Firefox Hacks
There are a lot of really neat extension that can be added to the Firefox and Mozilla web-browsers, to add neat tricks not included in the standard packages. Whenever I install FF on a new machine, I always seem to spend ages trying to remember the names and download locations for the extensions I use. I made this page to try to help me keep track of these. If it also turns out to be useful to you, then great!
One of those ‘Why isn’t this part of the core app’ extensions. Adds a small close button to each tab, rather than having to right-click or use the button at the far right of the tab bar. Such a tiny little thing, but it’s the first extension I add when setting up Firefox on a new computer.
This is also pretty essential. It replaces all flash components on a page with a button which you can click to let the flash display. Perfect when you want to block virtually all flash but would still like to be able to view some specific bits. It also lets you whitelist sites, which is essential for things like flickr
This adds a right-click sub-menu to allow you to open multiple selected links in tabs or download multiple files. This is ideal for things like multi-page articles, where you can just select all the page links, and have Linky open them all in tabs so that the entire article is preloaded for you. Also useful for thumbnail photo/picture galleries, since it can also automatically load all selected images and lay them out on a single page.
Adds a small set of navigation buttons to the bottom left of the status bar. These look for common links on a site like ‘next’, ‘forward’, ‘top’ etc, and put them in a consistent place, so you don’t have to go hunting around an unfamiliar web page for them.
A small plugin that extends the ‘Properties’ right-click menu when invoked over a photo. It adds any attached EXIF data from the photo to the dialog box. Useful if you’re a terrible photographer like me, and want to see what camera settings the person who took a photo used.
This adds a small ‘resize’ element that you can add to toolbars using the ‘Customize’ menu. It’s pretty useful for resizing the search bar, especially if you have the searchbar on a separate toolbar from the main URL box (such as on the menubar.) That being said, I don’t actually use the search bar any more. See the next recommendation.
URL Bar Searching
It’s possible to set up bookmarks to allow you to search websites from the main URL bar, rather than having the default search bar taking up space on your display. To search for something on Google, for example, I type:
g Thing I want to search for
To do this, right-click over the search box on the site you want to add, and select ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’. Ignoring the weird capitalisation, this will bring up a dialog box to let you specify a keyword and a name for the bookmark. The keyword is what you’d type before the search term in the URL bar (such as: g, amaz, imdb, or whatever.)