My Firefox Manifesto

[atrata]

Well, it's not really a manifesto, so much as I opened up my Firefox today to tell someone about some extension or other, and I'm using FF 2.whatever, which tells you at the top of the window how many you have. I have 45. That's kind of a lot. So I went through them to see if there are any that I just don't use, and... nope. I use them all. Granted, I do web development and QA, so I have some weird crap that I never use in my fannish life.

But anyway, I've decided I am going to tell you all about them. Also I am going to show you pictures. Because I'm in a weird mood tonight and this is exactly the sort of distraction I need.


Unexciting But IMO Necessary Extensions
First, the configurey shit. This stuff is not particularly shiny, and some of it's kind of overkill, but it's the backbone of all the other stuff, so it comes first.

• Nightly Tester Tools. This extension enables all sorts of weird fiddly config stuff, and it's meant primarily for developers working on pre-release Firefox builds (as I sometimes do, when I am feeling extra-nerdy). But the awesomest thing it does is force extension compatibility. So if you have some extension you are madly in love with and can't live without, but that extension breaks the hell out of Firefox 2 and therefore you haven't upgraded and don't know the joy of spellchecking in text boxes, this extension is for you. You hit the button that says "make all compatible," and you're good to go.
• MR Tech's Local Install. Speaking of fiddly config shit. Christ. I mostly use this to disable the annoying "are you sure you want to install this extension? Yeah? I don't believe you. Wait five seconds. Still sure? Okay, I suppose I will let you install this extension." This overrides that completely and lets me install what I say I want to install. No waiting! It's also making this post possible by generating a list of my extensions with links.
• Fasterfox. The main thing that Fasterfox does is pre-fetch links. So while you're looking at the first page of your f-list, it's loading the stuff behind the cut tags, the nekkid pictures of Dan, and the next page of your f-list. When you get around to clicking on those, they load faster. Shiny.
• Greasemonkey. I don't even know what to say about Greasemonkey. It lets you install or write your own little scripts, and there are a ton of them for use with LJ or del.icio.us. That, however, is an entirely different post, best made by someone who isn't me. There's a list of LJ-specific scripts here, and del.icio.us scripts here.

Fun Fannish Stuff
This is why you're here. I know. Me too.

• Del.icio.us Complete. This one lets you post to multiple del.icio.us accounts with the same button. I was driving myself nuts opening separate browsers and copying links and just making a mess of things. Now I just have one button, and it's dreaaaamy. The dialog box looks like this.
• ErrorZilla. So you're looking through old recs pages, or your old bookmarks, or your old links lists, or old posts, or anything else that is more than a month old. Fandom moves fast, yo. And in the course of digging through things that are old, you often come across broken links. This error page is full of awesome. Instead of just telling you you're SOL, it gives you a bunch of options -- trying again, if you think the site isn't really down, but also searching the Google Cache or the Wayback Machine. It's very useful for finding old stories that aren't around anymore.
• Cooliris Previews. I'm still playing around with this and trying to decide how useful it is. It lets you hover over a link, and then open that link without really opening it. My theory is that it's going to be really good for newslettering -- I can preview links this way and then just copy them (or possibly open them) if they're includable. It's not as fast as I'd like it to be, but I think there are some interesting things that can be done with it.
• Video Downloader. It lets you save movies from YouTube or Google Video or pretty much any other vid site you can think of. Just click a little button down in the statusbar and the video is all yours.
• DownThemAll. Downloads every image on a page. Awesome for grabbing screencaps or just pretty pictures of your favorite celebrities.
• Word Count. Highlight some text, right-click, and find out how many words it is. Very cool, especially when you work on a newsletter that categorizes fic by length and people yell at you if you call something more than 1,000 words a "ficlet."
• Gmail Manager. Deal with multiple gmail accounts in one handy place. Nice if you keep personal and fandom mail separate, or if you have a bunch of accounts for the seventeen newsletters you edit.

Miscellaneously Awesome
Stuff that is not obviously fannish, but is still pretty cool and useful.

• TinyURL creator. You know sometimes you want to send someone a link, but it's roughly 8736 characters long? OR it's something like www.fuxors.com/lets_have_buttsecks.php and you don't necessarily want them to know what the page is just by the URL? Enter TinyURL. Click a button, and it copies a new URL to your clipboard that looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/38ryjm. That'll take you to my LJ. Not that useful an application of this extension, but I think you see my point.
• Gspace lets you use your 2 gigs of gmail storage space as storage. It's a good way to move your files from computer to computer, or keep it safe from local crashes. It hangs out down in your statusbar and doesn't bother you until you need it.
• Google Images Re-linker. When you do a Google image search, this lets you bypass the annoying thing where it opens the image in a frame and you have to tell that yes, you really want to see that image. It just goes directly there.
• OpenBook. Lets you customize the Add Bookmark dialog box. It can even remove it completely. I use keywords a lot, and before I found this, it was really annoying because I'd have to add a bookmark, open the bookmark menu, and THEN add keywords. This lets me add them at the same time I add a bookmark. Good stuff. Screenshot here.
• Open Image In New Tab. I wish these had better names. So, this lets you right-click on an image and open it in a new tab. Surprising, I know. It's actually more useful than it sounds -- I read about it, thought, "why would I ever want that?" and then of course installed it immediately. Now I don't know what I'd do without it. I can fill all my tabs with pictures of Snape!
• Download Statusbar. I hate hate hate that whenever you download something, that goddamn window pops open. This stops that from happening. In mini mode, it's just a number down in the statusbar, and it's totally awesome and unobtrusive. You can click on it and it will open a list of recent downloads, and from there you can open them or kill the download or whatever.
• Tab Mix Plus. This is an absolutely insane Tab extension, and I've been using it so long that I no longer have any clue what is native to FF and what is added by this extension. Stuff I do with tabs: Add close tabs buttons to all tabs, even when there a gazillion open; have a scrolling tab bar so when there are a bunch open I can still see their names without necessarily scrolling over them; add progress meters to tabs so that I can open a bunch of stuff in the background and keep reading and not go to those pages until they're finished loading -- this saves me tons of time while newslettering; my tabs open exactly as I had them before whenever I restart Firefox, whether legitimately or due to a crash; I can rearrange tabs or clone them into new windows (history and all), etc. It also functions as a session manager, but that slows the browser down and FF 2 has a much better session manager than 1.5 did, so that's been disabled for a while. This is probably the extension I cannot live with out. Except for all those other ones.
• Check All. You know how sometimes you go to a site (or, say, go to your edit friends page) and there are a gazillion checkboxes and no one has been kind enough to provide you with a "check all" function? This will do that for you. You highlight the text by the clicky boxes, right-click, and tell it to check (or un-check) everything you've selected. We all love ticky boxes, but sometimes it's a little out of control.
• Right-Click-Link. Pretty much does exactly that. You've all seen posts where people say, "here's the link!" and you a URL but haven't actually coded it to be a working link. It annoys the crap out of me, though I do understand that sometimes it makes sense. This lets you select that text, right-click, and open it in a new tab.
• Similarly, Direct Link lets you highlight text and right-click to do a Google search on that text. You can also do a Wikipedia search, or an I'm-Feeling-Lucky search. Try highlighting some random phrases the next time you're reading fic and running an I'm-Feeling-Lucky search! Hours of entertainment, I'm telling you. Or possibly just a lot of porn. Which is totally the same thing.
• Still similarly, Unwrap Text lets you unwrap multiline URLs. So the annoying not-live URLs that get pasted into bulletin boards and then they wrap to multiple lines? Highlight, right-click, open in new tab. I always think this is stupid and not useful, and I uninstall it, and then the next day I find myself missing it.
• Stop Autoplay. Stops embedded music and movies on webpages from starting automatically. We've all accidentally clicked on The Worst Star Wars Fan Site Ever and been temporarily deafened by the unexpected theme song we couldn't figure out how to turn off. This keeps that from happening.
• Flashblock. Sometimes Flash sites are good. Sometimes they are fucking annoying. This stops all Flash anything from playing unless you specifically want it to. You can add domains to a whitelist, so Flash from those sites will always play (television sites are good candidates). It plays really nicely with:
• Nuke Anything Enhanced, which lets you right-click on any object on a web page and get rid of it. Don't want advertisements in the middle of that article you're reading? Nuke it. Sick of looking at the Shrub's face? Nuke him. I take great pleasure in removing all pictures of W from my web-browsing experience. You can remove Flash objects, but only if they haven't yet been fully rendered. So if you've got Flashblock on, you can kill Flash ads, which is nice.
• Googlepedia. You know how, when you do a Google search, the right-hand side is sponsored advertising? Wouldn't it be cool if it were useful information instead? This replaces that column with the relevant wikipedia article. So a Google search on "googlepedia" looks like this. Pretty cool.
• Fission. I don't remember why I decided I wanted this. I use Safari maybe once every six weeks, when I am already using Firefox and Camino for other things. But back in the day! Back in the day, I was feeling the Safari love, and I kind of liked that the location bar was also a status bar. This recreates that for Firefox, so you can just look at the location bar and get a good idea of how much loading is left on any given page. Oh! That's why I wanted it. So I could get rid of the spinny wheel thing in the corner that told me FF was loading. It just takes up space, and it's particularly useful. This shows me something like a percentage, and I can use that space for other things. I'm on a 13-inch laptop, so I needs me my screen real estate. Note that this may not work if you're using some wacky theme.
• The Stop-or-Reload button is similarly space-saving. It combines the stop & reload buttons into the same button. So while the page is loading, it's stop, and once it's done, it's reload. Makes sense to me, and gives me back some button space.
• Kaboodle. I love Kaboodle. It's basically a giant wish-list site, and you can make pages for different things, and then as you browse around, you can add stuff to your Kaboodle. It's like shopping, but without spending any money! It also makes it nice for other people who are shopping for you, because they can click on an item, and Kaboodle will do a bunch of comparison-shopping for them. (Sometimes they get the item wrong, though, which I find utterly hilarious.) Anyway, this is just the add-to-Kaboodle extension.
• Reveal. This has several different features, but the one I like the most is that when you hover over the back or forward button, it shows you a thumbnail of that page.
• Secure Password Generator. Is exactly that. Generates a random string of letters/numbers/other characters. You can designate which characters you want to use, as well as the length of the string. Excellent for anyone really paranoid about security, or anyone setting up accounts for other people.
• On the other hand, if you're really NOT paranoid about security, there's Always Remember Password. Many e-mail sites and banking sites will save your userid, but NOT your password. This forces the issue, and saves you from having to remember any passwords, ever.
• BugMeNot. Lets you bypass mandatory registration for web content. Keeps away the spam!

Stuff I Use For Work And Couldn't Think Of Fannish Applications For Without Trying Harder Than I Am Inclined To At Midnight
I mentioned I do web development and QA? So I often need to know and find out strange things. These extensions help me do that. I doubt anyone cares about these, but by now, I'm doing this for the sake of completion.

• Cookie Crumbler. That little "crumble" button in my statusbar? Is for the cookie crumbler. I'm always having to clear out my cookies for my job, but I sure as hell don't want to clear out ALL my cookies because I use a gazillion sites and hate logging in. It's terribly insecure, but whatever. Anyway, I hit "crumble," and cookies from designated domains are blown away. I don't think this works with FF 2, but I've got a hacked version that does. And even if I didn't, Nightly Tester Tools would force the issue.
• DOM Inspector. DOM stands for Document Object Model, and this lets you muck about with them. I'm reasonably sure this comes installed by default, and I just haven't got around to uninstalling it because it sounds really official. But now that I think about it, Firebug can do all the DOM inspecting I need to do (which is approximately none).
• Firebug, which I just mentioned, lets you monitor and debug CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Here's a screenshot of me inspecting the html of my LJ. So it's actually really cool and you can see how it would be useful if you're trying to figure out why a website is broken. It's also a quick way to look at the CSS of some page. My CSS is asstastic, so I'm always poking around and stealing it from other people. It's also pretty unobtrusive -- it sits down in the status bar until you click on it.
• Link Checker. This extension reminds me of the terrible horrible idea I had one time of exporting all my del.icio.us links to an html file, running said file through an html validator, and then PRINTING OUT THE RESULTS. Which, mind you, were in no sort of useful order and had only the URLs listed, so I had to run text-string searches against the non-validated html file to find the corresponding link, and THEN find the link in del.icio.us, and I really have no idea what I was thinking. Clearly I just wasn't. I sat around highlighting my list of broken links for, like, weeks. WTF? ANYWAY. You turn this extension on, and it highlights good links in green and bad links in red (or whatever colors you want), and that's pretty cool.
• DRE Address Completer. This is a work-specific extension that fills in forms with a keystroke. It's actually very, very cool -- for a given domain, you can have different profiles, and then whenever you are at that domain, you hit ctrl+F and your form is filled in. Totally awesome! I'm not sure if it will work on sites that aren't owned by my company, though, and it lives on our internal development server, so there is no link for it. However, it remains completely shiny.
• Live HTTP headers. Basically it lets you look at the data going from your browser to the server. Useful for debugging web apps.
• Web Developer Toolbar. This has roughly a bazillion useful webdev tools for dealing with CSS, forms, enabling and disabling various browser features, etc. It offers a quicker way to clear cookies (like -- if you just want to clear your session cookies for some site that's not necessarily in your Cookie Crumbler and you don't want to add it, this is a much faster way to do it than going through your giant list o' cookies) and disable pop-up blocker or whatever.
• View Source Chart. Mostly useful for debugging html and CSS. Viewing the source of my LJ, for example, looks like this, instead of the plain-text (and often unreadable) code (quick, view the source of this post! Ugly.). You can set it to open in a sidebar, too, instead of its own tab. And I think you can edit it and then your edits will show up on your page. (Obviously that's only useful for pages you actually own.)
• View Dependencies. This brings up a nice box that tells you everything that goes into a page -- stylesheets, javascript, images, etc. It's nice if you're working on a big site that has a lot of interlocking pieces and you're trying to figure out how they fit together. The only remotely fannish application I can think of for this is if you're on a site and you really really really want to save an image (for personal and non-commerical purposes, obviously) and can't figure out where it lives to grab it. This will help you, but you could also maybe just take a screenshot.
• Selenium IDE. Write and run automated tests on websites. If you have a set of tasks you do every day, and it's always exactly the same, Selenium can do it for you.
• Professor X. Lets you see inside a page's head. It's kind of a combo of view dependencies and view source chart, but is lighter than both of those things. Here is the inside of my LJ.
• Talkback is another one that comes installed by default. It reports crashes to the Firefox team.

So those are my extensions. A quick tour of what my browser actually looks like:


Those are my menu bars. Back & forward, stop-or-reload (instead of stop AND reload). The next line is bookmarks, and the one after that is miscellaneous junk. All the stuff to the left of the first dotted line is the web developer toolbar. Then there's Video Downloader (which also lives in the statusbar, so probably I can get rid of it here), TinyURL creator, del.icio.us, and two Kaboodle buttons. The puzzle-looking button is the extensions menu, so I can edit extension options from there. The one with the recycling button is a list of recently closed tabs that I can re-open (that would be Tab Mix Plus at work, I believe). The blue arrow on the right restarts Firefox.



The statusbar. Left to right: Fasterfox, telling me how quickly that page loaded; video downloader; greasemonkey; gspace; Firebug (this page had no errors!), download statusbar (I've apparently downloaded 278 files since I last cleared it out), Cooliris previews (the blue check means they're enabled), cookie crumbler, and gmail manager. So many things in, like, two inches of space. Rock.

Now I wonder if anyone actually made it this far. I probably wouldn't have.