More Best of Firefox Awards

Comments (4) · December 19, 2007 at 7:40 am · Resources

Time to hand out a few more awards to those who have made using Firefox just a little ‘bit better over the past 12 months. Congratulations to all, and yes - I am sure a few more awards might be on the way…

Best Firefox related project award?

iPox Remix - In TwisterMC’s own words, “iPox Remix is my way of letting the user customize the iPox Firefox theme to their liking.” Never have I seen a better guide on how to get a good looking theme going with a lot of hand holding along the way. By far - this multi-stepped article series deserves to be the best as far as the non-Mozilla owned projects go.

Best alternative guide to Firefox award?

Learn Firefox - It is a visual guide to help you learn more about the Firefox browser. With an original look and feel to the entire web site and project, Learn Firefox leaps above the rest when it comes to giving you a new and exciting way to learn more about everybody’s new favorite browser. Major props for Chris, Ryan and Ashley for putting this one together.

Mitch’s favorite Mozilla Firefox awareness program?

Operation Firefox - Sharing the Firefox love by placing huge stickers all over the place. Point to me where the part not to love is, because I ain’t seeing it. Winners were also recently announced, so might be time to take look back at this Mozilla project if you haven’t been there in a while.

Best Firefox Blog?

MozillaLinks.org - This is a good blog that even I like to subscribe to so I can stay ahead of the game with some really cool news and information coming out of Mozilla about Firefox. Percy does a great job and hopefully will keep up the great work. Two thumbs up from one blog to another.

Want more? Ok, here are a few quickies:

Favorite Mozilla Personality? Asa Dotzler

Best Use of the Firefox Community? Spread Firefox

Biggest Waste of Time? Why Firefox is Blocked

Have any other awards you’d like to see me hand out? It is your turn! Give me your choices and awards in comment form.

Firefox Search Box Hacks, Tips and Tweaks

Comments (6) · December 5, 2007 at 9:18 am · Firefox Settings

The search box in Firefox as totally revolutionized the way we deal with search engines on a day to day basis. I don’t go to Google.com to do my searching anymore - I do it from there. There are many more tips, tweaks and tools you can use to get the most out of this built in browser innovation.

Get More Firefox Search Plugins

The first place to check out would be Mozilla’s own search engine page. From here you can add many of the top search engines from around the Web. From Live.com to Wikipedia to even Flickr - the best of the best are all listed.

To remove one, click on your search box and select “Manage Search Engines…”. On that new options window you can sort your search engines and remove the ones you don’t want. Read the rest of this entry »

RSS Bootcamp with Sargeant Firefox

Comments (3) · November 30, 2007 at 7:09 am · Firefox Usability

Listen here Private, I am going to not only give you some tools to get your RSS editing and reading done. I am going to give you the best tools you can load into that browser of yours. Are you ready? Well ten-hut - and sound off.

Alternative and Different RSS Readers

RSS Ticker - watch as your live bookmarks and scrolls their entries across your screen while you surf.

Simple RSS Reader - When you need to get the news fast, Simple RSS gets you there faster.
With only a few clicks you get your favorite news in your toolbar.

Feed Sidebar - The Feed Sidebar is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser that displays the new items from your Live Bookmarks in the sidebar. It works well - as long as you don’t have many feeds to get through.

InfoRSS - The extension installs a small icon (looks like an earth) in the status bar. The headlines are displayed in the beside this icon in the status bar or in a separate bar (top or bottom of the screen).

Editing RSS Tools and Addons

RSS Editor - Edit your own feed with this extension. It delivers a simple desktop RSS editor for casual editing of RSS 2.0 files.

RSS Validator - Once you open the RSS feed into the browser window, you can right click on the page or goto the Tools menu and validate the RSS feed.

Traditional RSS Reading in Firefox

Wizz RSS News Reader - At first I didn’t like Wizz much (fighting the urge to make a joke about “taking” this Wizz anywhere) but it has improved with time. It is fairly powerful, feature rich, well supported and has comprehensive online help for all.

Sage - The oldest and maybe the best of the built in Firefox feed reading clients. It delivers newspaper feed rendering customizable via style sheets. It also does a good job at integrating with with Firefox’s bookmark storage and live bookmarks.

Beatnik - Simple but elegant news reader for RSS and Atom feeds. It is simple. If your looking for neat features and a “wiz bang” interface, this isn’t the extension for you. If you need a feed reader for a dozen feeds or so and you want it built into your browser, you might want to give Beatnik a shot.

NewsFox - NewsFox is an RSS reader for folks who like Thunderbird’s built in RSS reader, but they don’t use that E-mail client.

RSS Reading on the Web (along with some cool tools)

Google Reader Notifier & Google Reader Watcher - Two grade A addons that give you a way to track when your Google Reader updates with new things to read. Pick which one does the best job for you and stick with it.

BlogRovr - It fetches posts from your favorite blogs about anything you’re browsing, and shows you summaries you can open read posts without leaving the web page you were on.

Firefox RSS Resources and Guide

Comments off · May 28, 2007 at 12:00 pm · Firefox Settings

Over at Mashable.com Pete has put together a pretty good list of resources and links on how best to handle RSS feeds in Firefox.

Although many seasoned RSS users have a standalone RSS reader of choice, many people use Firefox to read their RSS feeds. Besides the standard Live Bookmark feature, there are several more advanced RSS addons for Firefox out there, some of them being developed for years now. Time to round them up and see what they have to offer.

There is a little something there for everybody. Check it out!

Switching User Agents in Firefox

Comments off · February 18, 2007 at 5:00 am · Firefox Hacks

No, this is not part of some super secret spy novel, switching your “user agent” is kind of like changing the brain of a browser. I have found a good tutorial to help you get the most out of changing Firefox’s into something else right here:

Recently my bank made some changes to web based banking facility. It is now IE only site for netbanking. They have coded site such way it only works with IE and do not work with Firefox browser. So I need to change the ‘user agent’ field in the Mozilla web browser to make it “look” and “act” like Internet Explorer (IE).

Luckily Google pointed out to a user agent switcher that is written as an extension to Mozilla products.

+ Check Out the Rest of the Guide!

Make Firefox Safe and Secure

Comments off · February 14, 2007 at 8:40 am · Firefox Security

Now I do come from the camp of folks that say that Firefox is mainly safe because it is not the tallest nail getting hit at this moment. Internet Explorer is harder hit on by those who wish to do you harm, so that is one reason why it is less safe than Firefox.

On the other hand though, Firefox is a “stupider” browser (no offense to my Mozilla friends) so it is harder for deviants out there to get it to do their evil deeds. No matter if you like Firefox or not, you have to admit there are a lot of great extensions out there that can make your browsing a lot safer. Nothing beats common sense, but having some of these extensions installed should be a good first line of defense.

+ Check Out All 9 Firefox Security Extensions!

Foxmarks Backing Up Walkthrough

Comments off · February 13, 2007 at 1:04 pm · Bookmark Help

You have probably heard about Foxmarks before, but have you used it yourself?

I know several people who have said it is a little too complicated for them. I don’t think they really gave it a shot though. It doesn’t have to be difficult. For those of you out there that need a helping hand the people at Lifehacker have put together a pretty darn good tutorial on the subject.

Foxmarks lets you easily back up your bookmarks to the Foxmarks server and sync them to any browser with the extension installed. Today I’ll detail how to use the Foxmarks extension to back up and sync your bookmarks to your own personal FTP server, whether it’s with a hosted account or your own home server.

+ Check Out the Full Guide at Lifehacker!