Top 8 Cool things you can do with Firefox
May 21st, 2006
Firefox is one of my favourite peices of software. Fast, secure, and most of all, open source. Even though I've been using it since its "beta" days, I continue to learn new tricks. There are many lists like this on the net, but I haven't found this stuff collected in one place before, so here are some of my favourite Firefox tips. I decided to stop at 8... I know 10 is cooler, but adding 2 more would take "filler".
Instant Search
Firefox allows you to create Keyword Searches in which you can just type in, in my case, "g" in the URL bar. Or for Wikipedia it is "w". For word highlighting you can just use Firefox's search functionality.
It is really quite easy. Go to http://www.google.com and right click on the textbox where you would normally enter your search. Click on "Add a Keyword for this Search..." and then just set whatever keyword you would like in the Keyword textbox. So for Google I just entered "g". You can do the same thing with any search box, so I've got it setup to work with Google (g), Google Local (gl), Google Image (gi, Wikipedia (w), Download.com (dl), Dictionary.com (d), Rottentomatoes.com (rt), IMDB (imdb), and WHOIS (whois).
Quick Tab
In firefox you click the adress bar and start a new tab with the link via alt+enter
Webdeveloper Extension
If you are a web developer, you need the webdeveloper extension. If you are Chris Pedrick is a genius. 'Nuff said. For all your Web 2.0 goodness, you also need Firebug to help you trouble shoot all those XMLhttp requests. When I was building BambooInvoice I kept it open pretty much the whole time.
Multiple Home Pages
When you press the home button you go to your homepage. That's nice. But what if you wanted many homepages? In the Home Page URL in Preferences (or Options, depending on your OS), you can specify a multi-URL home page. The multi-URL format used is just pipe-delimited URLs (e.g. URL1|Url2|URL3...etc.)
Each URL is then opened in a separate tab.
Remove Saved Form Inputs
As you type stuff into a form text input, Firefox, remembers everything for your convenience later on, and next time you start typing the first fiew letters, it helpfully offers to finish off the rest of your typing in a drop down. The problem? What if you typed "Derek Allrd" instead of "Derek Allard" (as I've done about 1,000,000 times)? You could delete your entire saved forms (Tools > Options > Privacy > Saved Form Information), but how do you remove only 1 entry? Easy, start typing, then when the option you don't want comes up, select it and press shift-delete. Magically, only the 1 entry will be removed.
This also works for the quick search, and address bar.
Find as you type
OK, if you've been using Firefox for a while, you've probably seen this, but its worth mentioning that you type "/" and then start typing a word after that, and Firefox will highlight that match for you in sequence. Want to find it again, just press F3.
Folder Bookmarks
If you've saved a bunch of bookmarks into a folder, you can open all the bookmarks at once by right-clicking on it and choosing "Open in Tabs".
Flash Pop-Ups
OK, I'm not recommending this one, but its a useful trick to know. Even with the native popup blocking of Firefox, some still sneak through. This is almost always because they are using Flash to launch the popup, so Firefox doesn't detect it. The good folks at forevergeek have your solution.
To block pop-ups from plugins, open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser, type about:config in the address field. Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and select New > Interger.
Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the resulting dialog, hit OK, type 2 in the next dialog and you're all set.
This pref can actually take three values:
- 0: open allowed
- 1: the opened windows are treated as popups, but they're allowed to open (we limit the number of these types of popups)
- 2: the window is a popup, block it
Some have reported success with this method while a few have reported some problems. Some people claim that using the AdBlock extension or athe FlashBlock extension will also do the trick.
This entry was made on May 21st, 2006 @ 11:00 and filed into Browsers, How-To.
