will langford dot com

• July 2 – 1.9 – The organization of this guide has changed greatly. I have separated the extension into a few select groups, as well as expanding the hacks section. Extensions; Removed: Session Saver, Download Statusbar, and Firebug. Added: Torrent Search Bar, Video Downloader, Google Browser Sync, Mouse Gestures, and more…
• May 13 – 1.85 – Added: Couple Extensions, and two new hacks!
• May 9 – 1.8 – Added: Leak Monitor Extension, Adblock Plus, Search Engine Ordering, Greasemonkey, ScreenGrab, and StumbleUpon. Removed: SearchPluginHacks
• May 1 – 1.7 – Added: MR Tech Local Install, this extension kicks because it allows you to manage extensions and themes locally. Updated the Hacks and Keyboard Shortcuts.
• April 27 - 1.6 – LOTS of updates. Removed a few extensions, and added a few.
• April 19 – 1.5 – Added: Tab Mix Plus ResizeSearchBox, SearchPluginHacks, LinkChecker, and FoxyTunes. Removed: Tabbrowser Preferences , and Duplicate Tab. Added Search Engines Category. Updated Keyboard Shortcuts.

Must Have Plug-ins

Google Browser Sync – Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. For more info, please visit our FAQ. Please note: Google Browser Sync must update your browser settings whenever you start Firefox. This will increase the start-up time of Firefox (the time between clicking on the Firefox icon and loading your start page) – please bear with us as we work to decrease this delay.

Forecastfox – Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or status bar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.

Adblock – One of the best plug-ins ever written. Adblack allows you to block elements of a web page, images, flash, i-frames, etc… This will help make pages load faster and with zero ads!

Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker.

Adblock allows the user to specify filters, which remove unwanted content based on the source-address. If this sounds complicated, don’t worry: it’s not.

Just add a few filters. Every time a webpage loads, Adblock will intercept and disable the elements matching your filters. See?- nothing to it.

Adblock Filterset.G Updater - This is a companion extension to Adblock and should be used in conjunction with it. This extension automatically downloads the latest version of Filterset.G every 4-7 days. Filterset.G is an excellent set of filters maintained by G for Adblock that blocks most ads on the internet. In addition, this extension allows you to define your own set of filters that you can add along with Filterset.G during an update.

Adblock Plus – Includes Improvements of the normal Adblock! – Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu – the banner won’t be downloaded again. Or open Adblock Plus sidebar to see all elements of the page and block the banners. You can use filters with wildcards or even regular expressions to block complete banner factories.

Tab Mix Plus – Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

TabMix Plus does the jobs of Tabbrowser Preferences, SessionSaver, and Duplicate Tab, and then some.  Although it doesn’t offer a button for duplicate tab, it’s just a short context menu away. Therefore I have removed Tabbrowser Preferences and Duplicate Tab from this guide. Session Saver is still here but who knows for how long. Please email me if you disagree with this change.

IE Tab – IE Tab – an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox. Note, this will also allow you to run Windows Update also.

Greasemonkey – Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Mark Pilgrim’s definitive Greasemonkey guide, diveintogreasemonkey.org will show you how.

Wizz RSS News Reader – News is the new frontier for the web. With the up-and-coming rss and atom technologies, news is becoming easier to read and more accessible, but Firefox’s livebookmarks are rather lacking when it comes to features. Wizz RSS News Reader is the solution. Over the past year, it’s evolved into a mature feed aggregator. Although the UI lacks polish, it includes a number of powerful features, such as the watch list, OPML support, and the ability to subscribe to podcasts. The documentation is extensive and the author maintains support forums, so it’s easy to get help too

PDF Download – Allows to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML), if you want to view it outside Firefox with your default or custom PDF reader, or if you want to download it!

Colorful Tabs – The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a lot of sense. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appeal of the interface. An essential.

Auto Copy - Select text and it’s automatically copied to the clipboard. Like Trillian or mIrc

Gmail Notifier – A good replacement for Google’s notifier, this extension adds a status bar item showing if you have new email. You can configure the time between checks for new email.

Separe – Help separate tabs with a nice bright yellow spacer tab.

ResizeSearchBox – ResizeSearchBox is an extension that adds a resize thumb to the toolbar which can be used to resize the search box. This is a very useful extension that makes this hack very simple!.

SearchPluginHacks – Adds a context menu to the search plugins drop-down list, which allows quickly deleting unneeded plugins. Search Engine Ordering – Rearrange the search engines in Firefox’ search bar! You can use Drag & Drop to change the order as you want or right click somewhere in the menu to sort them alphabetically. Unwanted engines can be deleted just with a right click. (Makes SearchPluginHacks unnecessary.) You can even add an engine to the menu by right clicking the search field of a web page and choosing “Add this Search to the Search Bar”.

MR Tech Local Install – The primary goal of this extension is to provide the tools needed to install and manage extensions and themes locally. To do this the extension provides multi-extension installation support, hacking capabilities to the Extension/Theme manager windows, features to find and troubleshoot Extensions/Themes Build, GUID and Profile information.

McAfee SiteAdvisor – As you search or browse, SiteAdvisor’s safety button changes color based on our test results to let you know:

• Safe: We tested the site and didn’t find any significant problems.
• Caution: Our tests revealed some issues you should know about. (Example: a site tried to change our browser defaults, or sent a lot of “non-spammy” e-mail)
• Warning: Our tests revealed some serious issues that you’ll want to carefully consider before using this site at all. (Example: The site sent us lots of spammy e-mail or bundled adware with a download).

Optional Plug-ins

Viamatic foXpose – The Viamatic foXpose plugin is a tiny little extension that lets you view all your tabs inside a browser window.

Mouse Gestures – Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard. You can also use click-only “rocker” gestures which are even faster than drawn gestures.

DownThemAll! – Why do we have to load a slow external download manager/accelerator, when we can just have DownThemAll inside Firefox? DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want.

DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager: it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400%, it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it’s fully integrated into your favorite browser!

Flashblock – Never be annoyed by a Flash animation again! Blocks Flash so it won’t get in your way, but if you want to see it, just click on it.

FasterFox – Performance and network tweaks for Firefox. Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with the unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing. A popup blocker for popups initiated by Flash plug-ins is also included.

Because some websites may not have the resources available to support the enhanced prefetching feature, it may be easily blocked by webmasters.  Prior to generating any prefetching requests, Fasterfox checks for a file named “robots.txt” in your site’s root directory (subdirectories are not checked).  If this file contains the following 2 lines, no prefetching requests will be made to your domain:

1. User-agent: Fasterfox
2. Disallow: /

If you are you are going to use FasterFox please remember to turn off prefetching and save a web server. Thanks!

Leak Monitor – This extension pops up an alert dialog to warn chrome and extension developers about one particular type of leak. It warns when chrome windows close but leave other code pointing at their JavaScript objects.

FoxyTunes – Do you listen to Music while surfing the Web? Now you can control your favorite media player without ever leaving the browser and more…

ChatZilla – ChatZilla is a cross platform messaging client that combines Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with existing web standards like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Bumble Search – Bumble Search will automatically interpret all the keywords in any page to capture its essence , and pump them into relevant search engines, to discover new and related information. For example, a news item on Apple may contain the phrase Intel Macbook ; Bumble Search can infer this, and utilize search engines like Google to discover other pages with these phrases.

Some more thumbnails of this extension: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

FlashGot – Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page at the maximum speed with a single click, using the most popular external download managers for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD (dozens currently supported products, see http://www.flashgot.net for details). FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to synthesize full media galleries in one page, from serial contents previously scattered on several pages, for easy and fast “download all”.

Adsense Notifier – Displays your Adsense clickthroughs and earnings on the statusbar.

MyStickies – MyStickies lets you save the web for later To put it simply, MyStickies allows you to place little yellow squares of digital paper anywhere and everywhere you feel like in the whole wide web. Along with the ability to put sticky notes on webpages mystickies offers a powerful interface to browse, search, sort, edit and generally have a wonderful time with your sticky notes from any computer that has internet access. Goodbye to Bookmarks? MyStickies is like bookmarks on steroids. While bookmarks store the title of a webpage and it’s link, they do little to help you find what was important about the page and why exactly you chose to mark it. MyStickies solves this problem by giving you the power to mark up the page the way you like, and a tool to find notes easily and efficiently.

Scrapbook – ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and manage the collection. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are: Save Web page, Save snippet of Web page, Save Web site (In-depth Capture), Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks, Highlighter, Eraser and various page editing features, Full text search and quick filtering search, Text edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes, and more!

Fun Plug-ins

StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for browsing, reviewing and sharing great sites with like-minded people. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.

VideoDownloader – Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion… and other 60+ video sites ! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc). VideoDownloader add a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. Just click that and download the video you are watching.

Torrent Search Bar – Search Torrents in more then 27 Top Torrent Search engines.

del.icio.us Complete - del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. This extension is not only a sidebar it provides an excellent post dialog as well.

Stylish – Stylish allows easy management of user styles. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun. With an online repository at userstyles.org, you don’t even need to know how to write styles yourself; just a couple clicks and the chosen style is applied. Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.

Plug-ins – Web Design

Web Developer – The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the brow

ser with various web developer tools. This is the first development related extension that should be installed. There are way to many features to list on this page, so check the features list here. This extension replaces EditCSS, MeasureIt, and in some ways Aardvark.

Google Pagerank – Display the google pagerank in your browser’s status bar.

Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool – RightLynx displays a Lynx view of a web page via right-click or Tool menu. With just one click and without leaving the page (RightLynx opens in a new, small window), preview the page you are on with a Lynx Viewer. You can see what what a page will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser. It is also presumably, how search engines see your site. In addition, it can help determine if web pages are accessible to the vision impaired.

MeasureIt – Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

NoScript – NoScript provides extra protection for your Mozilla/Firefox or Flock browser: this extension allows JavaScript and Java execution only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site).

Clear Cache Button – Adds a clear cache toolbar button. After installing the extension, find the clear cache button in the toolbar customization panel.

Cookie Crumbler – Are you a developer who has to clear cookies from certain domains over and over again for testing purposes? Clearing all cookies is fast but you lose ones you may not want to. Scrolling through Firefox’s cookie manager takes too long when you’re doing it 50 times a day. This extension allows you to configure a list of domains and cookie names that you can then delete with the click of a button located on your status bar.

ColorZilla – With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there’s more…

LiveHTTPHeaders – View HTTP headers during load.

User Agent Switcher – The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.

Aardvark – Aardvark is handy for quickly cleaning up a page, for readability, or prior to printing it.  It can also useful to web developers for page analysis.  As you move the mouse over elements on the page, you’ll see a red border along with the element type and id, and then you can use single keystrokes to operate on that element (remove, isolate, view source, etc) as well as the useful “w” to go wider (that is, select the element containing the currently selected one). Web Developer has some similar features of Aardvark, but Aardvark does much more than just showing the CSS tag for a given element. Therefore I recommend using Aardvark in addition to Web Developer. Aardvark allows you to selectively show or remove elements from the page. Aardvark can be used to create printer friendly views of pages by hitting just a few keys after starting Aardvark. I would also like to thank the developer of Aardvark, Rob Brown, for emailing me a new description to use on this guide.

LinkChecker – Check the validity of links on any webpage. There’s also a toolbar button that can be added for easier access to LinkChecker. Just right click on your toolbar, choose “Customize” and look for the button with the underlined blue check.

FireFTP – FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. FireFTP makes it easy to upload files to your web server without ever leaving the browser window.

ScreenGrab – It, in case you hadn’t guessed, saves webpages as images by scrolling around and stitching the result together. In particular it also will save just a frame as an image

Honorable Mention

Foxmarks – This extension allows bookmarks to be synced across multiple computers. This extension is very similar to Google Browser Sync and I consider a great alternative if the user wishes to not use Google’s service.

Themes

The ability to theme a browser is not so much a needed feature but a must have. I am currently using the stock theme that came with Firefox, I’ve tried tons of different themes and from my personal experience all it did was make my browser look nice and eat up a bit more memory so I have opted to not use themes anymore. If you want a theme grab them here.

Hacks

One of the cool things about Firefox is that the developers encourage customization. Head over to the official Firefox Tips & Tricks page to see more nifty hacks.

Search Bar Width – The Search Bar is just too darn small to type anything. Now you can make it as big as you want.

about:config Hacks

Many user preferences set through the Firefox GUI and extensions along with others normally unseen can by edited by simply typing "about:config" in the url bar and filtering through the various settings. When you are doing making these changes to your browser, restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

Making it Faster – Lets change some hidden options to make it faster… In the address bar type: "about:config".

• Find network.http.pipelining and double click on it so it = true
• Find network.http.proxy.pipelining and set it to = true
• Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests double click on it and change it from 4 to 100

Disable IPv6 – Firefox on some Linux distros has issues with Google servers because of difficulties with the IPv6 protocol, an easy way to deal with this is to go into about:config and change the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting to true.

Control Animations – One easy configuration change is limiting animated images. Double-click image.animation_mode and change it to ‘none’ to stop all animated images, or ‘once’ to let them run through once. You can revert to the default behavior with ‘normal’.

Back-Forward Cache – Firefox has a special “Back-Forward cache” for recently visited pages that works differently than the regular browser cache. The default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers , “-1,” will save up to 8 pages if you have more than 512MB RAM on your PC. Reduce the number to zero for maximum memory savings.

Cache Hack – Firefox will adjust the cache size to fit however many pages you have open; this can be useful if you only have a few pages open, but you can manually reduce the setting to a specified amount at the cost of reducing performance when Firefox runs out of cache.

• 1. Right click on the new page and select New -> Integer.
• 3. In the pop-up window, type in “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. In the following pop-up window, specify how many Kb of ram you want to dedicate to the cache, I selected 32768(32Mb). I suggest a number between 16Mb and 64Mb, anything lower and performance will suffer, anything higher is excessive. Try different amounts and see what works.

Download Manager – This will allow you to tweak and/or destroy your download manager. Tweak the fallowing for your needs.

• browser.download.manager.showAlertInterval at default shows the alert message for 2000 milliseconds or 2 seconds. Try 500 milliseconds; and change as you see fit.
• browser.download.manager.openDelay at default opens up the download manager immediately, which can be a big pain if you are downloading small files to your desktop, you don’t need that annoying manager to pop up. I use 30,000 milliseconds or 30 seconds. If a file is larger than 30 seconds of download time, I figure anything bigger than 30 seconds I’d like to see what’s going on.
• browser.download.manager.closeWhenDone at default is set to false so that your manager doesn’t close itself. I set it to true just to get this thing out of the way the moment it is done, I like to watch something moving, not something that’s finished.
• browser.download.manager.flashCount at default flashes the download manager icon in your taskbar for 2 seconds, I take it to nothing to save time.

Minimize Hack – Free RAM when you have Firefox minimized.

• Right click on blankness and tell it to make a new boolean. Call it config.trim_on_minimize , set it to true.
• Find: network.prefetch-next. Double click it to turn it false if it is on.
• Disable fast back and forward : about:config, search for viewers, find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers, set it to 0 to disable fast back and forward.
• Limit the memory cache: about:config, new integer, browser.cache.memory.capacity, set it to the memory in KB you want to limit the memory cache to.

Show Image Placeholders – browser.display.show_image_placeholders [Boolean] (false)

Advanced Hacks

CSS in web pages are often used to define basic elements of that page, for example text, colored hyperlinks, and the type of fonts. Two files in Firefox, UserChrome.css and UserContent.css, basically work the same way. UserChrome for elements of Firefox, and UserContent for changing the appearance of how a pages is displayed in Firefox. By default both of these files don;t exist, they can be created in <driveroot>/Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profilename]\chrome.

UserChrome.css

Custom Background Image on Toolbars (Image must be .gif and in same directory as UserChrome.css)

menubar, toolbox, toolbar, .tabbrowser-tabs {

background-image: url(“yourimage.gif”) !important;

background-color: none !important; }

Change Color of Tabs

/* Change color of active tab */

tab{ -moz-appearance: none !important; } tab[selected="true"] {

background-color: rgb(222,218,210) !important;

color: black !important; }

/* Change color of normal tabs */

tab:not([selected="true"]) {

background-color: rgb(200,196,188) !important;

color: gray !important; }

Display Sidebar on the Right

/* Place the sidebar on the right edge of the window */

window > hbox {

direction:rtl; } window > hbox > * {

direction:ltr; }

UserContent.css

Change Cursor for Links Which Open in New Windows

/* Change cursor for links that open in new window */

:link[target="_blank"], :visited[target="_blank"],

:link[target="_new"], :visited[target="_new"] {

cursor: crosshair; }

Remove All Embedded Content

object, embed { display: none; }

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts (for Windows and Linux)

• Open new window: Ctrl + N
• Open new tab: Ctrl + T
• Close window: Alt + F4 or Ctrl+W
• Close tab: Ctrl + F4
• Switch focus to address bar: Ctrl + L
• Open link: Enter
• Open link in new window: Shift + Enter
• Open link in new tab: Ctrl + Enter
• Go back: Backspace / Alt + Left Arrow
• Go forward: Shift + Backspace / Alt + Right Arrow
• Reload: Ctrl + R or F5
• Go to home page: Alt + Home
• Go to next tab: Ctrl + Tab
• Go to previous tab: Ctrl + Shift + Tab
• Find in this page: Ctrl + F
• Find again: F3
• View page source: Ctrl + U
• Decrease text size: Ctrl + –
• Increase text side: Ctrl + +
• Restore text size: Ctrl + 0
• Save page as: Ctrl + S
• Save link target as: Alt + Enter
• Stop: Esc
• Clear private data: Ctrl + Shift + Delete
• DOM Inspector: Ctrl + Shift + I

Couple of useful tricks..

• You can also hold Ctrl and scroll up/down with the mouse to change text size.
• You can also use Ctrl+(number at top of kb) to switch between tabs, i.e. Ctrl+1 would take you to the first open tab. Please note this only works for up to 9 tabs.
• A Middle-click on a tab closes it on Windows by default. However, in Linux it pastes whatever is currently in the Clipboard and visits that site (or performs
  
  a search). This can be changed by setting the middlemouse.contentLoadURL pref to either true (for the Content Load URL feature) or false  (for closing the tab).

Mozilla.org Mouse Shortcuts for Firefox.

Mozilla.org Keyboard Shortcuts for Firefox

Profiles

Important files in the profile folder:

• bookmarks.html: stored bookmarks
• history.dat: browsing history
• prefs.js: preferences

Search Engines

There are a few search engines in the top right corner. However there are many more that I use, and you might too. Get them here. And more here. Oh and the main page is here.

Search Engines I use…

• Froogle
• Google Images
• IMDb
• Wikipedia
• The Pirate Bay
• MiniNova
• Technorati
• del.icio.us
• The Weather Channel
• And many more that I have on my work computer…

Portable Firefox

Portable Firefox is a fast, full-featured web browser that’s easy to use. It has all the same great features as regular Firefox including popup-blocking, tabbed-browsing, integrated search, improved privacy features, automatic updating and more. Plus, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go.

Firefox Related Links

Mozilla

Google Firefox Resources

Firefox @ Wikipedia

Firefox Tweak Guide

Mozilla Tips and Tricks

Mozilla Addons

Portable Firefox

Firefox: for the Perplexed

SuperBrowser