Wed, 02 Jan 2008
YSlow - a Grade A Tool
I spent a couple of hours running the YSlow
FireFox extension against the main website for one
of my little side projects and I couldn't stop fiddling with the sites
config until I got the score up. Improving a category until you get an
'A' gives you that same moment of satisfaction as all your tests passing
or a file restore working perfectly.
Due to not being amazingly wealthy I cheated with the content delivery network stage and just overrode it with the sites own name.
I'd happily recommend this tool to anyone who wants to learn some good habits. With the exception of the CDN rule it's hard to argue with most of its suggestions. The performance grade is a nice way of giving near instant feedback and encouraging at least basic sensible behaviour.
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Posted: 2008/01/02 22:52 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 20 Jul 2006
FireFox 2 Microsummaries - Initial Thoughts
Microsummaries are regularly-updated succinct summaries of web pages.
They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label,
provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and
are regularly updated as new information becomes available.
--
Microsummaries - Mozilla
Wiki
I've spent a little while playing with them now and while I like them, smarter page titles are nice, they have their limits. Firstly, they are not the easiest things to install. Most people are not going to understand them or get them working without some hand holding. IMHO they are going to be a niche tool unless the user experience is heavily tweaked. Secondly, and this caught me for a while, you only see the dynamic behaviour if you add the microsummary to the bookmark toolbar. It doesn't work in the normal bookmark menu, which I think would be a lot better. There has been some discussion about putting them in tab titles but this seems to be a bad idea based on how much space they typically have available.
I've also noticed a couple of odd things, although this is a beta so it's understandable. When you add a microsummary it doesn't pick up the favicon, even when it changes the content. It does however pick it up when you go to the actual site it refers to. I also didn't get any errors when I tried to install (via a href link) a microsummary that didn't exist.
In general I think they're interesting but the way they are installed and activated is too awkward for my liking and RSS already satisfies a lot of the use cases where they could be very powerful. I've not finished playing with them yet (and they're refreshing my XPath and XSLT knowledge) so expect my prototypes to be on here in a day or so.
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Posted: 2006/07/20 13:18 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 08 Feb 2006
Adding Multiple FireFox Extensions
Adding FireFox extensions through the GUI one-by-one is, if you ignore
memory leaks, one of the browsers most annoying quirks. Fortunately,
modern versions of the browser allow you to drop a number of xpi files
in to your "extensions" directory and install them as a batch when you
start FireFox. Of course you need local copies to do this but that's
where a little bit of perl web spidering comes in...
The hardest part of the process is actually finding where to drop them. If you are using a modern Windows system (2K/ XP+) you'll find the "extensions" directory under %APPDATA%, which you can display with "echo %APPDATA%" from within cmd.exe. The other catch is that FireFox (and Thunderbird) create a profile name based on random characters. The full path will end up looking something like this: 'C:\Documents and Settings\dwilson\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default\extensions'
You'll still be prompted once to install them all (I've not dug too deep in to completely silent installs yet) but it's a lot simpler than the alternative. And a good first step on way path to completely unattended installs.
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Posted: 2006/02/08 18:15 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 05 Feb 2006
Greasemonkey (and JavaScript) Debugging in FireFox
Since being bitten by the Greasemonkey bug I've found
dozens of ways to write broken and invalid JavaScript. While the JavaScript
console that comes bundled with FireFox has helped track them down it's come
up short on a number of occasions. Fortunately we've now got FireBug,
a per page JavaScript console with a bundle of extras. Including an
integrated element inspector and XMLHttpRequest sniffer that shows you any
AJAX traffic.
And now for an related, annoying quirk. If you view source on a page, you get the source *before* any Greasemonkey changes have taken place. Which is often the exact opposite of what you want. I've worked around this with the "View Generated Source" function in the Web Developer Extension.
Bonus extension: Html Validator Firefox Extension. Displays a little icon on the bottom right of the screen which shows when a page has warnings or errors. It can show the total warnings and errors for the page but you need to enable this option. Double click the icon for more details.
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Posted: 2006/02/05 14:50 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 03 Feb 2006
foXpose and the NOC
What do multiple Nagios status pages, network traffic graphs and RT incident queues
have in common? They're all tabs I have open throughout the day. Because
any of them can change at anytime, watching them has been always been a
PITA. I used to get around this with a custom kludge that drove IE through a set series of pages. On
the upside it worked. On the downside the periodic flicker of page changes
drove me nuts.
I've moved to a two monitor set up at home, while this allows me to work and watch a page at same time the requirement to view multiple pages is still an important, and awkward, one. Thanks to foXpose this is suddenly a lot easier.
foXpose creates a tab that contains a miniature view of every tab you have open (apart from itself) and shows them all in a single tab. The great thing about it is that if any of the "real pages" change then the miniature one also adjusts. So you can watch too many tabs at once in real time! A foXpose tab has become an almost permanent resident in my right hand monitor.
If you work on a single monitor then Tab Sidebar might be more useful, instead of a whole tab of tabs, it opens a sidebar with a compressed version of each tab in it. While still allowing you to web browse in the main window.
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Posted: 2006/02/03 18:35 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 17 Sep 2005
FireFox - Making PDFs Easier to Swallow
When it comes to presenting information on the 'Net PDF files do little but
annoy me, fortunately I'm not alone in thinking PDFs in websites
suck. I understand that you might need to have a very controlled
form that people can print off. Fine, but take me to a HTML page
with a link explaining what the PDF is for. And don't even think about
giving me important information in PDF format by default; HTML with a
link to a higher quality version maybe. PDF on its own? No way!
Fortunately FireFox has two extensions that make dealing with PDF files much more pleasurable. First up is TargetAlert, an extension that provides clues as to what's at the other end of a link. If the far end of the link is anything but a webpage TargetAlert will attempt to warn you with an icon. I can't even imagine how many times it's saved me the long wait of loading a Word, Excel or PDF document by accident.
Secondly we have the PDF Download extension. This one intercepts any PDF links you click on and allows you to either download it, open it in a new (background) tab, convert it to HTML and show it in another tab or abort the load. I like this extension a lot.
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Posted: 2005/09/17 14:31 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 13 Aug 2005
O'Reilly Articles - Print Friendly Version and Greasemonkey
I've been doing some fiddling with Greasemonkey recently (I need to
buy a modern book on JavaScript, mine are all four/five years old and the
landscape has some what changed!) and I've found some quite useful user
scripts. My favourite one so far is a mostly innocuous script called theO'Reilly Network
Printer Friendly Redirect. It does pretty much what you'd expect,
instead of getting an article cut across four or five pages it shows the
complete version in a single page. Simple, free and damn neat.
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Posted: 2005/08/13 12:06 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 30 Apr 2005
Aardvark FireFox Extension
Despite its odd name the Aardvark FireFox Extension is
actually damn useful. Once installed, turn it on using Tools->Start
Aardvark and move the mouse over the page.
As you hover over different parts of the page a red box will outline the current section, show you what HTML tag created it and show the elements "class" or "id" values. What's less useful but still interesting is that once you've selected the element you're interested in you can do a couple of occasionally useful things to it, remove it, colour the background, remove the element but leave a blank spot etc.
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Posted: 2005/04/30 15:13 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 15 Jan 2005
Adding RSS Validator to the Webdevelopers Toolbar
I've been doing some work with RSS feeds recently and I wanted quicker access to the
FeedValidator from within
FireFox, I already have it in IE thanks to a nifty sidebar written by
humble ole me, after a little look around I noticed it's possible to add a
custom validator to FireFox's Webdeveloper Toolbar
The process itself is simple, click Options on the toolbar and then click Options on the menu. Then click Validators on the left of new window and paste the following URL in to the "Custom Validator Field".
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=
Once this is done you can just click "Validation" and then "Custom Validator" to validate the currently displayed feed.
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Posted: 2005/01/15 15:39 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 05 Dec 2004
PDFs, Word Docs and Linking to Web Unfriendly File-formats
I'm not a big fan of unmarked links pointing to resources that require an
external viewer. The worst of these formats, such as PDFs or the Microsoft
Office formats, cause the browser to pretty much halt for a couple of
seconds while the viewer is loaded and then change the behaviour of the UI
(if you are viewing a PDF in FireFox for example, Ctrl-W will not close
that tab) in a way that seems designed to annoy people who know how to use
the keyboard.
Fortunately there is now an extension, called TargetAlert, for FireFox and Mozilla users that changes the HTML when it receives a page load event and adds icons to highlight links like these.
It's also worth noting that you can customise (the default types) and toggle if they should display the icons or not.
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Posted: 2004/12/05 16:13 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 12 Nov 2004
Installing FireFox Extensions
One of FireFox's best features is it's community of developers and the
third party extensions they create. While it's always been pretty easy
to install these, over time, this mechanism has grown to be more secure
and less user friendly; a common trade-off. The checks it made (for
example you could only install new extensions from certain sites by
default) were rational they forced people to either download and
install or dig around in the Options screens until they found the
correct settings.
With the release of version 1.0 the process has become a lot simpler. If you try and install an extension from a site that isn't in the current list of acceptable download sites a bar pops up under the toolbars and explains what's happening. On the far right is an "Edit Options..." button. If you click this then the 'Allowed Sites' dialog box appears with the URL already entered. All you need to do is think about the consequences and either hit allow or cancel. And it doesn't need a restart.
Well I was impressed.
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Posted: 2004/11/12 20:42 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Upgrading to FireFox 1.0 -- Extension Updating
I've just upgraded my main machines web browser to FireFox 1.0 and I was
pleasantly surprised by its ability to upgrade some of the third party
extensions I use. While I've historically bitched about the changes in the
extension mechanisms and packages it seems that all the pain was for a
good reason.
On the first run of the new version I was shown the extensions that wouldn't work and then prompted to search for upgraded versions. Twenty seconds later and over 75% of them (I use some very old extensions that have had development stopped as better solutions became available) were upgraded and working nicely. Very impressive.
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Posted: 2004/11/12 20:42 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 10 Nov 2004
Google FireFox Home Page
If you've not yet seen Googles
FireFox home page then it's worth a look. I'm not sure why they've
decided to do it but as a big FireFox fan I'm just
happy to see it get more coverage. It's a shame that they've not replaced
the front page for a couple of days to really spread the word.
It's also worth noting that a number of plugins don't work correctly with the newly released FireFox 1, if you have any that you constantly use it's well worth installing the new version side-by-side with your current version for testing. Hopefully with the new version 1 release this should become a rarity and the plugin installer should settle down.
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Posted: 2004/11/10 00:20 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 28 Oct 2004
Foxlicious - FireFox and del.icio.us Integration
I'm a big fan of the del.icio.us social bookmarking site but
it's lack of browser integration has always been slightly annoying. Luckily
someone else must have thought along similar lines as we now have the
excellent Foxylicious
This FireFox extension adds a folder to the bookmarks menu that contains your del.icio.us bookmarks making them available without going to a separate website. The only downside is that it seems to be a one way trip, adding a local bookmark to the menu and choosing "update bookmarks" (you can reach this via tools->Foxylicious) doesn't seem to update the bookmarks on the server.
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Posted: 2004/10/28 10:57 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 27 Oct 2004
FireFox adbar - It's a Joke Dammit!
I've been doing some research on the available FireFox extensions for a
very small side project that may or may not appear. During my travels I
spent some time investigating the quite excellent Adblock. I bet you can all guess what it
does.
What was slightly more amusing was the Adbar extension, this adds text ads that no one gets paid for, to FireFox; it is very similar to the unregistered Opera browser. While the idea behind the extension is worth a smile the Adbar user comments page helps to prove that some people don't pay any attention to what they are reading and will swallow anything. Always a good thing to know if you plan on starting your own business ;)
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Posted: 2004/10/27 17:32 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
WebmailCompose -- FireFox Extension
Over the last couple of days I've become quite taken with a FireFox
extension called WebmailCompose (
WebmailCompose XPI)
This addin for FireFox (although it has an issue installing on 0.9.3) and
Mozilla overrides the default behaviour of mailto: links and instead calls
your webmail application of choice.
By default support is provided for, among others, Gmail (WOO!), Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and you can even add your own service of choice with a little knowledge of URL formats.
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Posted: 2004/10/27 00:30 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 13 Oct 2004
Give Unneeded GMail Invites to a Good Home
Do you have a couple of spare Gmail invites laying around (guvner)? If so
you probably already use FireFox as your web-browser of
choice, and a good choice at that!, but just think of the poor untold
hordes of IE users just
waiting to be saved.
"What can I do to help?" you may ask, well for a start you can donate a couple of GMail invites to the Spread FireFox GMail Project. These invites will be given to people proudly displaying FireFox buttons on their own web-sites. FireFox gets more PR, the site owner gets a Gmail account, you get the warm glow of giving back to the FireFox team and the web gets a better client base.
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Posted: 2004/10/13 00:12 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 22 Sep 2004
Running Multiple FireFox Versions Simultaneously
While testing a small FireFox plugin in both 0.9.3 and PR-1 I noticed a
small oddity. Open 0.9.3, leaving this window open try and open an instance
of PR-1. When both windows are open click on the Help menu, now select
'About Mozilla FireFox'. Both windows are version 0.9.3.
I'm note sure if this is a bug with FireFox opening new windows with a 'getobject' call rather than a 'create object' call (that is a serious over simplification! :)) and having an instance of the already running version returned or if it's something weird with my settings under the 'tabbed browser settings' plugin but it is odd and it caught me for a couple of minutes as I wondered how my plugin was already installed.
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Posted: 2004/09/22 18:48 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
