Well I finally managed to get Firefox 3 downloaded and installed.    It was a bitch getting the download page up as the Mozilla pages were getting truly hammered but someone gave me the direct download link and that helped in the end.   Demand for Firefox 3 was staggeringly high.   I don’t think the demand was this high for Firefox 2.

Initially half of my extensions conked out including Stumbleupon but gradually some of them came back.    Stumbleupon was first back and then some others blinked back on.    But I have still lost some that I really want back.    For example, I have still lost Vertigo (the vertical tabs) and that is REALLY disorienting me big time going back to normal tabbing.    I have also lost the smart Digg button, Aardvark,  Copy Plain Text, Del.icio.us, Permatabs and Snaplinks.

But on the positive side, Firefox 3 is damn FAST!    I also really like the address bar and the general look and feel of the browser interface.   It feels more stable than Firefox 2 and I feel more comfortable working with it already.

I just need those other extensions back and everything will be peachy.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Mozilla

Socialphile Firefox Extension puts a small bar underneath your search results which shows you the popularity of that link on social networks such as Digg. It also gives you the link to digg it as well as the number of comments. Right away, you can see which search results are the most relevant and the most popular.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, extension, Firefox, search, social, socialphile

photo credit: TedsBlog

An article I wrote for Make Use Of. If you can’t wait for the stable Alpha version of Firefox 3.4 but at the same time you don’t want to risk your Firefox profile on the buggy beta version, you can have the best of both worlds - run the portable version.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: beta, browser, Digg, Firefox, Haller, Mozilla, portable, portableapps, USB

photo credit: mindcaster

A story I wrote for Make Use Of. Learn the most important keyboard shortcuts, the ones I use on a daily basis to whizz my way around the Fox.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, Firefox, Mozilla, Productivity, shortcuts

Some browsers let you set up auto-complete information for all the Name/Address/City/Password forms you fill out on a regular basis, but often with a “do it all or don’t do it” functionality. Free Firefox add-on InFormEnter is a better implementation of that automated function.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, extensions, Firefox, informenter, Lifehacker

A post I wrote for Make Use Of. Give your Firefox browser a kick up the rear with Preloader, a freeware application from Sourceforge which preloads parts of Firefox into memory to speed it up.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Freeware, Make Use Of, preloader, Software, sourceforge

A post I wrote for Make Use Of. A new Firefox shortcut tip - navigating between pages with your keyboard.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: browser, Digg, Firefox, howto, keyboard, Mozilla, Productivity, shortcuts

Last week I re-installed Firefox from the German version to the English version and suddenly all my file associations were gone. This was a big deal for me as I do a lot of networking and negotiations over instant messaging programs and this involves clicking on a lot of weblinks. Suddenly, whenever I clicked on a weblink sent to me via IM, Pidgin was coming out with the error message :

“FIREFOX DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO OPEN THIS ADDRESS BECAUSE THE PROTOCOL ISN’T ASSOCIATED WITH ANY PROGRAM”

So basically it was telling me that it didn’t know how to open a weblink because I hadn’t specified that Firefox was to be used to open URL’s.

This was a big problem that took me over a week to figure out and today I finally solved it. Which is just as well because I was about to blow a gasket.    I wasn’t sure if it was Firefox’s fault (requiring a change to the “about:config” page), a problem with Pidgin or a problem with Windows.   Since the problems started when I re-installed Firefox, I was inclined to think that it was Firefox causing the problems.   But it seems now that the offender was Windows!

What you have to do to fix this issue is change the Windows registry to let it know what you want done with weblinks. So open up a text editor and type in the following :

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http]
@=”URL:http Protocol”
“URL Protocol”=”"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command]
@=”\”I:\\Programme\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\” \”%1\”"

Save the file as protocol.reg to your desktop. But make sure that you first change the path to your browser. My Firefox browser is at “I:\\Programme\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\ but yours may be somewhere totally different.   You may also use a different browser altogether.   So make sure that last line corresponds to where the default browser is located on your PC.

Once you have the “protocol.reg” file on your desktop, double-click on it, say yes to the boxes that pop up and the necessary changes will be made to your registry.    You should now be able to open weblinks with Firefox.

The above script is also the one to use if you want to set a particular action with a particular program.   So if you have a preferred program for opening photos for example, you would replace the http with say jpg and the last line would contain the path to your preferred program.

If you’re not entirely sure what you’re doing though, I strongly recommend you make a backup of the registry before changing anything.   If you totally mess up your registry without a backup to save you then you’re totally screwed.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, program, protocol, registry, script, URL, Windows

An article I wrote for Geeks Are Sexy. Performing a clean re-install of Mozilla Firefox. If your Firefox is not responding as it should or if it is as slow as George W Bush’s brain, then a fresh re-install may be necessary…

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: browser, Firefox, geek, howto, Mozilla, reinstall, uninstall

There are some bloggers out there who are just downright saviours. Whenever I have a big computer irritant, I can normally go online and find a blogger who knows the answer to my problem. Therein lies the beauty of bloggers or blogging. If you don’t know something, you can quickly find someone who does.

The How-To Geek is my latest hero.

I am a big fan of the Firefox extension, Greasemonkey, but I was getting extremely hacked off with the fact that if I wanted to edit a Greasemonkey script, it automatically opened in Microsoft Word. I am slowly going off MS Word as my preferred word processing app as it is slow, clunky and unwieldy. In fact I am seriously considering installing Open Office which gives you a good indicator of MS Word’s high positioning on my shit-list.

Anyway, I wanted to find a way to change Firefox’s default editing program for Greasemonkey scripts. I much prefer lighter faster programs such as MS Notepad but I had no idea until now that the solution lay in Firefox’s “about : config” options page. Thanks to the How-To Geek, I have now changed the default editing program and I am one happy chappie.

I strongly recommend you subscribe to the How-To Geek. I only wish we could get him to write for Make Use Of.

Technorati Tags: about:config, Firefox, Greasemonkey, Mozilla