CHRISdotTODD

I have updated my 2006, Firefox 2 keyboard shortcut tri-fold for Firefox 3. I added about a dozen new keyboard shortcuts from my prior version. Click on each of the gif files to view a full version or just download by right-clicking. Print one image on each side of your paper, and then fold into three.

Here's a few fun easter eggs in Firefox. In the "awesome" address bar, try entering each of these: about:robots about:mozilla And here are a few Firefox plug-ins to make your browsing a bit easier: For those that prefer the Firefox 2 address bar, try the Oldbar plug-in. Save a step of having to arrow or mouse down to the first item in the awesome bar, install the Enter Selects 3 plug-in. Aging Tabs will continually darken the color of tabs the as time passes since you last viewed the particular tab. Instead of reopening a closed tab using History, you can accomplish the same task with a button using Undo Closed Tabs Button plug-in. Firefox Showcase let's you view thumbnails of all your tabs in a single window.

Here's a quick tip for cycling through Firefox 3 tabs using the keyboard: Hold the CTRL key and press Page Up (left) or Page Down (right)

As with all updates, I always recommend waiting before updating your main computer. The recent problems with Windows XP SP3 is a good example (and here ) of why you should wait. Well its been a little over two weeks since Firefox 3 has been released, and it looks like it has worked for the most part without any significant problems. I have now installed and ran it successfully on my work laptop and home desktop. What I was most pleasantly surprised about is my custom toolbars (using TinyMenu) stayed intact for all but one item which was easy to add back in. As you might of expected, not all my plug-ins worked though. In the case of RoboForm, Firebug, and the Digg toolbar, it required some manual download and install. For the following though, no additional work was required -- they continued to work : Del.icio.us toolbar TwitterFox Download Statusbar BugMeNot Forecastfox FoxClocks IE Tab No Script PicLens Read it Later Web Developer The following no longer work : TinyURL NSFW AutoCopy

At work I was having trouble with any Google web property not displaying images when I used Firefox. I tried everything I could think of from changing Options to clearing cache to searching for a solution. I finally decided that setting everything back to "new install" state would have to be the way to correct it. Of course I searched Google, and I found an answer on the Mozilla site that told me that by deleting the Profile file, Firefox would create a new one and I'd be good to go. Sure enough, it worked. I did lose most (maybe all) of my Extension configurations. Deleting your Profile (manually): Close Firefox Enter %APPDATA%\Mozilla\ Firefox\Profiles\ into Run... Open the folder of the Profile you want to delete (the folder name will end with . ProfileName ) Delete prefs.js Start Firefox Well in researching this tonight to post, I discovered that I could have just created a new Profile - giving me the opportunity to see if that fixed the problem. If it did (which in

I found a couple of new Firefox extensions; the first is used to indicate whether a link on a web page is safe for work (SFW) or no (NSFW). You simple hover over a link on a web page and in the lower-right of your browser you will see SFW, NSFW, or Unrated. If you're on an existing web page, you can send your own rating; the extension uses user votes to determine SFW or NSFW. Go to No-NSFW to get this extension for yourself. I found another, not so useful Firefox extension, RefControl . With RefControl you can change the referral page in your browser. As you may or may not know, when you visit a web page, it gets various information from your browser, including the page you were on previously. With refControl, you can change this to be what ever page you want it to be. In fact there are multiple options: Normal - send the referrer as it would normally be sent without interference from RefControl. Block - send no referrer to this site. Forge - send the root of the site as the r

If you are a regular reader, you know I am a big Firefox fan. I just wanted to let folks who didn't know that Firefox is soon to release their next version, Firefox 3. Further, they are on their 5th beta right now, so I know they are close. With that though, a simple reminder: wait for others before you install any new or beta release on your primary or main computer . As much as we might want to new features and functions, it's rarely worth the risk of causing a real headache by happening to have the one machine that the software runs into trouble with. If you want to learn about what new features are waiting for you in Firefox 3, there are several sites that have posted reviews of the beta releases. Laptop Magazine posted an article on Friday and they talk about the following features: Star button One-click site info Improved OS integration Tags Resumable downloads Matt Asay of CNet also posted a brief statement on beta 5, and despite the typical bugs of a beta, he's c

To claim a blog with Technorati , you need to create a post with some custom code -- Technorati Profile . Since I have moved off of Blogspot and onto my own domain ( http://www.CHRISdotTODD.com ), I need to reclaim my blog. For those unfamiliar with Technorati, it's a site that tracks blogs. Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media... Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster. While I'm at it I thought, "Why not see if there are any Technorati Add-ons for Firefox ." Here's what I found: Technobar : displays Technorati linked websites to the blog you are viewing Technorati Search Engine plug-ins Rank Status Bar : displays the page/blog rank on Technorati Who is this person? : when highlighting a name, it will search Technorati and other

Download Statusbar offers several ways to view the status of your downloads using Firefox without the annoyance of a separate dialog box. I've chosen to use the mode where it's just another icon on the status bar. You can opt to have an additional bar added above the status bar when downloading. After your file has downloaded, through a simple hover, you can see all the specifics about the downloaded file(s). For example, you can see the site you downloaded it from, the file size, and the time it took to download. Additional options include a notification when complete and even an auto-virus scan. I like it just because it reduces the clutter.

Posting and viewing pictures on the Internet has become a popular activity with sites such as Flickr and Picasa , as well as social networking sites Facebook and MySpace . I have always thought that the quality of the photos are not what they should be; now my opinion has changed. With the PicLens plug-in for Firefox , Internet Explorer, and Safari, there is a new way to browse pictures that really helps bring out the quality of high-resolution photos. PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing images on the web will never be the same again. At first glance, this just looks like an alternative to browsing photos -- which works quite well, by the way. But what really sold me was how good my photos look using PicLens. It is simple to use, click the arrow that is sup

Seems like whatever application we use, it's never fast enough for us. And of course in today's computer world, all our applications are on the network, which is just one more bottleneck. Well if you're browsing the Internet, it can now happen faster. I have found 3 options for improving the performance of Firefox -- choose 1 based on your level of expertise. Option 1. For the person who just wants their computer to work, there is FireTune from Totalidea Software . Totalidea Software has created a small application that will backup and modify your Firefox configuration to optimize the performance of the browser. You tell it if you have a fast or slow computer and a fast or slow Internet connection, and FireTune will do the rest. In addition, FireTune offers some additional optimizations (Other optimizations tab) that should improve the performance for all Firefox users. What I like about FireTune is that you don't need to be a computer geek and get under-the-hood to im

I found two new Firefox Extensions that are real practical, FoxClocks and Forecastfox Enhanced . During this time of year, the weather changes frequently, and what may be freezing on the west side of the city may be above freezing on the south side. With Forecastfox Enhanced, I can get a look at the forecast and weather radar for myself. Forecastfox Enhanced gets its weather feed from AccuWeather.com . You can run Forecastfox Enhanced in several different ways including in the browser status bar or in a toolbar. When displayed, you can configure it to give you more detailed information by simply hovering over the top of the forecast. It also quickly shows you an updated weather report automatically each time it is updated (time between updates is adjustable). If you're like me, I work with folks from all over the world. I had been using a Yahoo Widget to track the time in various locations, but it was not configurable to meet my needs. Using FoxClocks, I can configure the cities

Thanks to Digg , I found a very interesting blog from Jesse Ruderman, Indistinguishable from Jesse . Jesse has a great post on how you can help in the effort to remove memory leaks in Firefox . Of course not all of us have the skills that Jesse and others working on Firefox have, but he indicates there are other things we can do to help. If you're a Firefox user, an easy way to help is to browse with a trunk nightly build wrapped in a script that calls leak-gauge.pl when Firefox exits. If it reports that documents or windows leaked, try to figure out how to reproduce the leak and then file a bug report. In addition to coverage on Firefox, Jesse has assemble a wealth of useful information in the 4 years of writing his blog. For example, he has a link to his del.icio.us links , a list of 43 things he wants to do, and a humor list . So if you're looking to learn more about Firefox or just looking for a good blog, give Indistinguishable from Jesse a look.

I have been using the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox for some time now, but I recently learned of a new, powerful Extension, Firebug from Joe Hewitt. Firebug makes it very easy to inspect different portions of your code while on your web page. For example, click the Inspect tab and then you can see the related code as you hover over different elements on the page. Where the Web Developer toolbar makes it easy to look at different parts of the code on a page, Firebug lets you interact with the page and subsequent code. If you want to see how fast (or slow) the various elements load on the page, click on the Net tab. In addition to showing the time to load the various elements, it is very easy to filter by element types such as JavaScript, images, and even Flash. You can use Firebug as a part of your browser window (while you're interacting with it) or in its own window. the one drawback I see is that each time I change tabs, the new website is processed by Firebug; not that it&

If you have ever explored Google's advanced search capabilities, you would know that it can be very powerful in finding specific content. For example, you can use it to find web directories with music from your favorite artist. Take this code for example, which you can enter into the Google search box: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Stevie Ray Vaughn” Your results would be something like this: You can even add different file formats and wildcards for the search string: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3| ogg ) "stevie ray vaughn % " How does this apply to Firefox? Well I'm glad you asked! You may recall that by entering a keyword into the field of a bookmark, you can retrieve the bookmark in the Address Box by just entering the keyword. Firefox also supports wildcard parameters, so you can

I ran across a cool trick with Firefox, which allows you to open Firefox within Firefox. There's no real purpose behind it, it's just a fun thing to do. Just enter this into the URL line of Firefox: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Recently I was asked how to add a new Download Action to Firefox. In other words, how can I get Firefox to always use the same program and open a file from the web without having to save it first each time. I scratched my head for a minute and then thought, "this is easy, just click Tools | Options , and then the Content tab ." I found out I could only manage them here, not add. After being perplex for a while, I realized it is actually very easy. Download the file type (e.g. PowerPoint), select the Open with radio button, select the application you want to open it with , and (here's the hard part) check the box next to Do this automatically for files like this from now on . Now you can go back to the Content tab in the Options menu if you want to remove or change the file association. Ahh, such an easy solution to any easy problem.

I get an RSS feed from FranticIndustries (Stan Schroeder) blog. Stan's most recent post was seven things he missed from Firefox when forced to use IE6. I thought the list was great. Not only did it point out some less common features, but it also explained how to set them up. I'll give you the list, but you will need to visit FranticIndustries to learn how to use them: Multipage home page Selection source Undo closed tabs The test profile Search tricks Quick tabbing and session saving Spell checking

Brian Krebs, blogger of Security Fix , posted some recently completed research that clear shows why none of us should be using Internet Explorer. According to Mr. Krebs' research, Internet Explorer was unsafe for 284 days of 2006 -- 284 ! In case you doubt this number, here's what Brian Krebs had to say about his research methodology. ...individually contacting nearly all of the security researchers who submitted reports of critical flaws in Microsoft products to learn from them not only the dates that they had submitted their findings to the company, but also any other security trends or anomalies they observed in working with the world's largest software maker. Additionally, he also shared the data with Microsoft before posting it on his blog. This chart shows all the vulnerabilities that Mr. Krebs included in his findings. So if you were an Internet Explorer user in 2006, chances are you opened yourself up to compromising your PC. Mr. Krebs reports that the second most

The new release of Firefox, version 2.0.0.1, which was released December 19th, still has problems running on Vista . The biggest problem is that it cannot be set as the default browser. It almost seems as if Microsoft purposefully changed things to make it more difficult for Firefox. According to W3Schools , Firefox had nearly a 30% market share in November, number two after IE 6's 50% share.