Find As You Type

I use the Firefox keyboard shortcut CTRL + F quite a lot when I try to find a phrase on a large website. While I was browsing through the about:config items I discovered an interesting option that made my life easier. The settings are called Type Ahead Find and what they do is to start popping up the find box when you start typing chars on an active website.

Don’t worry this function is only available when you are not typing into a form on the website. The key is called accessibility.typeaheadfind and is set to false by default. The Find As You Type function becomes available as soon as you set it to true.

There are several other entries that change the behavior of Find As You Type in Firefox. I would like to explain them all in the following short list.

RIP Netscape ! Recommends Firefox

AOL has finally decided to get rid of Netscape and lay it to rest in the beginning of next year. Netscape was once a huge competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which changed when Microsoft decided to integrate Internet Explorer into Windows. There was no way – at that time – to break this unfair advantage and the better browser suddenly lost huge market shares.

The final blog post at the official Netscape blog is answering some frequently asked questions about this decision and recommends to use Firefox with the Netscape theme and extensions instead.

I’m not sure why but I always thought of Firefox as a worthy successor of the Netscape browser. And it seems that the time is right to break the marketing domination with a free and better browser. It is a sad day nevertheless.

Faster Firefox Download Process ?

Lifehacker posted an article letting us know that there was a way to Speed Up the Firefox Download Process by dragging and dropping the download instead of right-clicking and selecting Save As from the menu. I’m a bit puzzled by this article and have my problems accepting their conclusion.

First of all, drag and drop does not work for all websites. If a script handles the download you can’t drag and drop that to the download icon (which you most likely have to add using the customize feature). Second, not all downloads have to be right-clicked and Saved As.

Firefox offers a very distinctive way of selecting an action for file-types. You can choose to save certain file-types, like pdf, doc or avi to the hard drive which means that whenever you left-click them they will be saved to the hard drive instantly.

What do you think, is that a way of speeding up the download process ?

Disable Adblock Plus on all bookmarked pages

I guess most of you are using the Adblock Plus Firefox extension to get rid of most advertisement on websites. I especially dislike aggressive ads like layer ads, popups and the like that force the user to act to be able to view the website.

As a webmaster I make a living from these ads however and have to ensure that they are working fine. I could do that manually and add all my sites, and the sites of the companies I work with, to the Adblock Plus whitelist so that all Ads are displayed. I just have to verify from time to time which ads are displayed to be able to remove offensive or inappropriate advertisements from my websites.

Adblock Plus offers a online script that transforms all your bookmarks into a handy list that can be imported into Adblock Plus which has the result that those domains are whitelisted. This means Adblock Plus will not disable the ads on those websites. You can naturally remove websites from that list again before you import them all.

Firefox Master Password Recovery Tool

Every Firefox user should set a master password if he has chosen to save usernames and passwords in Firefox. If no Master Password has been set all usernames, passwords and urls are accessible in the Firefox Security menu which is a huge security risk.

A problem that could arise is that a user forgets his Master Password which has the effect that he can’t access the saved usernames and passwords option and that Firefox is not filling out the forms on websites automatically anymore. Without the Master Password those information are lost and can only be reset.

FireMaster is a password cracking tool that uses three different methods of cracking a password, those are dictionary, brute force and a combination of both methods. The brute force method is the only guaranteed method but it could take months, years and even decades depending on the strength of the selected Master Password.

Save Flash Games in Firefox

This Firefox tip is probably known by many already but I get the occasional request to write about it. Flash Games are small games that are embedded on websites. They are extremely popular and many users want a way to save them locally to be able to play them on their computer without having to be online during that time.

Firefox thankfully comes with an option to save flash games so there is no need to rely on third party tools like download managers to save them. All that you need to do is visit the page where you can play the flash game and right-click a free area on that website and select View Page Info from the menu.

Make sure you do not right-click on an element such as an image or link because this will open another right-click menu without the View Page Info link. Now click on the Media tab of that window and scroll down until you find an entry of the Embed Type.

Speed up Browsing by using Keyboard Shortcuts

Are you using your mouse to browse the web or do you rely on keyboard shortcuts to speed things up a bit ? If the first is the case you might be interested in some useful keyboard shortcuts that speed up web browsing by a good bit. It may take a while until you get used to the keyboard shortcuts but once you do you will notice that everything is working out just a tad faster.

I’m only going to list the keyboard shortcuts that I’m using in my daily activity. If you want to take a look at all the keyboard shortcuts you can by pressing F1 which opens the Help and clicking on Keyboard Shortcuts. That’s the first keyboard shortcut by the way as well, hehe.

10 Firefox config settings

I spotted an interesting article over at Ghacks while reading through all the updated RSS feeds in Netvibes which was named 10 lesser known Firefox about:config parameters and I immediately thought that this would probably make a great article for Firefox Mastery as well.

Guess what, I did actually find two settings that I have not heard about yet and that would help me tremendously in my daily work. The first notable setting is the double-click behavior on words. Firefox marks a space behind the word as well by default and the setting made it possible that the space would not be marked as well. Not sure why anyone would want to mark the space as well..

The second change that I made determined how Firefox handled copy and paste operations into forms of text that consisted of more than one line. By default only the first line gets pasted in Windows while Linux pastes everything and I was able to change that behavior as well.

Firefox 3 Website Concepts

The Mozilla team will release a new version of the Firefox portal during the release of Firefox 3 and are currently considering four concepts that they published in a jslater directory on their website. John Slater happens to be the Creative Director at Mozilla which means that these concepts do have some weight and are not merely wishes of a fan.

I thought I make a screenshot of each concept and put it up here so that everyone can take a look without having to visit the website. The website has only four links to the concept images and one called Brand Insights. If they want an advice, I think they should make a thumbnail of each image as well and post that.

After seeing all four images I think I would vote for number 2, the one called agile, with number 1 being a close second place. Which do you prefer ?

Speed up Firefox Website Rendering

Firefox is waiting 250ms for data before it starts rendering a website which works well for most connections. If you however have a fast connection you can speed up Firefox website rendering by decreasing the amount to 0. Users on slow connections might play around with the setting as well and increase it a little bit which would mean that they would have to wait a bit longer before the website is displayed.

To change the waiting time type about:config in your Firefox address bar and filter for the string nglayout.initialpaint.delay. This is not a default string which means that you usually have to create it. Right-click the white space somewhere and select New > Integer. Enter nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it the value 0 if you are on a fast connection. The default value for this is 250.

The benefit is that Firefox will immediately start rendering the website even if it did not receive all the data yet. It could increase the total page loading time on slow connections if they would change the value to 0 as well.