It’s ‘Tech Thurs­day’ here at Quak­er Ranter. I try not to get over­ly excit­ed by soft­ware and I attempt to stay neu­tral in the var­i­ous sil­ly tech wars con­stant­ly rag­ing (the old Mac vs Win­dows being the grand­dad­dy of them all). But the newest ver­sion of the Fire­fox brows­er is so much supe­ri­or to Inter­net Explor­er that I have to sing its prais­es and talk about how to soup it up with cool features.

The first thing to do is to “down­load the lat­est Fire­fox browser”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. It’s a small­ish down­load and it works great “right out of the box.” But to get the fun stuff, you need to down­load “exten­sions,” which con­sists of click­ing the down­load but­ton and restart­ing the browser.
*Exten­sions*
* “Book­marks Synchronizer”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=14&vid=15&category=Bookmarks : If you use more than one com­put­er in your life (work and home, say), this will allow you to have the same book­marks (“favorites” in Inter­net Explor­er) on all your machines. I find I actu­al­ly use book­marks more
* “All-in-One Gestures”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=12&vid=13 : I can nev­er con­vince peo­ple that mouse ges­tures are real­ly cool. I think you just have to try them. With this installed, you can hold down the right mouse key, slide the mouse to the left and go “Back” a doc­u­ment. Not real­ly excit­ing, I know. But once you get used to this you’ll start try­ing to use ges­tures on all your pro­grams and thus dis­cov­er just how addic­tive they are.
* “Chromedit”:http://cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit/ : This makes it easy to change cer­tain con­fig­u­ra­tion files. There are two that are worth mak­ing. One is the “Speed Up Page Rendering”:http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#oth_rendering (which is not­i­ca­ble) and the “Ad Blocking”:http://texturizer.net/firefox/adblock.html. You don’t need to know any­thing tech­ni­cal about mak­ing these changes: you just cut-and-paste the code from the web­site tricks page into Chromedit.
* “Googlebar”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=33&vid=34 : Like its equiv­a­lent in Inter­net Explorer.
* “Jesse’s bookmarklet”:http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/ site has dozens of handy book­marklets – lit­tle pieces of javascript that can be saved as but­tons in your book­marks or toolbar.
* “Adblock 0.5”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=10&vid=11 : As the name says, it blocks ads. Once you’ve installed it and restart­ed your brows­er, click on the options (on the Fire­fox tool­bar, click “Tools” then “Exten­sions,” find “Adblock’ and click on the options icon). Go to Help and select “Load default fil­ters from web.”
* Like most oth­er Fire­fox users, I’ve used “Tab Brows­er Extension”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en, which has all sorts of tools to ful­ly util­tize “tabbed brows­ing,” the mode where new win­dows are shown as tabs in a sin­gle win­dow. Clear? Well, it’s hard to explain, but it makes jug­gling open web pages much eas­i­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly “Tab Brows­er Exten­sions” or “TBE” is a bug­gy exten­sion which caus­es more prob­lems than it’s worth. Here’s a “list of alter­na­tives to TBE that will give you the func­tion­al­i­ty with­out the bugs”:http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Firefox_:_Tips_:_Extensions_That_Replace_TBE
h4. Oth­er things to look at:
* On the upper right­hand cor­ner of Fire­fox there’s a search box. Pull on the lit­tle icon and you’ll see that you can use it to search not only the page you’re on but also Google. There are hun­dreds of oth­er search­es you can add to by pulling down the icon and click on “Add engines” (you can also go to the “Search Plu­g­ins Homepage”:http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html. Just to give you an idea, I have search­es for IMDB, Book­find­er, Wikipedia, Yahoo on there.
There’s been a bit of con­tro­ver­sy over the new look of Fire­fox. I won’t get into it except to say that I think that “Qute, the old default theme,”:http://update.mozilla.org/themes/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=7&vid=8 looks bet­ter than the new one. Luck­i­ly, it’s easy to switch back.
Final­ly, if any­one’s won­der­ing why I’m obes­sion so much as to give you my detailed list: I’ve installed this on a few machines already and want my own list of favorite extensions.…