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Firefox
A note about Nightly Tester Tools
If you use Nightly Tester Tools to bump up the compatibility of an add-on to enable it on your installation of Firefox or Thunderbird, that does not guarantee that the add-on will work. Nightly Tester Tools is a tool for testing.
Add-ons are built on top of Firefox/Thunderbird code. When the Firefox/Thunderbird code changes (new version), that may break the add-on, or worse, the add-on may cause the new version of Firefox/Thunderbird not to work. This is why the whole “add-on compatibility” thing exists in the first place. Add-on authors can state which versions they know their add-on will work on. When you bump the compatibility, it doesn’t magically fix and bugs that may occur, when trying to use that add-on on a new version of Firefox/Thunderbird. You run the risk of breaking your installation of Firefox/Thunderbird.
For some add-ons, there may not appear to be a problem; but there’s no guarantee, because it hasn’t been tested. That’s the point.
History Repeating
Update your extensions
Now that Mozilla Firefox 2 has reached its first release candidate, it’s probably the best time for extension authors to update their extensions to work on Firefox 2; and thus the optimal time for users to check for extension updates, so no extensions get disabled when Firefox 2 is finally released.
A video is worth a million words
Providing screenshots can really go a long way in helping users with their questions. But sometimes images don’t tell enough.
Watch this.
If only I could add that great background music, that the CustomizeGoogle folks use. 🙂
Whole Lotta Theme Discussion Goin’ On
Those interested in giving feedback on purposed changes to the Firefox 2 theme, should head over to the mozilla.dev.themes newsgroup, where there is quite a bit of feedback/discussion taking place.
In addition, the SeaMonkey Council wants to give SeaMonkey a new default theme. Head over to the mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey newsgroup, to give your feedback on that.
In other news;
we may get our first alpha release of Thunderbird 2 this week.
Getting rid of the ‘blocked pop-up’ yellow bar in Firefox
Some people prefer it, if Firefox does not display a yellow alert bar in the browser, when a pop-up window has been blocked, citing a preference of pop-ups to be blocked “silently.” You can get rid of it, by modifying a hidden setting.
In Firefox, go to the URL: about:config
Search for the preference privacy.popups.showBrowserMessage.
Double-click on it, which should modify the value to false.
Multi-row Bookmarks Toolbar
Mozilla Firefox users, who like to put many bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar, sometimes get to the point where the number of bookmarks is too much to fit on the screen; so Firefox gives a drop-down menu at the end of the Bookmarks Toolbar, to access bookmarks not displayed on the toolbar.
Some users have used some simple methods of fitting more bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar. These include renaming bookmarks [Right-click -> Properties], to give them shorter names. If a bookmark has its own unique favicon, removing the entire bookmark name will work.
I recently came across a neat little userChrome.css script that will cause the Bookmarks Toolbar to start another row, if the current one cannot fit all bookmarks.
Just add the following script to your userChrome.css file:
#bookmarks-ptf {display:block !important;}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator {display:inline !important;}
Removing ‘Remove All’
Here’s a question: Using any of Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, the Mozilla Suite, or Netscape, have you ever purposely clicked on the ‘Remove All’ button, in the password manager?
Follow up question: Have you ever clicked on it by accident?
Clicking on it by accident, is easy, when it sits right beside ‘Remove’ button. Luckily, the closest I’ve come to that, is removing all cookies, not passwords. The scary part is that there is no “Are you sure” prompt, asking for confirmation. One accidental click, and ‘poof’, data is gone.
I’ve been able to avoid this by removing the ‘Remove All’ button. If you’re using Firefox or Thunderbird, add the following script to your userChrome.css file, to remove the ‘Remove All’ button from the password manager:
#removeAllSignons {display: none !important;}
Customize the Firefox Bookmarks location
Don’t like your bookmarks being stored in your profile folder? Want two or more users on the same computer to share a bookmarks file?
Easy.
– close Firefox.
– copy/move your bookmarks.html file (and bookmarks.bak) to the location you prefer to keep it.
– open Firefox.
– enter about:config in the Firefox location bar, right-click on any of the listed preferences, and choose New -> String.
– enter the preference name: browser.bookmarks.file
– for the value, enter the new file path (including the file name) of your bookmarks.html file.
Using this method, not only can you share your bookmarks file with other Firefox users on the same computer (and possibly same network. I’m not sure.), but share the file with SeaMonkey users, or Mozilla Suite users, or Netscape users. If you share with SeaMonkey/Mozilla/Netscape, just remember that live bookmarks will not function.
If you have Netscape Communicator, you can even go as far as pointing it to your Communicator bookmark.htm file.
The \bookmarkbackups\ folder stays in the profile folder. The bookmarks.bak file travels with the bookmarks.html file.