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.

Optimize Adblock Filter List

The filter list of Adblock plus contains the websites that you do not want to block ads on. This can be due to several reasons. You might be a webmaster who wants to make sure that ads are running correctly on his system and also find out which ads are running on it or you might have troubles viewing a rich media site if you do not add the site to the filter list.

Whatever the reasons may be, the filter list can be problematic especially if you take duplicate entries into consideration. The Adblock Filter List Optimizer changes that by optimizing the filter list by removing duplicates and reducing the number of lines and words contained in the filter list.

Just head over to the Adblock Website, export your filter list in Firefox and paste it into the form there. Click on optimize and you should see the results just a second later. Import the filter list again after saving it in a text file and overwrite the old one in the process.

Better Javascript Control

Firefox without add-ons allows to enable or disable Javascript. If you uninstall the popular Noscript you can enable Javascript on trusted websites and disable it on all other websites. If you want a better Javascript control in Firefox you could take a look at the Firefox add-on Controle de Scripts which gives you a much deeper control of what Javascript may do and may not do.

The Firefox add-on has basically two tabs that control certain Javascript functions. The main tab is called Permissions and you can allow or disallow functions like resizing windows, changing images, hiding scrollbars or the bookmarks toolbar here. The second tab is Popups which defines which Javascript events are allowed to open popups.

Knowledge of Javascript events is needed to configure this properly, you could use Google to search for the Javascript events as well . You might be saying that you don’t want any popups but you might consider that some websites open new pages in a popup after submitting a form or clicking on a link.

Unplug for Firefox

Unplug is a Firefox add-on that is very similar to the Download Helper extension that I have been writing about before on this website. It scans a website for video, audio and other multimedia content and provides direct download links to those files. Many users that I know use Unplug to download flash games from websites to be able to play them offline.

The process is as simple as it can be. Download and install the extension and restart Firefox afterwards. Now right-click the top toolbar in a free space and select customize from the menu. You have to locate the Unplug icon and drag and drop it into the toolbar. If you do not want to do this you can access Unplug from the Tools menu as well.

Unplug opens a new page listing all media files. Sometimes more than one file is listed on that page but it is normally quite easy to find the real one. Once that is done just click on save to save the file locally. This can be used on many games sites and I suspect also on video and audio websites.

Firefox Open Bookmarks in new Tabs

This is something that is really bothering me in Firefox. All the bookmarks are opening in the currently active tab and I prefer them to open in a new tab instead. There is apparently no option to change this behavior in Firefox which is not very user friendly if you ask me.

Thankfully though a click with the middle mouse button is loading the selected bookmark in a new tab. I have to get used to this and I happen to forget about this even after months of using it. Nothing is worse than opening a bookmark in the tab were you are writing an article because that article, or at least part of it, gets lost when this happens.

I know that there are extensions, I think Tab Mix Plus does it, that add this functionality but I recently cut down on extensions that I’m using to make Firefox more memory friendly. If you know of another way, config setting that is, please let me know.