Articles marked as "mozilla" :
HOWTO: Still Access Firefox 2 Download
[ 18 June 2008 ]
Marked under mozilla, time savers.
As just about everyone knows, yesterday Mozilla released their third major version of the Firefox browser. Though this release comes with an overwhelming amount of improvements, some people may still want to use Firefox 2. As a web developer, my company doesn’t officially support version 3 yet (even though support for it seems trivial), so I’m using Firefox 3 Portable for QA with my full Firefox 2 install still intact.
The new design of the Firefox download page doesn’t indicate older versions can be downloaded, so to get them, browse to:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
From there you can choose a version, your platform and language. For en-US Windows users, here’s a direct link to the latest FF2: Firefox 2.0.0.20 [updated 27 January 2009].
HOWTO: Run Firefox with Multiple Profiles
[ 31 August 2007 ]
Marked under mozilla, time savers.
Firefox has a ton of built-in features that kill the competition (*cough* IE sucks *cough*). One nice feature is the ability to use multiple profiles. You may wonder, “what’s a profile?” A profile is everything that makes up your customized Firefox experience. That includes your theme, add-ons and extensions, customized menus, bookmarks, etc. By default, you use a default profile (not surprising huh?). You can create other profiles though to have different experiences. You may wonder why you’d want to use different profiles.
Examples of Multiple Profiles
If multiple people use the same account on a computer, you can launch your own version of Firefox with your own extensions, bookmarks, etc. For example, you can create a Firefox shortcut on your Desktop for each specific user of the computer. That way each user can have their own custom Firefox experience. Your parents may just want the basic browser while you may want to add on a bunch of extensions. And… you will have your own set of bookmarks, separate from everyone else’s.
If you are a web developer, you probably use a ton of WebDev add-ons to make work easier. You can create your own development profile with all that extra baggage. You can then save your default profile to be lightweight and for personal use. This way, you won’t have all of those extensions and add-ons for webdev in the way when you just want to check the Red Sox score. And, it will keep your bookmarks organized. You can have a personal set and a set for development sites.
Do you watch lots of videos on YouTube, and all those crazy sites (CollegeHumor, Break, etc.)? All of those nice extensions for rich media can get in the way. You can create a video profile for your media viewing purposes only.
There are many other uses for multiple profile. For example, a profile just for testing out add-ons and extensions. A profile souped up for contacting people, fully loaded with gTalk in the sidebar, Gmail Manager checking your inbox and meebo open for chat.
Create the Firefox Shortcut
Let’s create a new profile now. Create a new shortcut to Firefox. Right-click it > Properties. Go to the end of the string in the Target field and add the following after that end quote:
-p PROFILENAME -no-remote
Replace PROFILENAME with a new unique name for your new profile.
The -no-remote flag, according to Firefox documentation “[e]nables Firefox to run with multiple profiles; used with -P. Firefox 2 and later.”
Here’s the example I used: -p development -no-remote
Profile Manager
Double-click on the new shortcut. The first time you try it, the new profile won’t exist, so it will open the Profile Manager. From here, click Create Profile and give it the same name of the one you used in the shortcut. NOTE: it’s case-sensitive.
Make sure you choose Don’t Ask at Startup. This will prevent the Profile Manager from opening next time and will launch the profile in the shortcut.
Now that you have the profile created, launch the shortcut and your new profile will open up. Customize it as you want.
HOWTO: Get Thunderbird to Minimize to the System Tray
[ 24 August 2007 ]
Marked under mozilla.
Most email clients out there are left open when someone’s on their computer. This allows new mail to get updated regularly so the user can be alerted of the mail. Most clients also have a minimize to try feature so the program doesn’t get in the user’s way. Mozilla Thunderbird, unfortunately, does not have this built-in minimize feature. It’s easy to fix that though. Download the MinimizeToTray Thunderbird extension. It also works with Firefox and other Mozilla programs.
Once you download and install it, just go to the option menu from the Add-ons box.
Firefox Quick Search: Google-to-Peer Free Music
[ 22 August 2007 ]
Marked under mozilla, multimedia, time savers.
G2P.org offers an easy way to search Google for music. It’s been around for a while. If you have Firefox though, skip going to g2p and just make a Quick Search to find the music you want. It makes it much easier and faster to get your free music.
Go ahead and create a new Quick Search bookmark. Make the location:
HOWTO: Manage Multiple Gmail accounts in Firefox
[ 12 March 2007 ]
Marked under mozilla, time savers.
Let’s face it, Gmail has redefined free webmail. Pretty much everyone has at least used Gmail. Many people, like myself, have multiple Gmail accounts. I have my personal account, which I use to manage my domain email acounts, as well as my “junk” account. So, for those of you with multiple accounts, I’ll walk you through a way to manage them. This method uses a Firefox extension called Gmail Manager.
1. Download & Install
First, download Gmail Manager from the Firefox Add-ons site. Don’t forget to install it the fast way. Once you have it installed, a Gmail icon will appear in the bottom right corner of Firefox.
2. Setup
Right-click on the Gmail icon and click Preferences. At the top, click the Add button and enter your Gmail address and password. If you don’t share the computer with someone else, you can select save the password and login to the account automatically. This makes account management extremely helpful.
Now, click the Toolbar tab.
Under Selected account:
“Hide unread count…” will hide the number of unread emails you have in that account. I prefer to do this to save space.
“Hide alias from…” will hide the Gmail address from being displayed. I prefer to hide this as well.
I feel the color the Gmail icon is enough to determine if you have new mail or not, so the two above options are both checked for me.
Under Tooltip:
“Show labels with…” will show only the labels with new mail.
“Show new mail snippets…” will actually show a little snippet of your new mail in the tooltip. This is an excellent option.
Under Unread count:
This section is obvious. I prefer only to select the Inbox.
The Notifications tab offers additional options, such as the update time… which is set to 15 minutes by default.
3. Use it
Now you can add as many other Gmail accounts as you want. To switch between/among accounts, right-click the Gmail icon and select the account. To open your Gmail Inbox for that account, just click on the icon.
HOWTO: Search faster using Firefox’s Smart Keywords
[ 30 December 2006 ]
Marked under mozilla, time savers.
Firefox — the next generation browser you either use yourself, know someone that does, or have heard of. Firefox is such a popular browser these days because its so flexible to the common user. Wait, it doesn’t have that feature you want? Well…chances are, there’s an extension for it. Just find a user-written extension, install it…and ugh, that’s it. Nextel. Done. Firefox has some really nice built-in features that sometimes go overlooked, unseen, or just not understood. Firefox’s QuickSearch feature (a.k.a. Smart Keywords) is one of my favorites.
Say you like to look everything up using Wikipedia. You can go to www.wikipedia.org, enter a search term, and click Search. If you have a Smart Keyword set up, you can find something simply by clicking on the address bar (or hit Ctrl + L), type in your keyword, a space, and your search terms. Hit Enter, see results. Done.
Set up your own Smart Keywords
It’s easy to add a new Smart Keyword. In fact, Firefox has some built in. I store mine in the folder Bookmarks > Firefox & Mozilla Information > Quick Searches.
Go to a web page that you want to create a Smart Keyword (QuickSearch) for. My example below is for Wikipedia. Right click on the search field and click “Add a Keyword for this Search…” as shown below.
Enter a Name for the Smart Keyword. Enter a special Keyword to use as a trigger for this search. Select the Create in folder to determine where this is stored. Mine is in the folder I mentioned above.
Click OK and try it out. In the address bar, just enter the keyword, a space, and your search terms.
You’re all done. You can also customize the searches available in the search box, but I will cover that another time.
I use Smart Keywords myself all the time. Here are some keywords I use:
ud Urban Dictionary
wp Wikipedia
imdb IMDb
def Dictionary lookup
jdoc Java Docs
php PHP function search
How do you use Smart Keywords? Let me know in the comments.
RSS: explained
[ 30 August 2006 ]
Marked under general, mozilla, time savers.
These days, there are so many websites out there that have little orange boxes on their sites that say RSS, Atom, or XML. Many people get confused by them and wonder what they’re used for. It’s a fairly new form of technology to keep up-to-date with website content. RSS and Atom are two separate forms of “feeds” built on XML technology. The earliest form of RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. The n, it stood for Rich Site Summary. The latest version of RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. When a website updates — for example, this blog — the XML-based feed file gets updated with the new content of the site. This file contains the date and time of the update, the title of the topic and the actual content. It is all stored in an XML file. RSS and Atom are just two different types of this technology, but both are very similar and are an extension of XML.
So what’s it good for?
Feeds are good for keeping up-to-date with frequently read websites. Websites that provide content feeds have a special feed URL. You can enter this into a “feed reader” or “aggregator” which will pull in the content and display it to you. Feed readers are good beause you can read the content of a bunch of different websites in one central place. I use a homepage portal, Netvibes, to read feeds from my favorite websites. Below is a picture of two feeds from my homepage.
(click image to enlarge)
The above screenshot shows two different feeds, TechCrunch and Slashdot. The bold entries are new, unread entries. The number next to the feed name indicates the number of new entries on the respective website. As you can see, feeds are a great way to get a lot of content in one central location. Now you don’t have to visit a bunch of sites to see if they have any updates. Now the updates come to you, and you can actually read the updates right there.
Browsers like Mozilla Firefox and the new Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 have feed-reading capabilities built into them. In the latest version of Firefox (currently 1.5), if a website provides a feed, it will have a little orange box in the top right corner that looks like:
If you click that box, you can add the feed to your bookmarks. Once you do that, you can navigate to it in your bookmarks and the feed will expand and list the topics like such:
(click image to enlarge)
Now that you understand RSS, you can subscribe to my RSS feed to stay in-tune with my blog.
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More information on RSS/Atom/XML:
Wikipedia RSS entry
mezzoblue explanation
XML.com: What Is RSS
HOWTO: Quickly install Firefox addons
[ 21 August 2006 ]
Marked under mozilla, time savers.
One of the best features of Mozilla Firefox is the ability to download third party extensions and add-ons. This makes Firefox great because people can create their own functions to add to the capability of Firefox. Whenever you add an extension to Firefox, the extension is saved as a .xpi file.
Firefox recognizes this file type and will attempt to install it. However, since this will add to Firefox’s installation folders, it’s a security risk. By default, Firefox will block any .xpi files from anywhere until you add the website hosting the file to your Exceptions list. Well, there’s a way to get around this. Instead of clicking on the link to the .xpi file and getting a warning like this…
…just drag the link up to your address bar. This will bypass the Exceptions list and immediately ask you to verify your installation of the extension:
HOWTO: have multiple homepages in Firefox
[ 17 August 2006 ]
Marked under mozilla.
Firefox is a great browser. You should use it. If you want more than one page to be your homepage in Firefox, it’s simple. Under Tools > Options > General tab >Home Page section, enter a URL followed by a pipe (”|”) and the next URL. An example:
http://www.netvibes.com/|http://www.allthingsmarked.com/|http://www.redsox.com/
That will open three tabs, each with their respective pages.