Facebook is a tool that some of us use everyday, so we might as well make it look the way we want and add new abilities that we really need, right? FaceTweak is an add-on for Firefox that promises to be the Ultimate Facebook Enhancer.  With it, you can add tons of tweaks to the Facebook interface and engine to get more out of this social networking tool.

Once installed, you will see that you have many more options available for tweaking Facebook to suit your needs.  These are mainly broken down into backend fixes, that make certain Facebook features better and ascetic changes, that make Facebook look different.

Here are the main features FaceTweak has to offer:

• AutoLogin – Auto-login to Facebook (assuming Firefox is set to remember your password)
• Chat Emoticons – Adds smileys to the side of Facebook, clicking on one adds to your message
• Replace Smileys – Replace text smileys as graphics (graphics are original from Facebook.com)
• Fixed Header – Makes the Facebook navigation menu remain ‘fixed’ to the top of the screen
• Fixer – Bigger photos, better albums, download videos, show age, Google Calendar integration, etc.

Here are some of the new social options you have available:

• Auto Confirm Friend Requests – Automatically accept all friend requests
• Autopoke – Automatically pokes back pokers listed on your home page
• Deletes – Bulk delete friends
• Ignore All Requests – Denies all Facebook requests on button click
• Invites – Invites your friends to the app if they’ve already allowed the app access
• Highlight Birthdays – Highlights today’s birthdays on your home page
• Games Quick Invite – Adds quick invite links to various games (needs ‘Invites’ option enabled)
• Poke All – Adds ‘Poke All’ and ‘Poke Selected’ buttons above the pokes on user homepages
• Reply Button – Adds a reply button to comments
• Select All Friends – Select all friends at once instead of having to do so one by one

But wait, that’s not all – you also have tons of media options to play with too:

• inYOf4ceBook – Larger versions of thumbnails and profile pictures on mouse-over
• Video – Adds links to download or convert videos with Zamzar.com, and provides embedded code
• View All Photos – Places link to view all photos of a user
• View Photo in Album – View all photos of a user or an album

And on top of all of this greatness, you get over 20 new skins for Facebook, so you can change how the website looks and feels. You can pick up FaceTweak from the Firefox Add-ons website or learn more about the development of this neat tool at FaceTweak.com.

Now, most of the time, when I see Firefox asking if I want to save my tabs for the next time Firefox starts, I quickly click through whatever I have to do to turn this extra warning off. However, I was thinking the other day, I wonder how I could toggle this interesting Firefox feature on or off again?

In the Firefox menu toolbar, click Tools and the select Options. Next, under the Startup section you want to check the drop down menu next to where it says, “When Firefox starts:”.

Click the drop down menu, and then select, “Show my Windows and Tabs from Last Time”.  Once you do that, click the OK button at the bottom of the screen and you should be set.  To turn it off, you can just go from the previously mentioned setting to one of the other two.  The other two options are to show your home page or show a blank page.

Want Firefox to ask you if you want this option each time?  If so, go back into the menu toolbar, go to Options and then the Tabs section. You can go in here and check the box for “Warn me when closing multiple tabs”.

There you have it.  Now, for this to work – you will need to make sure your saving your browser history between sessions too.  Hope that helps you either turn back on this feature, or maybe even turn it off as well.

By default, Firefox has a pretty good pop-up blocker.  It gets the job done.  Sometimes, it does too good of a job and blocks a pop-up on a webpage where you want to see a pop-up though.  Today, I will be showing you how to allow pop-ups for a certain domain from within Firefox.

To access the pop-up blocker settings, from the menu toolbar go to Tools and then Options. Next, you want to select the Content panel.

Beside where it says, “Block pop-up windows” click on the button labeled Exceptions.  This will give you a list of sites that you want to allow to display pop-ups.

From here you can:

• Allow: Click this to add a website to the exceptions list.
• Remove Site: Click this to remove a website from the exceptions list.
• Remove All Sites: Click this to remove all of the websites in the exceptions list.

This can also be a good way to unapprove a website you have mistakenly allowed to display pop-ups too.

So, there you have it.  Now you know how to give a website permission to display pop-up windows, or take that permission away.  Now, in a perfect world businesses and websites would do away with the annoying pop-ups all together.  Until then though, this work around should do the trick.  Hope this helps those of you looking for a solution to let Firefox display pop-ups.

Google recently changed the way your search results look and feel with a little more navigational help.  If you are not digging the new left hand sidebar on your Google search results, and you want to remove (or just hide) it, I have two great solutions for you to try out.

You should pick up either the Hide/Show Google left-hand menu add-on or the userscript with the same name for Greasemonkey.  Both options will add a toggle button (seen as +left nav in the picture above) so you can quickly gain more screen real estate by turning these extra links on or off.

Personally, I like the new helpful links over there in my Google search results, however it is nice to show or hide them when I need them.  It is all about dynamic customization here.

You can pick up the Firefox add-on on the Firefox Add-ons web site.  If you already have Greasemonkey installed, I would suggest grabbing that version instead over at UserScripts.org.  Either way you go, you’ll be able to toggle this new Google interface feature on or off depending on your own searching needs.

Coming to Firefox, you will soon start to see your add-ons manager inside the Firefox browsing window, rather than a popup window.

Personally, I really hope they plan to do this with all the extra popup windows Firefox has, because I want everything to be integrated within the browsing experience, and it has always seemed to me that a tab would be a much better place to take care of editing add-ons, options and more.

So, do you like the planned change?  You can read more about it on Boriss’ Blog.

From head to toe, this add-on for Firefox will give you a lot of new toys, options and more to play with on your Facebook account, to make the Facebook experience even better for you.

Better Facebook Activity Tracking

After Installing, just navigate to Facebook’s web site to get started. Right off the bat, you’ll notice that your most recent notifications are now pinned to the right side of the Facebook window, as seen here:

If anybody un-friends you, you will also get notification from the front page of Facebook under the “Friend Tracker” section.

My Group Activity will alert you to new posts, members, and more in groups you are a member of.  This is much more handy than visiting each, one by one.

Better Facebook News Feed

On your news feed, you have a few more options to play with too.  Here is a little more about those from the developer:

Click ‘Mark All Read’ once you have read every story on this page. The stories will then be hidden the next time you view the page. But don’t worry – if any new comments are added they will show back up! This will let you keep track of conversations that you otherwise might have missed.

You can always go back and see all the hidden stories by clicking ‘Show All’, then hide them again by clicking ‘Hide Read’.

Better Facebook Options and More

By clicking the “Options” button on the front page, you can quickly configure and edit how you want to see updates come up.  For example, you can show, minimize or hide new friend notifications.

You can pick up the Better Facebook! add-on for Firefox from the Firefox add-ons web site.

More Facebook/Firefox Fun > Best 5 Add-ons for Facebook Fans

Get more control over your tabbed browsing experience in Firefox with Tabberwocky. This add-on for the browser will give you dozens upon dozens of ways to customize the way you work with tabs. 

Some of the features of this Firefox extension include:

• Open in new tabs from Bookmarks, History, URL Bar, and/or Search Bar
• Open Selected Links in New Tabs
• Retain tab history when opening links in new tabs
• Show/Hide New Tab button and Close Tab buttons
• Highlight unread tabs
• Set minimum/maximum tab width
• Close tabs by double-clicking on them
• Tab clicking options

Plus many more.  It would take me four or five posts to go into all the control this Firefox add-on gives to your tabs. You can pick up Tabberwocky over at the Firefox Add-ons web site.  (kudos to Lifehacker)  It will give you more tabbed browsing controls than you can shake a… well, than you can shake a tab at.

Turn off Smarter Search in Xmarks

The first thing you want to do is go to Tools > Add-ons and then click the options button for Xmarks.  Now, under the “Discovery” Tab you can disable Smarter Search.  In your Google search results, Xmarks will highlight the top three sites based on bookmarking history.  Put your mouse over the special icon to the side of the search results to learn more information such as reviews, and rankings.  If you don’t like it, turn it off.

Turn off Site Info in Xmarks

Next, in that same options window, you can also disable the Site Info, which will turn off the feature in Xmarks that gives you more information about a web site in the location bar.  Once your done disabling things, hit the “OK” button at the bottom of the window.

There you have it, now the new features in Xmarks that some people may not like are turned off, and Xmarks starts to act a lot more like Foxmarks did. 

Well, the main goal of Tab Mix Plus is to give Firefox’s tabs more capabilities.  You can quickly duplicate tabs, control the tab focus, you get all kinds of tab clicking options, undo tabs and windows, and that is just scratching the surface. 

It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

Need help using one Tab Mix Plus’s features?  They have a handy set of user forums here:

• http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/

All in all, Tab Mix Plus is still a great addition to the Firefox browser if you need to do “more” with your tabs than the default Firefox install or any other add-ons give you. 

This can easily be done via the built in search engine manager.

Click on Firefox’s search box, as if you were going to change search engines, and look at the bottom for a menu selection titled, “Manage Search Engines”.  Clicking it will bring up the Manage Search Engine List.  From here you can:

• Edit Search Engine Keywords
• Move Search Engines Up or Down
• Remove a Search Engine
• Restore the Default Search Engines
• Get More Search Engines
• Enable/Disable the “Show Search Suggestions”

There you have it.  Now Firefox has not always had this option.  Back in previous versions, you had to do some heavy duty hunting and pecking to really edit and organize your search engine selections.  This at least gives you a more user friendly interface, and I am all about the user friendly around here.