Just before I hopped on a plane to Canada last week, I was interviewed on the Computer America radio show, which is broadcast all across the United States. For the second hour of Thursday’s show, I spoke about the Firefox browser, offering up a handful of tips taken from the pages of SitePoint’s new book, Firefox Secrets.
The tips I covered included:
- HTTP Pipelining, a disabled-by-default feature of Firefox that takes advantage of HTTP/1.1 functionality to speed up browsing.
- Delete unwanted items from the location bar pop-up history with Shift-Delete.
- Bookmark an entire set of tabs at once, then open them again using the Open in Tabs item on the Bookmarks menu.
- Provide a list of sites to be opened in tabs as your browser home page.
- Set up a custom search keyword to quickly look up a site’s history on the Internet Archive.
For the next week and a half, the archived audio of the programme is available for download from the online archives. Here’s the direct link (MP3, 18MB).
I had a lot of fun doing the interview, and I only wish it had been longer–I really barely scratched the surface of the stuff that’s in the book.
The sample PDF has more meaty tips in it if the interview leaves you hungry for more.
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Excellent interview :)
July 19th, 2005 at 9:14 pm
Firefox users beware! One of the not-so-neat things it does is to eat all your favorites. Being a very active developer, I had bookmarked more than a hundred favorites from August to March, when Firefox ate all my favorites.
I looked for a solution in the Firefox forum, but I found only many other posts by people who lost their favorites, and some from people who had also lost all their e-mails in Thunderbird. No solution was available.
What I discovered was that this problem has been discussed on the forum for two years, but it has still not been fixed, while Mozille continues to release new versions of Firefox. Even though I loved everything else about Firefox, I have gone back to using IE.
July 21st, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Yeah that is an annoying bug. It happended to me a few days ago on someone else’s PC. I reconstructed the bookmarks from an old backup of them and the IE favorites.
If you backup your bookmarks regularly than it’s not a problem. To back them up go to Manage Bookmarks –> File –> Export and then select the filename and location and click Save.
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:20 pm
Well, that bug hasn’t happened to me yet; not that I’d be bothered, since I’ve only just started really using Favourites/Bookmarks…
Does anyone else get a bit frustrated with how awkward it can be when, for instance, another page is loaded into a popup window without the tab toolbar present? At the minute I’m getting a bit sick of having to right click and close the “hidden tabs” sequentially…
July 25th, 2005 at 2:23 am
Yep the invisible tabs in pop-ups is a silly bug, documented here.
A hacky solution in Firefox 1.0.x is to go to the special about:config page and set dom.disable_window_open_feature.toolbar to true, which will force the standard toolbar (which includes the tabs bar) to be visible in all windows, including chromeless pop-ups.
In Firefox 1.5 (coming in September), this bug has been fully fixed. The same bug in Mozilla has also been fixed for the next release of that browser.
July 25th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Use an independent bookmark/personal information manager and forget the anemic Favorites feature in all the browsers. I use Compass, shareware that hasn’t been upgraded in over six years, and it works very well. I have over 15,000 URLs carefully categorized in over 1200 folders, full text search, encryption (store all my passwords in this), export individual folders to a HTML page, etc. Could not function without it.
If SitePoint released a very similar bookmark manager that allowed easy integration with FireFox (right now pressing INSERT while on a web page only auto inserts the URL from IE) folks would beat a path to your door IMO.
Compass
http://www.softgauge.com/compass/
July 26th, 2005 at 8:14 am