Must-have FireFox Hacks

[larryhead]

For anyone interested in spicing up their browser:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69781,00.html


Interesting that del.ico.us was acquired by Yahoo on Friday.

[MigueL]

I have fire fox and I must say I am not impressed. This could be for a lack of user knowledge. the thing I hate the most is my back and forward buttons on my mouse dont work with fire fox so I have to click on the back or forward buttons. Do you know how to fix this LH? Maybe I just need a newer version or an update or something. The buttons Im talking about are on the side of my mouse....

[007]

Y : Firefox is great! Although I don't know the buttons of which you speak, don't dog it.

LH : Do you recommend any of these hacks? I am not techie enough to even know what I was looking at/for...

Finally, I (again) highly recommend the Stumbleupon plugin that LH turned me on to. I have found a ton of awesome sites using it.

[slam]

i still feel a major annoyance every time i have to open up internet explorer and realize that the damn thing still doesn't have tabs! holy crap, what is this, 2003?

my suggested extension would have to be adblock. it can take some getting used to, but once you have it 'trained', you'll forget what banner ads even look like! i mean, if you're not going to click on them anyways, why show them?

Y: i know the buttons you speak of... i dunno why they don't work in firefox, though. they work just fine on my windows box at home. just grab firefox 1.5 and see if that fixes things. you could also download the 'mouse gestures' plugin, which i know larryhead likes alot.

[larryhead]

Here are my must-have FireFox extensions:

Adblock:
Filters any ad (and flash ads) from web pages. Also supports wildcards (*) so you can block every ad on a site by blocking it's ad directory, like: http://www.somesite.com/ads/*

Image Zoom:
Adds zoom functionality for images

Web Developer:
Adds a menu and a toolbar with loads of web developer tools to mess around with people's websites

Super DragAndGo:
Highlight and drag a link or anything like a uri (ie. "somesite.com") and throw it... also, if you throw a word or phrase it will automatically do a google search on that phrase for you

All-in-One Gestures: (My Favorite)
Let's you navigate forward/backwards, open/close tabs, jump between tabs and more by holding down your right mouse button and making a gesture... it's like manual kung-fu for browsing the web. (e.g. drag to the right, goes foward.. to the left goes backwards)

Google Pagerank Status:
Displays the google pagerank in bottom status bar of browser

DownThemAll:
When you want to grab all the images or videos on a page... this is the extension to dump them all onto your hard drive.

Get them here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/

Also... do this speed tweak to speed things up:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2005/02/04/firefox_speed_boost_tweak_tips.htm

[larryhead]

I have fire fox and I must say I am not impressed. This could be for a lack of user knowledge. the thing I hate the most is my back and forward buttons on my mouse dont work with fire fox so I have to click on the back or forward buttons. Do you know how to fix this LH? Maybe I just need a newer version or an update or something. The buttons Im talking about are on the side of my mouse....

That's weird... is it a M$ mouse I'm guessing? There's probably an extension or a setting in FireFox menu you can use to set those buttons.

[withoutcanseco]

also, in LHs link above here is what i use:

Image zoom (already discussed)

Paste Email (allows you to configure strings that you can paste in text boxes just by clicking the button, so you dont have to type it in)

IE View (view a page in IE...useful because 99 percent of people that code pages on the net are idiots and they will only work in IE)

WebMailCompose (specifies an email client that opens when "mailto" links are clicked. i have it setup to open up a gmail compose page. it's nifty)

[MigueL]

Thanks LH and slam I will see if I can get it to work. I have a great Logitech Bluetooth mouse and docking station and I cant live without those buttons. I hate always having to click on the back button. Also I have found that there a sites that you cant see all the stuff on with FireFox. Do you know how to fix this? I go on a bunch of government sites everyday and some I cant see the stuff or they don’t work right so I have to go back to Explorer. I use FireFox 90% of the time because everyone says it is a must. I definitely don’t look at Midget porn on explorer and get fuked up viruses like some lacklands I know. :wave:

[slam]

yeah, a lot of government webmasters suck, and design their sites to work exclusively in IE. not much firefox can do about that! just get the 'ie view' extension, so if you hit a site like that, you can immediately open the page in IE.

[007]

Also... do this speed tweak to speed things up:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2005/02/04/firefox_speed_boost_tweak_tips.htm

This is invaluable.
It probably doubled my speed on page downloads.

[MigueL]

I discovered the problem with my mouse, it turns out that logitech doesnt support those functions in firefox so I am buying a better mouse that does. problem solved :D

[bighead_42_1090]

I discovered the problem with my mouse, it turns out that logitech doesnt support those functions in firefox so I am buying a better mouse that does. problem solved :D

You might want to try updating your drivers before you do all that. My logitech works just fine.

[MigueL]

sorry what I ment to say is the model I have, MX 900, does not support firefox for those advanced functions. Other newer mice do and so I plan to buy their lazer 1000 which is a gaming mouse. It looks bad ass let me know what you think bighead I know you are in to the amount of magapix they have and what not. I remember yours was pretty bad ass......let me know how the 1000 compares.