Intelligent Browsing
February 23, 2007
It’s common knowledge that one of the coolest things about firefox is the ability to accept add-ons and extensions. Now some of them are rather useless, others are gems of productivity. They let you browse faster and more intelligently through out the internet, now the problem is: which ones to pick? There are far too many out there and when you dive into the realm of greasemonkey scripts things are prone to go a-wire.
So, what’s a personal blog without a personal list of crap we use to get firefox do load at 120Mb? Not much. So since this blog is a bit less then “not much” I present only solutions that will keep firefox at 40/50Mb per session and still provide a more productive time on the web.
All titles are liked to the add-on’s/script site or download page.
Are you traveling with your laptop from home to work to wifi hotspot to secondary office to coffee shop with accidental wifi connection to your parent’s house to wherever? Foxy Proxy can be used to configure proxy settings on the fly, also if you wish to use a given proxy for a given URL you can configure it to pick that specific proxy every time you connect to that URL, regardless of the “main” proxy you’ve got going for every other site. The list is endless and there is a “learning” mode, so you can just browse, choose a proxy, Foxy learns that and you’ll never have to pick it again. Foxy is 100% compatible with the onion thing so if privacy is what you are looking for, this one is friendly with the fashionable proxy service of the hour.
I’m sure most of you already know this one. It opens a IE browser inside a tab, so if you encounter a site that is “html-I-don’t-give-a-crap” compliant you can still browse it without actually switching browsers. However you are really opening IE inside Firefox, so the proxy settings from FoxyProxy or Firefox will not apply. Bummer, but still, it works.
Extra windows suck. The little gadget creates a little bar above firefox’s status bar with the downloads at the time…you can configure pretty colours to quickly assess the downloading speed, it’s got progress bars, double click to launch the app/doc you just downloaded, right click with individual options for each dowloaded file. Groovieness all around.
I though I wouldn’t use this…but I do! it’s so much quicker to access the add-ons folder, history, bookmarks (well…not bookmarks, but they are there!) download history, and so forth…It’s an ok thing to have. Little tip: don’t be afraid do press the options button and then the advanced button. The way the bar acts is actually quite cofigurable and I really didn’t like it’s default behaviour. Another tip: if you get the silly button thing on the side and want to get rid of it, just right-clooick and loose it like you’d loose a toolbar.
Ever wanted to open two webpages side by side? Now you can within the same tab. It’s really quite brilliant. Takes a wile to get used to, it seems a bit weird at first, but soon one realizes there isn’t any other sensible way to deal with multiple pages on a single tab. It’s a breeze once you get the hang of it, and you can open web pages left, right, up, down, you name it, you can do it…all in the same tab. Brilliant.
Another bliss. Just right click on a link and choose the folder from a list you can set up at will. As an added bonus it can change the file name to whatever you wish, as a prefix or suffix based on date or time (like 123032download.zip) so if you download a lot of stuff in a short period of time it’s easy to differentiate the files. You can also decide if it overwrites/appends to the file name or ask about files with the same name (if the previous option is disabled)
This little add-on will create numbered boxes next to links, so when you press Alt-W they show up, you proceed to type the number you wish, press Enter and you are off to that link. Downsides? You can’t choose to open the link in a tab or in a background tab. current tab only. Either way, if you are a keyboard geek like me, this is for you.
It makes life more easy or more unmanageable, depends on what you’ve got installed. Greasemonkey is, let’s call it, a framework to launch scripts that will alter the way firefox loads and presents web pages. Wait, stay with me on this… The next gimmicks are scripts that you can load on greasemonkey. They will not work without it.
Google calendar text wrap events
This little script will wrap text to fit your tasks. Should be default on google calendar, shouldn’t it?
Press ? and all the keybinds will show up on the screen. simple, and again, should be available by default.
You get this little icon before any contact (may that be on the email listing pane or reading an email, on the header) and by hovering over that contact you’ll get instant info on that contact and several ways to interact with the person. Buy clicking on the icon you get all the messages from that contact.
Right click over any message (except on the junk folder?!) and a little balloon will show the contents of the message. Pretty nifty.
Now underneath that thumbnail you have the link to the site where the picture is hosted. This also removes the google frame that used to be on top.
This little script opens tabs with all the links from a google search. You can configure it to avoid links that lead to docs, pdfs and such and you can also define how many link you want to open, all 10, the first 4…
Another images.google hack. This one lets you browse over the pictures click it and instead of opening the link it just opens the target link, so you click on the thumbnail and the big picture shows up; no frames, no new pages, just a big picture over the google page. You can also use this as it’s name implies an “Instant Gallery” as by using the cursor keys you can browse the pictures left and fight and zoom in and zoom out with “Z”. Downsides: you must close the little transparent window on the lower right side to do another search; otherwise the shortcut keys (like Z) will not show up in the search form. One thing I’d advise is to open the scripts’s options in greasemonkey and change it to only load the script on http://images.google.*/* , because by default it’s on on every page with a picture. which is silly and annoying because of that “must close little box in the corner” thing.
This will extend on some forums (Invision, duh!) the pages to infinity…well…at least you’ll lose the number of topic pages on the end of the page, instead you’ll get all the posts in 1 single page, that can be as long as…er…infinity.
Press the left click for 5 seconds and the link will pop-up on a tab with no further clicking. nice for laptop users that don’t have a middle button to create the same effect. (I alter this script to do it in less then 5 seconds, because that long is a waste of time. And yes, CTRL+Click opens the link in a background tab, but the point here is: one click, new tab!)
There are really a million different scripts for Greasemonkey that will suit your browsing habits. there are a lot of scripts for myspace, flickr, digg, and stuff like that. I didn’t pick any of those because I rarely stop by those sites, so optimization there is hardly something I’ll spend a single second on.
