i sense that most of us here in oaf-town aren’t content to get around the web in a plain-jane vanilla browser.
so, imagine you have to install a browser from scratch. what are the first modifications you make to your browsing experience?
what are the handiest tweaks, scripts or add-ons that you find yourself evangelizing about?
i personally can’t live without typeaheadfind, undo close and session saving (all of which are available, but disabled by default, in Firefox 2)
typeaheadfind has been available in every mozilla-based browser i’ve seen. if you type about:config into the URL bar, you will be brought to list of editable configuration settings.
if you find accessibility.typeaheadfind and set it to true (or create this variable and initialize it to true), you enable a quick way to get around a web page. once you’re on a page, you can simply type and the browser will find and highlight the first instance of the string you’ve typed in. if you happen to highlight a linkified word, simply pressing enter will cause the browser to follow that link.
most of the time, i’m looking for key information on a given page. and i’m shocked at how often people will scroll and hunt using their visual search strategies, when an unambigious match is 4-5 keystrokes away.
following links with keyboard is quick and preferable to relying on mousing and clicking, especially when you’re as bad with a touchpad as i am.
undo close simply solves the “crap i didn’t mean to close that” frustration that tabmongers like me face. if you right click on the tab bar in firefox 2, you will be presented with an “Undo Close Tab” option, which does exactly as you expect. i use an extension (keyconfig) to remap this function to control-Z, to preserve the “undo” convention across yet another app.
finally, session saving is another great feature that’s built right into Firefox 2, but is left off by default. To try it out, simply go to the preferences window, and in the main tab, set the “When Firefox starts” field to “Show my windows and tabs from last time.” It’s always nice to be able to pick up where you leave off, if circumstances necessitate closing a browser.
these tips are very basic. and there are many other tweaks, both great and small, that can improve your web traversals. go ahead, show your arsenal.
and stay tuned for part two of our series on “gettin’ around.”
For Camino users, note that you will also have to set accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart to true for it to work. I didn’t know about this one, but it definitely seems useful. Saves me a cmd-f.
First thing I usually do with a fresh install is set up my quicksearches. These are special bookmarks that let you type “google sharks playing land polo” to search Google for “sharks playing land polo, or “dict boustrophedonic” to search your favorite online dictionary. Usually you can set these up by using the search tool you want to make into a quicksearch, bookmarking the results, looking for your query terms in the URL and replacing them with a %s, and setting the keyword in the add bookmark dialog. I usually have Google (google, g), Google Scholar (scholar), Google Images (images), Dictionary.com (dict), Wikipedia (w), and Amazon (amazon) set up. Plenty of good ones at the Lifehacker link above.
In Firefox, there are plenty of extentions I wouldn’t want to live without, and foremost among them is the Web Developer Extention. It lets you do things like turn off style sheets, images, tables, pretty much anything, or outline all block-level elements, or label all elements with class and id, etc. I also love Zotero (thanks Nate) and Scrapbook (thanks Elisa).
My Extensions: Book Burro, LibX, URL Link, Switch Proxy Tool, Errorzilla and Chickenfoot
Much like Book Burro, LibX links DOIs, ISBNs to Melvyl, so you dont have to go through ACM Digital Library routine. Errorzilla for retrieving google-cache, waybackmachine-archived pages of broken links. Chickenfoot is like greasemonkey, but a LOT easier (can be useful for auto-filling and submitting the annoying AirBears authentication page). URL Link can be very handy when u face those unlinked text-urls like these http://google.com. The ext gives a select and right-click option to open the url in a new tab.
Also, LibX works really well with Google Scholar
AdBlock Plus let’s me block out quasi-sexual anime pictures in blogs so I don’t get in trouble at the office.
I’m generally a Safari guy, but when having to get work done, the extensibility of FF really comes in handy.
I tend to use the QuickFind (hitting slash to bring up the panel), but the typeahead switch will now save me a keystroke per Find. Thanks!
In terms of FF extensions, Web Developer is really essential. User Agent Switcher, by the same author, lets me masquerade as various other browsers. Firebug is very useful to track down JavaScript errors (among other things), with a decent debugger interface. IE Tab (Windows-only), for those times that you just can’t bring yourself to click on the big blue E (but have to use it anyway). RefControl, for those times that referrers need to be spoofed. And finally, SmoothWheel, because default scrollwheelin’ behavior in FF (on a PPC Mac at least) seems a quick way to test either your patience or your tolerance for motion sickness.
Fabulous, guys, truly a smart mob. I have a question: is there an extension that allows Firefox to pick a random site from my bookmarks (or from Del.icio.us) to display as home page every time I open it? Just to remind myself of what I bookmark (I know, I know, bookmarks are sooo yesterday)
I’ve just discovered that Google Scholar does a lot of LibX stuff (UC-e-links on results page) even with out the extension though you need to access from an Univ IP or proxy. That was cool !!
for OS X firefox users, tabbing behavior within a page is not up to snuff by default. on just about every other browser on every other operating system, you can tab around to every notable item on a page: links, dropdown menus, radio buttons, etc. OS X firefox does not allow you to tab into much at all, rendering you a slave to your mousing skills (of which i have little)..
but if we call up about:config once again, we can remedy this:
look for a variable called
accessibility.tabfocus
if it does not exist, right click and create a new integer
you’ll want to set this value to 7
here’s why: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Accessibility.tabfocus
now you can rely much less on mousing… if you see a button you want to click on, you can just use typeaheadfind to get to a point right before it on the page and then tab and enter.
also, nfultz has a great greasemonkey script that will tell you if a given amazon book is available @ the berkeley public library
elisa: i don’t know of anything like that, seems pretty cool though, let us know if you find anything. it may be worth posting to a forum, maybe someone with some spare cycles will write the idea for him/her-self and share it with the world.
Elisa, you could write a little server side script that does that and then point your browser to that.
Oh, wait. I was thinking delicious bookmarks. You mean browser bookmarks, right? Ever since I integrated delicious with Quicksilver, I stopped using local bookmarks.
ken-ichi: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~k7lim/misc/bookmarks.html check my quicksearches… d’ya recommend any beyond these?
Hannes: now I use delicious too, and I will try to do what you suggest as soon as I figure out what it means exactly. But I still have about a million old-fashioned bookmarks, and don’t want to lose them all, or sort them all manually. AND I use a PC. Does it get any worse than this?
forgot to pimp LastTab!
control-tab, for some dumb reason, just goes left to right.
http://timothyhumphrey.name/firefox/lasttab.aspx
this extension causes control-tab to act more like alt-tab!
wow, this thread alone was worth my ischool tuition for 2 years. ever since my shoulder started hurting from using the mouse so much, i’m always looking for tricks to make gettting around the web easier. above hannes mentioned quicksilver. i’ve downloaded it and tried it for about 3 seconds. it looks like something that’s potentially amazing, but i think i’d need someone to show me. is quicksilver pretty popular amongst ischoolers?
owen: i ADORE quicksilver. if you want to get nitty gritty, you can search youtube for screencasts on how to use quicksilver. it’s kind of a mac-lifehacker’s dream.
there is no reason you have to really use the finder anymore.
ComputerWorld just did their top 20.
Just found View Source Chart, useful for inspecting HTML structure. I’m pretty sure this is something Web Developer does not do.