Geeknizer » addons

Sync Firefox Addons, Settings

Tarandeep Singh — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:23:39 +0000

I happen to use four instances of Firefox- One each on my personal laptop, office laptop, remote desktop and solaris desktop and find it very tedious to have all the same stuff synced across the browsers.

When Xmarks came, it solved part of the problem by syncing Firefox and Chrome bookmarks. But I was still looking for a solution that could sync my settings, addons. Mozilla Weave partly solved bunch of it by providing settings sync. But wait a minute, addons?

Then I came across another addon, which became the solution to sync every kind of stuff across Firefox browsers, no matter what:

Siphon (Download)

Siphon is a firefox addon that promises to kick all the crap and sync it all. Siphon will manage and sync all your Add-ons with your different computers. That means tt will also save your Add-on list if you ever need to reinstall Firefox.

Siphon is still in the beta but works fine almost all of the time.

Now, you can combine Mozilla Weave with it to sync all your Firefox settings, bookmarks. you can also use xmarks for bookmark sync across browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome.

Using this methodology, everytime you install a new firefox, just install Siphon and it will do everything.

Limitation: Support for profiles, Themes sync will be added soon.

2nd Option is to use FEBE addon.

FEBE (download)

FEBE also does similar stuff but does a backup instead of Sync.

FEBE backs up your extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and just about everything else Firefox offers (it can even backup/restore your entire profile). You can selectively restore only the items you need. For instance, you may just want your bookmarks restored and leave everything else as it was.

Key Features:

Schedule automatic backups in time-stamped folders
User-defined backups: Make backups of virtually any file or folder – Firefox related or not. Just specify what to backup and FEBE does the rest.
Auto-Upload backups to your Box.net account.
FEBE 6.2 has a new, simpler profile restore interface. No need to use the Firefox Profile Manager to manually create a profile to restore into.

The thing I don’t like about this addon is that it doesn’t sync witha cloud service automatically, and that could be pointed as a big limitation. Everytime you want to sync with new PC, restore the backups manually from file location. On the contrary, it’s more featureful.

Choose your wishful methods, and let the syncing prevail!

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5 Interesting Firefox Addons

Tarandeep Singh — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:39:52 +0000

Addons is something that makes Firefox so rich. Playing around with the available ones often brings out the best of Firefox.
So here we bring 5 Interesting Firefox addons that you can add to change your experience, again.

1. Easy YouTube Downloader (HD)

How to Download Youtube Videos

Now that YouTube is going FullHD 1080p The only good addon that let’s you download YouTube videos is HD, MP4, FLV,3GP, FLV formats.

How to Play FullHD 1080p on PC

2. Dislike for Facebook:

How to Dislike on Facebook

Petitions for Facebook to add a “dislike buttons are rising. They may not listen, bu there is an un-offical workaround.

3. App Tabs:

Just like Chrome, you can Pin favicon-sized app tabs to the left side of the tab bar. The same feature is prevalently coming on to Firefox 4.0!

Just Ctrl+Click the tab, select App Tab, and any tab will shrink down to an icon only on the left of your Firefox window. You can set it to retain your App Tabs between sessions and protect them from closing.

4. Google Wave Add-on for Firefox:

If you have a Google Wave account, enter your login and password in the settings and it will log you in and notify you of new wavelets in your inbox.

Google Wave Invites Giveaway [100+] [ending soon]

5. LongURL Mobile Expander

URL-Shorteners sure have added to Twitter experience, but uou should always know where a link takes you before clicking on it. LongURL Mobile Expander uses the LongURL.org web services to let you know where shortened links point to and the best part, addon works throughout Firefox.

You may also want to checkout our Taranfx’s Web Addict Must-have Firefox Addon Collection

Create Website Screenshot/Thumbnail in Firefox

Tarandeep Singh — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 07:47:21 +0000

There are lots of Free websites that let you take screenshot of a particular Webpage/Website. But all of these take some time while queueing up the job. Also the features, thumbnail size options are limited.

Here is the Solution – FireShot — Firefox plugin which is very flexible, let’s you choose size of the target image and automatically uploads to a free Image hosting instantly.

When Installed, It sits in the right corner of Statusbar and gives you alot of options to chose from for capture. You can capture and Edit, Upload, save, print, copy to clipboard, Email for the Visible area or the Entire Page.

Also, you have option to include or exlude flash components. When you are including them, you can mention time offset too. Helpful for animated flash.

If you are saving image, you can choose between Jpeg and PNG file formats and corresponding image quality between 1 and 100, bigger the no., higher the size.

Make Old Extensions Compatible with Firefox (any version)

Tarandeep Singh — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:02:16 +0000

There are three ways to achieve this

1) Making Extensions Compatible – THE EASY WAY

All you have to do is to go and download a wonderful Nightly Tester Tools extension. Not only it is compatible with your newest Firefox version, but it will also add a button to your Extensions manager (Tools->Add-ons):

Just click this button and restart your browser. Please note that this is a screenshot taken AFTER making all the xtensions compatible – so as you can see they’re all active already.

The advantage of this way is that it’s really easy to make all your extensions compatible with any Firefox until Firefox 3.0 (that’s what this extension puts as the MaxVersion for each of the extensions it fixes)

The disadvantage is that there is no equally easy way to revert the changes, so once “made compatible”, your extensions will stay this way – there is no button to make them uncompatible again. However, disabling the extension seems to restore the versions.

2) Making Extensions Compatible – THE FIREFOX GURU WAY

What you can do is open the configuration (about:config) in your Firefox browser, right click the list and create a boolean extensions.checkCompatibility option there. Set its value to false and restart the browser.

Most of your extensions should work now. If you go to the Add-ons dialog, it will look like this:

As you can see, extensions which would otherwise be incompatible, are flagged with the exclamation mark. You can also see a warning message which suggest you enable the compatibility check again.

The advantage of this approach is that it’s really simple to make the change which affects all the extensions.

The disadvantage is that this way can be used as a temporary solution only, as it may lead to unpredictable consequences (some really old or really new extensions may malfunction).

3) Making Extensions Compatible – THE HARD WAY

This is essentially a manual way of accomplishing the result of using the Nightly Tester Tools extension.

The advantage of this way is in total control over which extensions you’ll hack to become compatible.

The disadvantage is in the fact that every step of this method is rather hard: distinguishing extensions to make sure you’re changing the one you really want, and
manually changing the versions supported.

Close your browser
Go to the folder with all your Firefox extensions:
C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILE\extensions In this line, USER is to be replaced with your Windows login, and PROFILE will be the name of your Firefox profile (weird looking folder name, usually the only one found in Profiles folder)
You’ll see a list of folders there, 1 folder for each extension. The names of the folders are the unique identifiers for extensions, so they may seem scary at first:
{34274bf4-1d97-a289-e984-17e546307e4f} – this is the Adblock extension GUID.
Go to any folder, and open the install.rdf file for editing with your favorite clear text editor. Notepad works, but using it will make things even harder cause it doesn’t part rdf files properly. Your choice Now back to the business. You need to look for 2 things:
- name of the extension, to make sure you’re editing the right oneJust look for the em:name, and try to recognize the extension from the description that follows:
  
  Adblock
  Filters ads from web-pages
  The Adblock Crew
  Henrik Aasted Sorensen
- a block of minimal and maximum Firefox versions the extension will work on.
  Warning: there could be few similar blocks with versions, so make sure you’ll edit the one which has EXACTLY this em:id, the one which belongs to Firefox browser: ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384.
Edit the maxVersion parameter (shown in bold to make it easier), and change it from 1.5 to 2.0b2.
Remove the extensions.cache file from the C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILE\ folder – this will make sure Firefox will read all the changes from install.rdf files and pick up the now “compatible” extension
Restart your browser, enable the previously disabled extension you’ve just edited
Restart your browser again to activate this extension

10 handy Firefox about:config hacks

Tarandeep Singh — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:38:56 +0000

I had been using Firefox for 5 years now. I know inside out, even contributed for some development. (fixe around 15 bugs, 3 enhancements and 1 addon). If you’re a decent Firefox user, you may be familiar with the about:config page. The Firefox about:config page is not so much a page as it is a somewhat hidden configuration section. It’s hidden because it’s fairly powerful and not nearly as simple to use as the standard Preferences window. In the about:config page, you have to know what you are doing or you can mess things up a bit. In fact, when you attempt to go to that page for the first time, you have to accept an agreement (which is really just a warning) before you can continue.

How this page works is simple. You reach the page by entering about:config in the address bar. There are entries (one per line) that handle various types of configurations. Each entry has a searchable keyword. The entries can be of Boolean, integer, or string value. Entries contain Name, Status, Type, and Value. Typically, you will be modifying only the Value, by double-clicking on it and making the change. With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at 10 of the best ways you can “hack” the about:config page.

Tip

If Firefox is fubar’d because you accidentally misconfigured about:config, you can fix it in one of two ways:

Make a backup of your prefs.js file before you start editing. Then, if something goes wrong, you can restore it by copying it over the corrupt file.

1: Speed up Firefox

This hack requires a few steps. Search for pipelining in the filter and you should see:

network.http.pipelining: Change this to true.

network.http.proxy.pipelining: Change this to true.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: Change this to 8.

Now search for max-connections and you should see:

network.http.max-connections: Change this to 96.

network.http.max-connections-per-server: Change this to 32.

2: Disable antivirus scanning

This is only for the Windows version. If you’re downloading large files, this scanning can seriously slow things down. And since you will most likely scan the downloaded file anyway, you’ll probably want to disable this. Of course, if you are uber paranoid (not a bad trait for computing), you might want to leave this entry alone.

To disable antivirus scanning, search for scanWhenDone and you should see:

browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone: Change this to false.

3: Open Javascript popups as tabs

If a popup window lacks the features of a browser window, Firefox will handle it like a popup. If you would prefer to open all windows, including popups, as new tabs, you need to tell Firefox in about:config. Search for newwindow and you will see three entries. Of those three entries, you will want to modify:

browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction: Change this to 0.

4: Spell checking in all fields

By default, Firefox checks spelling only in multiple-line text boxes. You can set it to check spelling in all text boxes. Search for spellcheckdefault and you should see:

layout.spellcheckDefault: Change this to 2.

5: Open search bar results in new tab

When you use the search bar, the results display in the current tab. This can be a nuisance because you will navigate out of the page you are currently in. To make sure Firefox always opens search results in a new tab, search for openintab and you should see:

browser.search.openintab: Change this to true.

6: Auto export bookmarks

In Firefox 3, bookmarks are automatically saved and exported for you. The only problem is that by default, they’re saved as places.sqlite instead of the more convenient bookmarks.html. To change this setting so that they can be easily re-imported, search for autoExportHTML and you should see:

browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML: Change this to true.

7: Disable extension install delay

One of the few gripes I have with Firefox is the silly countdown you must endure every time you want to install an extension. Fortunately, this can be disabled. Search for enable_delay and you should see:

security.dialog_enable_delay: Change this to 0.

8: View source code in an external editor

When you need to view the source of a page, it opens up in browser popup. Most developers would probably like to have that opened in their favorite editor instead of having to cut and paset. To do this, there are two entries to modify. Search for view_source.editor and you will see:

view_source.editor.external: Change this to true.

view_source.editor.path: Change this to the explicit path to your editor of choice.

9: Get more add-on search results

When you do a search in the Add-on window, you’ll see just five results. You might find it more efficient to increase this number. Search for getAddons and you should see:

extension.getAddons.maxResults: Change this to 10 (or higher, if you want to see even more).

10: Redefine the Backspace button

Did you know you can configure Firefox to use the backspace button to either go back a page or go up a page? This keeps power users from having to go back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. Search for backspace and you will see:

browser.backspace_action: Change this to 0 for previous page and 1 for page up.

If you can’t restore via a backup prefs.js file, you can exit Firefox and issue the command firefox -safe-mode to bring up the Firefox Safe Mode screen. Then, just select Reset All User Preferences To Firefox Defaults. Note: This will restore all user preferences to their default values.

Best of Chrome now possible in Firefox

Tarandeep Singh — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:04:49 +0000

The internet is a twitter with Google Chrome’s innovative new features—which means your choice of browser may depend solely on features. Apart from a few specific issues (namely process management), many of Chrome’s best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility. From incognito browsing and the streamlined download manager to URL highlighting and improved search, let’s take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome’s best features to Firefox.

Stealther Turns On Incognito Browsing

Chrome’s Incognito browsing allows you to look at porn without keeping any history of that browsing session anywhere on your computer. In Firefox, the Stealther extension does the same thing. The main difference: In Chrome, a single window can enter Incognito mode, whereas in Firefox it’s enabled globally (this is probably possible in Chrome because of how it manages each tab as a separate process). But let’s be honest, are your multi-tasking skills really that good?

Download Statusbar Puts Downloads in Your Status Bar (Surprise!)

Chrome is all about saving space, so files you download don’t break out into a separate window. Instead, they live in your status bar. Not bad, but guess what: The Download Statusbar Firefox extension has been doing this for five years, and it offers lots of additional options and wastes even less screen real estate.

Speed Dial and Auto Dial Power Up Your Empty Tabs

Chrome’s empty tab page—which displays your most visited sites, most used search boxes, and even your recently closed tabs—is awesome. There isn’t currently anything quite as full featured for Firefox, however there are a couple of options that are very close. The Speed Dial extension (which itself is a ripoff of the Speed Dial feature in Opera) provides a very similar thumbnail-based new tab page, but you decide which sites you want in your speed dial and you can quickly access any of them from your keyboard with shortcuts.

Locationbar2 Adds Domain-Highlighting to the Address Bar

Google Chrome’s “omni bar” sports root domain highlighting, a cool feature that doubles as a nice anti-phishing device (if you see the root domain more easily, you are less likely to give your information to an imposter domain). That sort of domain highlighting isn’t new by any means, though; the Locationbar2 Firefox extension has been boasting this same highlighting—in addition to several other excellent features—for well over a year.

Prism Extension Turns Any Site into a Separate Application

If you want to break out a webapp you use all day long into a separate window and desktop shortcut, Chrome makes it easy on you. Just click x and do y. The concept of separating webapps into their own application isn’t new, though. At Mozilla, they’ve been cooking up Prism to do just that for quite some time. With Prism and the Prism for Firefox extension installed, just go to Tools -> Convert Website to Application to break a webapp into a separate window and application. Right now this extension is Windows only, but hey—so is Chrome.

Keyword Search Bookmarks Integrate Site-Specific Search with the Address Bar

Chrome boasts that after using a site’s search engine once, you can perform that same search from the address bar the next time. For example, after you search Amazon once, the next time you may just be able to go to your address bar, type ‘a’, press Tab, and then perform your search. That’s pretty saucy, but it’s also not much of an innovation over keyword searches in Firefox. Granted, you have to manually add a search box (here are 15 of our favorite Firefox quick searches), but you can also define exactly what you want that shortcut to be. Chrome also doesn’t currently support keyword bookmarking in general, which is one of the most time-saving features in Firefox.

On the other hand, previously mentioned Auto Dial automatically populates the new tab page with your most frequently visited sites. It’s not as attractive as Speed Dial or Chrome’s new tab page, though. Either way, give Firefox extension developers some time. We’ll have an even better alternative before you know it.

Make Old Extensions and addons Compatible with Firefox 3.5

Tarandeep Singh — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:00:15 +0000

So, I’ve had some more time to play with the latest build of Firefox, and I liked it so much that I couldn’t use the 1.5 version anymore. And this left me with a problem: hardly any of my extensions were compatible with the latest and greatest Firefox version.

I’ve made a bit of a research out of it, and here we are: I present you with the 3 ways to make extensions compatible with Firefox 3.5