Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Before a Firefox extension has a chance to become unbelievably popular it has to go through an experimental phase to make sure it’s worthy of being added to Mozilla’s extension site. This process can sometimes take months, and so today we wanted to show you some of the best experimental Firefox extensions that you probably don’t know about.

Since each of these extensions are still in the experimental phase you’ll need to have a free Mozilla account before being able to download them. Believe me though, there are some handy add-ons here that are worth going through the extra hassle.

P.S. If you get a “file hash” error message when trying to download any of the extensions checkout this guide on tips to solve the problem.

–MyBookmarks (Homepage)–

MyBookmarks creates a homepage out of all the bookmarks located in your Bookmarks Menu. Just type about:mybookmarks into the address bar, and it will traverse through your folders grabbing each bookmark displaying the results on a central page. It also sticks each site’s icon next to the results making it easy to find your favorite sites.

The color scheme might not appeal to everyone, but that’s not a problem. Just pull up the options, and using a little CSS magic you can customize the look of the entire page. Additional information on skinning the MyBookmarks can be found here.

–Get File Size (Homepage)–

How many times have you wondered how big a file is before you start downloading it? With this extension you just right-click on the URL of the file, select the option to get the file size, and then you’ll receive a popup letting you know just how big the download is.

–Find in Tabs (Homepage)–

Being able to find text on a page is nice, but being able to find text in any of your open tabs is even nicer! With this extension a new “Find in Tabs” button is added to the find bar. Once pressed it will pull up a listing of search results from each of the tabs that you have open. Clicking on one of the results not only takes you to that particular tab, but also focuses on the area where the match was found.

–Text Area Resizer & Mover (Homepage)–

We’ve seen extensions that let you resize text boxes before, but none of them are like this. Just right-click and drag to dynamically resize any text box, or double-(left)-click and drag on any text box to move it around. If you choose to double-click in a text field it will remain “locked” and movable until you double-click in it again.

The screenshot below demonstrates how you can do things like move a comment box up alongside an article so that it’s easy to pull out quotes. Then as you scroll on the page the text field actually moves with you.

–ErrorZilla Plus (Homepage)–

There are plenty of extensions out there that provide powerful “address not found” or “404 error” pages. Typically they just let you bring up the cache for a particular page, but this one is a bit different. ErrorZilla Plus also lets you customize a list of proxies, which you can then use to try and view the site. This is especially helpful for viewing sites that may be blocked for one reason or another.

–Google Redesigned (Homepage)–

The great people over at Globex Designs have taken the time to compile their two custom styles for Gmail and Google Calendar into one simple extension. A dark skin has never looked so darn good!

–GrandCentral Click to Call (Homepage)–

Do you use Google’s GrandCentral service? If so this extension makes it a lot easier to dial phone numbers that you come across in the browser. Just click on a phone number, and let the extension do the rest of the work!

The developer’s homepage has a lot more information about the extension.

–Noise (Homepage)–

I’m not a big fan of sounds while I’m surfing the Internet, but I know some people like them. If you happen to be one of those people this extension will let you add and customize the sounds used throughout the browser. Get audio alerts for when a popup is blocked, a download has completed, and much more.

–CyberSearch (Homepage)–

And the last one of the day is our own concoction. CyberSearch lets you view Google search results from the web, images, videos, local/maps, and more right in the Firefox 3 address bar. Be sure to checkout the options where you can customize the keywords used to drill down search results to a particular site or Google service.

–Overview–

There you have it! I have to say that there are a lot of great Firefox extensions that can’t wait to get out of the experimental phase, but in the meantime they’d love for you to take them for a spin. Let us know in the comments about any Firefox extensions you use that haven’t broken out of the experimental stage yet.

Update: You might have noticed that a few of the extensions are no longer experimental. It looks like some of them didn’t spend much time in the Sandbox.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed in Safari 3 is the inline search interface, and just the other day I thought I would peruse around the Internet trying to find a way to do the same thing in Firefox. Why is searching special in Safari? Because it dims the background of the page that you’re on, and highlights the matching results as you type. The result that you currently have highlighted bounces up and down to catch your eye, and the whole experience is overall visually appealing.

When searching around for an extension I didn’t come up empty handed. I found one called XUL/Migemo that did exactly what I was looking for, but the problem was that the extension does a few other things that I don’t really need (nor wanted). After a little more searching I came across this post in the MozillaZine forums which talks about how you can set it up yourself. After testing it I can verify that it does work on both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.

Note: There is a video demonstration at the end of the article that shows what the end result looks like.

–Setup–

The setup process consists of three pretty easy steps. You’ll have it done in just a minute or two:

1. Download this package that I’ve assembled which includes the four files you’ll need.
2. There are three JavaScript files (userChrome, SafariHighlight.uc, and ucjs_findbar.uc) that need to be placed in your profile’s chrome folder. Use this table to find your browser’s profile:
   

   Operating System	Profile folder location(s)
   Windows 95/98/Me	C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ C:\Windows\Profiles\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Windows NT 4.x	C:\Winnt\Profiles\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Windows 2000 and XP	C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Windows Vista	C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Unix	~/.mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/
   Mac OS X	~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

   After you’ve found the profile folder just copy the three JavaScript files (userChrome, SafariHighlight.uc, and ucjs_findbar.uc) into the chrome folder located within your profile. If the UserChrome file already exists you may want to back it up before overwriting it.

3. Now you’ll need to install the extension which I’ve included in the download from the first step (here’s its homepage in case you’re curious). I’ve cleverly named the extension DragMeIntoFirefox because that’s exactly what you need to do… drag the file into the Firefox window. Then proceed with installing it, and restart the browser when it’s done. If you don’t want to drag the extension into the Firefox window just go to File -> Open File and browse for the extension.

–Using the New Search Feature–

When you go to perform a search for the first time you may not think that it’s working, but I’m confident that you’ve followed the three steps accurately. The reason why you may not be seeing the dimmed background and nice highlighting is that you need to click the Highlight All button on the Find bar. Immediately after doing that you’ll see the effects go into play.

Alternatively you can just hit the Next button (or the keyboard shortcut Control+G) to go to the next result. After pressing that the Highlight All feature will automatically be enabled. Those of you with the automatic find-as-you-type enabled will want to use the Control+G keyboard shortcut to move on to the next result if you want to see the special effects.

–Demonstration–

Is it worth the work? I think it’s a really nice feature to have, but you be the judge:

–Overview–

So that’s how you can get a Safari-styled search interface in Firefox 2 or Firefox 3. After setting this up I have fallen in love with it, but it would be nice if this was bundled into its own extension.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

After about a month in progress, we have finally launched a huge Learn Firefox redesign! Our focus was to bring a graphical appeal to the site since it is a “visual guide to the Firefox web browser,” and we believe that we’ve successfully done that.

For those of you who haven’t visited Learn Firefox yet there has never been a better time. Almost 100 Firefox extensions have been reviewed thus far, and screenshots of over 200 themes have been taken. Of course, at the center of all this are the countless guides that have been created to help new Firefox users learn the ropes.

Here’s a list of what’s new:

• New design with simplicity in mind
• Significant speed improvements
• Works great in all the popular browsers
• Each category has the posts broken up into “Guides” and “Extensions.”
• Mini navigation buttons are located on the bottom of every page (except for the homepage for obvious reasons)

We would like to welcome you to the new Learn Firefox! This is quickly becoming a hub for new and existing Firefox users alike, and you can always subscribe to the feed to stay up-to-date with the latest articles. The next time you know someone switching to Firefox, point them in our direction so that we can help them along!

Note: We’re still in the process of updating some of the graphics on this blog, but that should be done shortly.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge the Mockup

Mozilla is working on a new addition for Firefox called Coop, and the goal of the project is to add some social networking features to the browser. I was actually really shocked when I heard about this because Flock, a browser based on Firefox, has already gotten a huge headstart at implementing social features that connect users with their favorite services such as Del.icio.us and Flickr.

The Coop Firefox extension will let you track your friends pictures, bookmarks, movies, blog posts, and essentially anything else they feel like sharing. Right now I’m not huge into the whole social network thing like MySpace and Facebook…in fact I don’t have an account on either service. It’s not that I feel it’s bad, but everyone I know who has those accounts seem to get consumed in them. Once you’re in, you’re hooked…kinda like World of Warcraft (another thing I forbid myself to try).

There is currently a prototype of the extension available in the Add-ons Sandbox (you’ll have to login to your Mozilla account in order to download it) that works only with Facebook for the time being:

This version is a very early prototype with only a fraction of the proposed functionality. It lets you log in to your Facebook account, see your Facebook friends, send them links by dragging and dropping them onto your friends, and see the links your friends send you.

While new Firefox features are always exciting to get, hopefully they are also focusing heavily on the memory leak issue that plagues so many users. A memory leak, for those unfamiliar with it, is when an application continuously eats up more and more memory (a.k.a. RAM) without ever releasing it. The result will either be a really slow program, or the application will just crash. Numerous memory leaks still exist in Firefox 2, but my experience in Firefox 3 has been much better with Firefox normally taking up less than 150MB of memory.

For right now this Coop feature is in the very early stages and may differ as the development progresses. One thing that I do like about Coop is that it is just an extension you have to install, so if you’ll never use it you don’t have to worry about it adding some extra weight to your browser.

Source: TechCrunch

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

Apple has really been successful with their Cover Flow representation of album covers, and with their latest Leopard operating system they even added a Cover Flow view for browsing files. This has to leave you wondering why you’re not able to browse your bookmarks in a similar fashion?

Well, thanks to this new Firefox extension (install it here) you can. As you visit websites that you’ve saved as bookmarks the extension will create a small JPG snapshot (about 30KB in size) that will be used when you open up your Bookmark Manager. In the Bookmark Manager you’ll see a Cover Flow-like interface for flipping through your bookmarks.

If you click on the View menu you can switch between the Details view (the one that looks like Cover Flow) or a regular Thumbnails view. The Thumbnails view tiles all of the websites on one page which might be a little more user friendly if you’re going through hundreds of bookmarks.

There is also a Create Previews option located under the File menu if you want to have the extension go through all of your bookmarks and grab previews for them. It’s all done in the background so you can go about doing your business in Firefox while it works, but it will likely take awhile if you have hundreds of bookmarks.

I estimate that each preview image is around 30KB in size, and about 30 previews will take up about 1MB of space. All of the JPG files are stored in your Firefox profile in a folder called bookmarkpreviews that will be deleted if you uninstall the extension.

Bookmark Previews Firefox Extension
Kudos to “Trip” for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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