Firefox Repagination add-on

Don’t you hate it when you visit websites that divide articles to increase their pageviews and look more appealing to advertisers this way ? While some websites provided a print link that displays the full article others do not have this luxury and if you want to read the full article you have to click next a dozen times.

Not very user friendly if you ask me. enter Repagination for Firefox. This little Firefox add-on adds an option to the Firefox right-click menu when hovering over specially named links. It only becomes active on links that are either numbered (1,2,3,4) or named Next.

The option Repagination becomes visible on those links. If you select it you can load all other parts of the article below the current part. That is extremely useful for paged articles. You can limit the amount of pages that should be loaded below the current one, it ranges from 5 to unlimited.

Repagination comes with a slideshow option that is great for photo galleries. You can select a delay of 1 to 64 seconds until the next photo of the gallery is displayed.

The add-on does not work with any website that is dividing their articles though. Some websites prefer to name the next links and do not use next or a numbered approach. Those paged articles do not work that well.

A great addition to this add-on would be the option to use an automatic approach for some websites that you visit regularly.

Changing the Fonts in Firefox

Changing the fonts in Firefox, why would someone want to do that ? Maybe because of the same reason someone changes Windows system fonts, maybe because the fonts that are displayed are not optimal for his display setting, say Clear Type. I recently ran into a problem that Firefox was displaying text in forms so stuffed that it was impossible to read, even when changing the size of the font .

It’s obviously better to use Clear Type fonts if you use a LCD monitor and have Clear Type enabled. Firefox by default uses Verdana and Arial I think as Serif and Sans-Serif fonts and another one for Monospace. The Monospace font was the one that was causing the troubles for me, here is a screenshot of the font setting in Firefox.

And here are some examples of how fonts change the display of text on websites. JPG is a lossless format and results might look different on your computer. The best option would be to test different fonts to see which works the best in your environment.

You can access the font settings in Tools > Options > Content Tab > Advanced Button.

Firefox Corbel Font:

Firefox Arial Font:

Firefox Cambria Font:

Firefox Candara Font:

Install Firefox add-ons locally

The usual way to install a new Firefox add-on is by left-clicking on the link on a website which will start the installation. You might be asked to allow the website to install add-ons in Firefox but that’s usually it. I have lately experienced some troubles with several installations of Firefox add-ons. I did receive download errors for instance or installations that would simply stop at a point.

My thoughts on this topic were that it would probably be easier to install the add-ons locally, meaning to download the xpi file of the add-on and install it from my local hard drive which would actually be the same process that Mozilla Thunderbird users perform when installation add-ons for the email client.

My only problem was that I did not know if this was possible at all. I did check the add-ons menu first but there was no option to load a xpi file from the hard drive.

I then tried to use the File > Open File menu and what can I say: It works! I was able to install the add-on from my hard drive using the Open File dialog.

You can download the xpi files by right-clicking them and selecting Save As from the menu.

How to remove unnecessary Firefox plugins

Plugins are added by third-party applications to Firefox which add some kind of functionality to the browser. While some plugins make good sense, say the Quicktime plugin for instance, some others are not that easily understandable. Why would I need a Microsoft Office plugin for instance ?

You can check the installed plugins by entering about:plugins in the address bar. The list contains all available plugins that are currently loaded in Firefox. Information like the name, location on the hard drive and a short description are available. The description helps to determine if that plugin is actually needed on your system.

My preferred solution for plugins that I (think I) do not need is to create a temporary directory and move all unnecessary plugins into them. This ensures that I can move them back if I should discover that I do need the plugin.

Visualize the Firefox History

I have to admit that I’m not using the Firefox history function at all and clear it – and other data – whenever I exit Firefox. Call me a little bit paranoid but I prefer it that way. Some of my friends however love their history, they use it to access websites with a few clicks instead of using the keyboard. Each to his own I’d say.

I think we can all agree that the Firefox history in the way it is displayed in the sidebar is not the optimal way of displaying information. Only the page titles are displayed and as we all know webmasters are a lazy bunch, they create websites using copy paste and some tend to use the same title for all of their pages which makes it quite difficulty to identify the correct one.

ThumbStrips visualizes the Firefox History. After installing the extension it adds a toolbar at the bottom of your Firefox screen that displays screenshots and titles of the latest websites that the user has visited. Thumbnails can be sorted as well by dragging and dropping them around. A click on a thumbnail loads the website immediately.

Extend Firefox 2 Results are up

The winners of the Extend Firefox 2 contest have been announced yesterday. The contest did end on December 31th of 2007 and saw more than 100 entries. The task was to create a Firefox add-on in time, the prices travel and accommodation to a Mozilla Developer Day, a 15″ Macbook and several others. I don’t think that most participants did enter the competition for the prices though.

The three Grand Prize winners are Tony Farndon from the United Kingdom for his Minimap Sidebar Extension, Massimiliano Mirra from Italy for his SamePlace add-on and Jay Meattle from the United States who created the Shareaholic add-on.

Minimap Sidebar Extension displays a minimap in the sidebar. Maps can be easily created by drag and drop or by right-clicking the information. It’s a real time saver if you have to lookup maps regularly.

SamePlace is a multi-network Instant Messenger add-on that makes it possible to chat with buddies from many IM networks in Firefox.

Shareaholic is a great add-on that lets a user add pages that he visits to popular social bookmarking and news websites like delicious and digg.

How to update add-on compatibility manually

Some Firefox add-ons that are hosted at Mozilla are not compatible with the latest version of Firefox. Not because they would not be working or display errors but simply because the author did not update the add-on to be compatibly with the latest version of Firefox. Each Firefox add-on has two variables called min version and max version.

Min version specifies the Firefox version that has to be at least installed to run the add-on while max version specifies the Firefox version that can not be exceeded if you want to run the add-on. As I said it sometimes happens that a project is dead and that the author is not updating his add-on anymore.

Firefox then won’t install the add-on because of compatibility issues. It simply checks min and max versions and if those do not match it will reject the installation. One could use the Nightly Tester tools to force compatibility but also edit the installation file on its own to make it work.

Add RSS to Netvibes directly

I have been using Netvibes, an online RSS Feed service, for a long time and did not switch to Google Reader like so many of my friends and colleagues. The one thing that I did not like that much was that the process of adding new RSS Feeds was cumbersome. I had to copy the feeds url, open the Netvibes website, click on Add Content, click on Add a feed and paste the url of the feed in there.

To many clicks and moves if you consider that desktop RSS readers or several other feed readers add feeds that are clicked automatically. The Firefox add-on Add2Netvibes steps in and makes it possible to add feeds to your Netvibes account directly from the page that you are visiting.

It adds a green plus icon to your toolbar. If that is not done automatically you will have to right-click free space on a toolbar, select customize from the menu and drag and drop the green icon to one of your toolbars.

Firefox Configuration Mania

Firefox Configuration Mania is a Firefox add-on that displays many configuration options in a menu that looks similar to the default Firefox configuration menu. The functionality however is different and can best be described as advanced. When you open the Configuration Mania menu you see five tabs at the top, those are: Browser, Security, HTTP Network, UI and Debug. Each of these tabs opens a huge list of options that sometimes expand as well which means that it could take a while to take a look at each option.

The browser menu for instance leads to options for High Speed Browsing, Tab Browsing and Location Bar while the Security menu deals with Javascript, Redirections and Cookies. You might remember the Javascript add-on Better Javascript Control that I wrote about a few days ago. Most of the options are also available in Configuration Mania.

Many settings require some research on the Internet unless you really Internet and Network stuff in and out. The add-on explains several settings but some are not explained at all which means that beginners will have a hard time at least at the beginning.

Speed up Firefox by optimizing prefs.js

I have lost count of the number of Firefox add-ons that I have installed since the beginning. Many of them add entries to the file prefs.js which is located in the Firefox profile folder. Unfortunately though these entries are not removed once you make the decision to uninstall the add-on in Firefox.

This means that you will accumulate lots of entries from add-ons in prefs.js that do nothing but waste space and could slow down Firefox this way. You probably have noticed that Firefox loads and behaves much faster if you create a new profile and use this to surf the web. This is due to two reasons.

First, no extension is loaded because none is installed yet. Second, all the entries that point to old extensions in prefs.js are also gone and not available in the new profile. Cleaning the prefs.js file is unfortunately not that easy as it sounds. You can load the file into a text editor but deleting a needed entry could corrupt Firefox.