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. 

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.

Here is what Mozilla has to say about the issue.

Starting in Firefox 3, downloads of executable files (e.g., .exe or .msi) may fail and the Firefox Downloads window will contain this message, under the filename:  This download has been blocked by your Security Zone Policy.

This issue occurs because Firefox 3 now honors your Windows security settings for downloading applications and other potentially unsafe files from the Internet.

The rage here is that the Internet Options you see from the Control Panel links back to Internet Explorer 7.  So in a round about wacky way, Firefox 3 follows IE7’s security settings.  Need a fix?

To change the setting, open Internet Options (via Control Panel or from Internet Explorer -> Tools) and click the Security tab. With the Internet zone icon highlighted, click the Custom level… button. A list of security settings for the Internet zone will appear. Find the “Launching applications and unsafe files” setting (under Miscellaneous) and select “Prompt (recommended)”.

If that does not do the trick for you, there are a few more fix suggestions on Mozillazine.org you can try.  So are you upset about this or could you care less?

Now you could just print the page that is there, but that is going to give you all the ads, logos and other junk you don’t want on your paper. The Lexmark crew is wanting to fix that issue.

The Lexmark Toolbar is wanting to be that “better printing” extension you never knew you needed. It will allow you to cut down on the clutter, so you will only print the most important details of the web page in question.

Some of the features in this beta release of the extension include:

- One-click Print and Preview buttons

- Remove ads and other unwanted stuff with the “Clean” feature

- View, edit or print photos in Picnik, the best online photo editor

- Choose print settings such as Selected Content, Orientation and Header/Footer

Overall, I think if they are delivering this much in the beta, there are many more great things to come for future releases of this handy extension.

I’ve added many languages under Firefox options. And yet when I view a site with Japanese writing, for example, it comes up as “?????”. Even when I’m absolutely sure of the language, and have added it to my language options, the characters won’t show.

The answer? I didn’t know – but Amy figured it out and shared it with me.

It was an Windows OS thing, not a FF thing.
Controls panel –> Regional and Language Settings –> Languages –> check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box.

Have any Firefox issues that are giving you troubles? Want to be able to do something, but don’t know how? Send it in to me and I’ll do my best to find any answer to your most wanted as well.

How can you tell Firefox to save all of your downloads in one specific spot? First thing you need to do is go into Tools, and then select Options. A new window should pop up with your browser options. In that first tab, go down to the middle of the box where it says “Downloads” and then make your way down to the browse button next to the Window for “Save files to…”.

Browse to the folder that you wish to save all of your downloads to, save and then exit. Now Firefox knows your default download location. This is really handy when you wonder what that program was you downloaded last week – or if you misplace an important file from the Web, you can keep a backup of it here.