If it is wrong to love a web browser, then buddy – I don’t ever want to be right. OK, now I know this might sound like the introduction to a bad geeky country western song – but hear me out. I love the Firefox web browsers, put out by those fine folks at Mozilla. Now I didn’t just jump on the bandwagon when using Firefox was cool – oh no. If that was the case I’d be using Google Chrome right now. So what makes Firefox so special to me? Let me see if I can count the ways.
Tag Archives | Firefox
Firefox Fan Boy Love
Watch Videos Saved in Your Cache
After watching a video online, you might decide you want to watch it again later – but rather than going to the website again and slowly downloading it as you watch, you would like to have a local copy. The freeware program, VideoCacheView will let you easily recover videos from your browser’s cache.
Use App Tabs for Better Browser Organization
We all have web sites we keep checking back on day after day, while we browse the Web. Maybe you are checking for news in Google Reader? Perhaps you are checking your mail in Gmail? You could be following your favorite forum too. The App Tabs add-on for Firefox will let you shrink your favorite web site applications to a favicon-sized tab, so it can be there handy when you need it.
Quicker Window Resizing in Firefox
You might need to resize your browser window for a number of different reasons.
Maybe you need to check to see what your web site looks like at a smaller resolution? Maybe you want to take a quick screenshot? Now, of course you can resize the browser by dragging the edges around till you get the perfect fit, but that is often tedious and if you are a perfectionist like myself, you have a hard time getting the browser back to the perfect shape and size it was before, until now.
Great Web Development Bookmarklets
Searching the Web for a few great bookmarklets to make your web site coding a little easier? I have found a great collection of them over at Squarfree.com. You can drag and drop any of these bookmarlets to your saved bookmarks to use later.
- test styles – Type in CSS rules to experiment or to create a temporary user style sheet.
- edit styles – Experiment with changes to the page’s style sheet.
- ancestors - Lists the ancestors of any element you hover over in the status bar.
- computed styles – Lists the computed styles of an element and of its ancestors.
- zap style sheets – Disables all style sheets.
Most of these bookmarks work for Firefox only, but a few will work with Internet Explorer and Opera too. Go chec out the Web Development Bookmarklets page at Squarefree.com to check out the 18 other tools they have for you to use.
Bookmarklet to Convert Any Page to PDF
I love looking at bookmarklets. These handy bookmarks that allow just about any browser to do even more amazing things are really handy to have. Want to convert any web page to a PDF to read later? I have found a bookmarklet that does that too.
The people behind PDF Download have produced their own bookmarklet to convert web pages into high-quality PDF files free from any browser. Just drag and drop this link to your bookmarks toolbar, and click it when you want to export to PDF:
Here are the setup instructions for all the various browsers out there:
- Google Chrome
- Safari
- Firefox (also see full add-on)
- Internet Explorer (also see full add-on)
- Opera
Only negative I could find is I got the “server is too busy” message more than a couple of times.
Know of anymore bookmarklets that will allow you to export a page into an entirely different format? Me neither, but if you do – please share. PDF Download’s solution will work for the time being though. Save on paper and export to PDF. That tree outside your window will thank you.
Merry Christmas from Mitchelaneous
Christmas has even made it’s way over to Mitchelaneous.com – and who would have guessed I’d pass up the chance to call it Mitch-mas. 
For all of you I have two very special presents – a couple of my other side projects you may or may not know that much about. I wanted to take a minute or two of your time so that you could check them out, and if you like them as much as you like Mitchelaneous – feel free to subscribe there too. Merry Christmas!
The Web Hosting Show is my weekly podcast on and about the wacky world of web hosting. From news, to help and even some shopping tips – I like to help people get the most out of their hosting accounts – while having a little fun along the way.
My Favorite Web Hosting Show Posts of the Year:
- 5 Best Ways to Search Rapidshare, Megaupload and More! (plus 4 More Ways)
- Free eBook – Best of the Web Hosting Show Guides
- How to Trace Route (on Windows and Mac) (and the Video Walkthrough)
- Podcast Archives – 175+ Web Hosting Podcasts to Learn From!
- Talking Data Protection with R1Soft – Episode 139
You can subscribe to WebHostingShow.com for free by plugging the RSS feed into your favorite news reader of choice. Here are a few subscription buttons to help you in that process:
Firefox Facts is my daily blog about all things relating to Firefox. It started out as an e-book project, but has expanded by leaps and bounds since then. Find reviews for useful extensions, great looking Firefox themes and a whole lot more. I even toss in an occasional roundup of the best tools for this, that and the other. If you use Firefox, you need to subscribe.
My Favorite Firefox Facts Posts of the Year:
- Darkest Popular Themes for Firefox 3 (also have the lightest)
- Freshest Top 10 YouTube Greasemonkey Scripts
- Change the Default Search in Firefox
- 25 Tweaks for Your Firefox Statusbar (also 25 more tweaks too)
- Give Firefox 3 Firefox 2′s Address Bar
You can subscribe to FirefoxFacts.com for free by plugging the RSS feed into your favorite news reader of choice. Here are a few subscription buttons to help you in that process:
Thanks to all my visitors and free RSS feed subscribers for keeping this rambling side project of mine fun to do. This November was the 5 year anniversary of Mitchelaneous.com, and hopefully we will have many more years to come.
10 Tools to Turn Firefox into WordPress’s Little Helper
Firefox and WordPress. Seems like these two fan favorites should mesh together as well as peanut butter and jelly, however – finding add-ons for Firefox to help you with your installed version of WordPress (or your WordPress.com blog) is not an easy task. So let me take the pain away this holiday season and share with you 10 awesome tools that will turn Firefox into WordPress’s little helper.
- Screen grab to WordPress! – This addons ads to Screen Grab! by allowing screen captures to be uploaded to WordPress (2.5+) blogs
- One-Click Installer for WP – Install plugins or themes on your self-hosted WordPress blogs with a single click (needs the related WP plugin to work; not intended for WordPress.com) .
- WordPress.com Sidebar – Get quick access to your wordpress.com account from your browser sidebar.
- MMD WordPress.com Extension – This extension adds a tiny statusbar panel that shows you your blog hit count for your WordPress.com blog.
- Blog This in Windows Live Writer – Adds a button to Firefox which starts a new Windows Live Writer blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. Blog the whole page, or just selected snippets.
- WordPress Helper – The Firefox extension WordPress Helper helps you working with WordPress by providing useful help and tools.
- WordPress Post – This extension lets you post the text you select in your browser directly to your WordPress blog.
- easyComment-a-Blog – Filling out Blog Comment Forms automatically with ease.
- Deepest Sender – Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too.
- DashBlog – lets you quickly collect videos, images, text/quotes, songs and screen-captures from any web page and publish them to your blog (word press, blogger/blogspot, tumblr) and/or twitter.
Know of another good one that didn’t make the list? Let me know about it!
9 Google Reader Add-ons for Firefox
Looking for an easy way to get through your Monday morning feeds? Use these add-ons for Firefox, mix them up with Google Reader and then recover the rest of your morning.
- Google Reader Notifier – This shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.
- Google Reader Watcher – Afraid your updates are getting away from you? Google Reader Watcher will check your Google Reader for unread news.
- feedly – Feedly is a new kind of RSS start page which weaves Google Reader, Digg and Delicious into a more fun, magazine-like user experience.
- Better GReader – Preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, get a Mac OS X like skin, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader.
- Shareaholic – Shareaholic allows you to quickly share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a very wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking & bookmarking sites such as Google Reader!
- IntenseDebate in Google Reader – Add IntenseDebate comments to Google Reader.
- Google Reader Toolkit – Adds a few more browser utilities for use with Google Reader.
- Integrated GMail – Allows you to make the Inbox Collapsible and loads your choice of Google Calendar, Reader, Notebook, Groups etc… seamlessly into the gmail interface. Works w/Google Apps Accounts.
- gReader Comments – gReader Comments is a Greasemonkey script-turned-extension for Firefox that brings all Disqus conversations into Google Reader.
Know of anymore good ones? How have you super-charged Google Reader? Be sure to share!
Put Plurk in Your Firefox Sidebar
As I mentioned yesterday, Plurk is quickly becoming my favorite miro-blogging/status provider out there. It is unique, creative and doesn’t go down every few hours (hear that Twitter?). How would you like to be able to keep up with your plurking in your Firefox sidebar? Here is how you can get it done.
Visit this handy Plurk URL here:
Bookmark it (or drag and drop it onto your links bar). Then right-click it, and select “Properties”. From here, check the box next to “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”, then save your changes and you are done.
Now you have instant Plurk access no matter what web page you might be on.
Need a friend on Plurk? Feel free to add me! I feel like you all are nearly family anyways!
Update – Thanks to TwisterMC you can get a Firefox add-on that does the same thing, with a few other extra perks.
Subscribe
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.
