Posted on November 8th, 2007
The availability of an untested Firefox 3 Beta 1 version on the public Mozilla ftp site has shown it once again that this information makes it on the big news sites such as Digg. This sends masses of users to the ftp which is neither prepared for the storm nor ready to deliver a version that has not been tested.
The Firefox development team reacted and created a webpage for users who wanted to reach the ftp site by clicking on a link at Digg.com. This article explained why it was not advised to download this version yet unless you wanted to take part in the beta testing process. Their reasoning was that the version was untested, did not make it through quality tests yet and that it was not mirrored properly.
What bothers me a little bit is that they do make this unfinished version available on a public ftp especially if they know that this can cause massive confusion on part of the user.
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Posted on November 7th, 2007
Adding bookmarks to Firefox is not a real pleasure. The default window does not display all of your bookmark folders by default but only a Create in Bookmarks folder. Only when the user clicks on the down arrow provided the rest of his folders are shown in the menu.
The default folder is pretty useless to me because I keep my bookmarks organized and move them straight into the correct folder. I suppose this is the way most users would want the functionality to be.
Below is a short css tweak. Once applied the Add to Bookmarks menu will always show the complete folder tree right from the beginning. To apply the tweak you need to add the lines of code at the end of your userChrome.css file which can be located in your Firefox profile folder.
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Posted on November 6th, 2007
A wonderful Firefox extension that I do not want to miss is the Download Statusbar extension which displays all current and past downloads in a bar that sits above the normal status bar. The speed, the size and the remaining time of the ongoing downloads are displayed there as well which makes this an ideal extension to see those details with ease.
Old downloads can be removed from the tab to make place for new downloads. If no downloads are active the download statusbar will not be shown at all.
This is a better solution than to display the downloads in their own download window
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Download Statusbar
Posted on November 5th, 2007
Are you one of those Firefox users that likes to use the CTRL (or ALT)+Number keyboard shortcut to quickly activate tabs in Firefox ? Pressing CTRL (or ALT) + a number between 1 and 9 activates the tab at that position in the Firefox tab bar. This is by far faster than using the mouse to click on the tab that you want to activate.
One problem when using the keyboard shortcut is that it is sometimes hard to tell the exact number of the tab that you need to activate it. The Fancy Numbered Tabs extension displays a number for every open tab in the tab bar at the position that the red X, which is used to close a tab, normally uses.
But don’t worry, that functionality is still available. As soon as you hover over a number the number changes to the red X making it possible to close the tab as usual.
Posted on November 4th, 2007
Welcome to the new daily review of what has changed in the land of the Fox since the last update of this article. I try to give a quick overview of all the new and upgraded extensions and themes that have been published. I think that providing this information is a better way of keeping in touch with the latest Firefox news, because frankly, I do not like the way the official site displays those new and updated extensions and themes.
Extensions:
Flagfox - Displays the flag of the country the website you are currently visiting is hosted in.
Foxsaver - Turns Firefox into a Screensaver.
iMacros - create macros to fill out forms automatically for example.
Open Search Fox - add any search form on any website to the Firefox search toolbar.
Update Scanner - scans websites for updates and notifies you if it was updated.
Themes:
Football Fox Theme
Posted on November 3rd, 2007
The latest versions of Firefox are automatically resizing images if they do not fit the screen which is a feature that is not wanted by some users. If you are one of those users who would like to change the default behavior and always view images in their original size in Firefox you have to change a setting in the options.
The easiest way to access this option is to type “about:config” in the address bar and search for the string “browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing” which handles how Firefox processes images that do not fit the browser screen. The setting is set to true by default which means that Firefox will resize images automatically if the image is to large to fit the screen.
Change that option to false to override it. This has the consequence that Firefox will never attempt to automatically resize an image so that it fits on the screen.
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