Tag Archives | YouTube

Best Firefox Tips and Add-ons of 2009

Dec/31 in Best of Firefox

Best of Firefox Facts in 2009!

All in all, 2009 was a great year for Firefox.  It grew by leaps and bounds, and continues to be the best alternative browser out there.  Firefox Facts did pretty well in it’s own right too – surpassing the 7,000+ RSS subscriber mark.  So with today being the last day of 2009, let us all sit back and revisit some of the best posts of the year.

Here are 10 of the most read stories, tips, tutorials and reviews I have posted here in 2009.  Hope you check out some classics you might have missed, or revisit a favorite post or two.

How to Disable the New Tab Button

#10 – Love (or Disable) the New Tab Button in Firefox

Love it, or hate it – Firefox got one more addition to it’s browser that seems to have gotten a mixed reaction from the fans. The open new tab button rests at the end of your tab bar in Firefox 3.5 giving you an easier user interface to open a new tab.

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1-Click YouTube Video Downloader

Dec/08 in Add-ons Reviews

Better YouTube Downloader

Now, I know what you are going to tell me before you even say it.

“Mitch, there are already a million and one video downloaders out there, why review another one?”

Number one, you are right – there are way too many.  So what makes the 1-Click YouTube Video Download any different?  It cuts out the useless junk, and gets right to the meat and potatoes.

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Speed Up Flash Videos in Firefox

Aug/24 in Hacks and Tweaks

Want to speed up your flash video watching?  By default, Firefox takes a sort of “snapshot” of whatever you are doing every ten seconds.  Why?  It is so that the browser can restore itself, just in case of a crash.  Now you might ask, what does this have to do with flash videos?  Well, the snapshot action is what is causing your ten second delay, at times, with watching flash videos on the Web.

So what is the solution?  Time to visit our good friend, the about:config…

The quick fix for this problem, at least for my own sake, is to increase the time between each of the saves performed by session restore. By opening about:config in your Firefox address bar, then typing browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box, you’ll see a value of 10000, which is in milliseconds. (Meaning your session is saved every 10 seconds.) I changed this to 300000, or every 5 minutes, as I don’t have the urgent need for tab restoration. If you feel like being more on the safe side, try increasing it to something a bit lower, say 120000, or every 2 minutes.

I gave it a shot, and it might not be a life changing experiance after doing so, but it does seem to make the videos play faster, especially if you have several Firefox tabs or windows open at the same time.

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The “Better” Firefox Add-on Collection

Jul/28 in Add-ons Reviews

Better Firefox Addons

It is no secret I am a big fan of Gina Trapani’s line of “better” add-ons for Firefox, so I can tell you I was more than excited to see that they had been rolled together as an add-on collection, so you can grab them all at once. 

Which extensions make the list?

Better Gmail 2 – Add useful extra features to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, an unread message icon on your browser tab, file attachment icons, and more.

Better Amazon -  Highlight Amazon listings with free shipping, automatically enlarge product images, clean up book pages, shorten URLs and more on Amazon.com. Enhances Amazon.com with a compilation of user scripts and styles. All scripts copyright their original authors. Click on the script homepage in the Help tab for more information.

Better Flickr -  Adds collapsible header and sidebar, event title text wrap, colored weekend days, week numbers, and skins to Google Calendar.

Better GReader -  Preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader.

Better YouTube – A compilation of some of the best Greasemonkey user scripts for YouTube in one interface.

Go pick up the Better Pack of Firefox Add-ons and find out what is so great about them yourself.

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Easily Download Music and Videos from YouTube

May/25 in Add-ons Reviews

Download videos or music for free!

The extension, NetVideoHunter, promises you a world of easy to download videos and music from any YouTube-like video sharing web site.  With it, you can download media from places such as YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Metacafe, Dailymotion and more.

One more nice feature that comes with this add-on is that before you download any video or music, you can play it in a built-in media player.  It has both fullscreen and video smoothing capabilities too, to make your viewing experience just that much better.

Here is a video tutorial on how to get the most out of NetVideoHunter:

Now, truth be told – there are a lot of extensions out there that promise to make content downloading easy and painless, however many fail in a number of ways.  NetVideoHunter however, has yet to disappoint.  If you have your own favorite media downloader for Firefox, feel free to share!

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Download Anything with FlashGot

Apr/27 in Add-ons Reviews

FlashGot for Firefox A popular add-on for Firefox, to help you download all the links, movies and audio clips on a single page at maximum speeds, is FlashGot.  Created by the same man who brought us NoScript, this lightweight and reliable external download manager will let you download a plethora of information with a single click. 

While this extension has many good features, my favorite might be the FlashGot All.  By selecting this from the menu (or by hitting Ctrl+F3) you can grab all the links found on a current page and dispatch them to the default download manager.  Another nice feature included is the FlashGot Media option.  Watching a video on YouTube?  Quickly download it by hitting Ctrl+F7, via the right click menu or from under the “Tools” Category in your menu bar.

FlashGot might simply be the best integration/add-on for your download manager.

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Most Popular Search Engines to Add to Firefox

Mar/31 in Add-ons Reviews, Best of Firefox

We have looked at the ten most popular search extensions for Firefox, however we can not overlook the many popular search engines you can add to the Firefox search box.

Add to Any Search Bar Most Popular Search Plugins for Firefox *

  • YouTube – Find all kinds of cool web videos.
  • IMDB – Quickly find that one actor that was in that movie you just saw.
  • Wikipedia – The web’s encyclopedia.
  • Album-Cover-Art.org – Quickly find album art from your favorite musical artists.
  • isoHunt – BT search – Find ISO images quickly using this search plugin.
  • Merriam-Webster – It is like the dictionary, but Online! (insert ooh and awe here)
  • Live Search – Microsoft’s lovable underdog of a search engine.
  • Flickr – Find photos by searching via the image tags.
  • Weather Channel – Is that a tornado in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?
  • Amazon – Use Amazon’s A9 search to find Amazon products, and anything else on the Web.

Roll Your Own Search Plugin

Want to roll your own search plugin using any web site search box out there.  That is an easy task to accomplish with the Add to Search Bar extension.  If you want to “do it by hand” you can also create your own plugins with this handy tutorial from the Mozilla Developer Center.

More Search Plugin Databases

Now with those mentioned, you can’t mention the search engine box without mentioning the MyCroft project.  There you can find a search engine plugin or search provider that you can quickly add to the Firefox search box.

To check out their most popular search engines, be sure to check out the Top 100 listings.

What tools and plugins do you use to keep your searching in order?

* – Yes,I left Google off the popular plugin list, cause everybody knows about Google.

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Convert YouTube Videos to MP3

Mar/16 in Add-ons Reviews

The experimental add-on YouTube 2 MP3 will convert and download YouTube videos in the .mp3 audio format.  There is no doubt that YouTube has a large collection of music videos, so this type of service was bound to happen eventually. 

Download YouTube Videos as MP3 files!

Once installed, the add-on will add a link to each YouTube video page that says, “Convert & Download as MP3”.  Once clicked, the extension takes you to another web site where the mp3 will be available for you to download.  The only downside I could find, is that it takes some time to convert the videos to the .mp3 format. 

As a bonus, if you want to use the YouTube video to mp3 converting service without the add-on you can do that too.  Just bookmark this link:  http://youtube2mp3.wmn.eu/

You can download YouTube 2 MP3 extension on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

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Get a Timeline with Your Online Videos

Feb/11 in Add-ons Reviews

The people at VideoSurf have developed a really nice addition to Firefox, for all of you out there who are fans of watching Online video.  The VideoSurf Videos at a Glance add-on enhances your video playing experience with what they call video summaries. 

Videos at a Glance at Work

This comes in handy because it allows you to check out scenes from a video before you watch it.  It works with: YouTube Search, the YouTube Home Page, the YouTube Video Pages, and FriendFeed.

It also works for your search results too:

Even Works with Britney Spears!

A few other features included are:

  • Use the visual summary to jump in time while watching a video on YouTube’s video page
  • Discover more videos featuring the characters in the videos you click on, and learn more about them
  • Make all HD-compatible YouTube videos play in high quality (or HD) by default

If you want to give it a shot, go check out the VideoSurf Videos at a Glance page over on the Firefox Add-ons site or go lean more about VideoSurf on VideoSurf.com.

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Searching Inline with Select-n-Go

Jan/30 in Add-ons Reviews

Want to be able to browser for information from a page without leaving that page to go to a new tab?  If you want to save space or have easy access to a slew of search tools – you may want to look into adding Select-n-Go by Cleeki to your own Firefox installation.

To use it, all you have to do is highlight some text on the screen.  Then you get this cool window in a window effect. The main purpose here is to:

  • Minimum annoyance: no change of web page appearance, no unwanted tab switching, no unpleasant popups, etc.
  • Maximum efficiency: minimum operations, seamless connection, easy activation/hiding, etc.

You can do Google, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon.  If that is not enough for you – you can extend it even further by adding your own channels to it.

Select-n-Go Preview

In a nutshell, the add-on launches a browser window inside of your browser window. 

Now I promise though, that is not as annoying as it might sound.  True, it might not be the most visually appealing thing, however it does reduce your tab switching (back and forth) when searching for information Online.  You can pick up Select-n-Go by Cleeki on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

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