up close and personal with any images you find on the Internet. With zoomFox the image is opened in a new tab which also contains a thumbnail view of the image used to scroll around more easily, zoom controls with various zoom levels. Image Zoom goes for a much more traditional way of doing things by letting you click to zoom in. Either are great extensions for browsing really big pictures or graphics.

Allow you to edit photos?

Picture Editing in FirefoxWhen it comes to photo editing, both Picture2Life and Picnik come to mind. These two extensions export your find to an Online image editor that will give you even more creative control than MS Paint. (like that was a hard thing to do) In all honesty though it is amazing how these Web 2.0 online applications stand up against some of the basic photo editor competition out there. With the resources they have it is hard to see how anybody else could do better than what these two extentions (+ services) offer.

Change the way you view your images?

Slideshow Pictures in FirefoxThere has been a lot of innovation when it comes to graphics and pictures via the browser too. FoxSaver is an extension that we have tackled here before that turns Firefox into a screen saver and photo viewer. Tossing in their support for media RSS and you have a winner. Another unique image extension out there is PicLens. It instantly transforms your browser into an full-screen slideshow experience.

Need a few more tasks for images that you can only get done with the help of an extension?

What else do you do or need from you images?

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