Some might think my love for Firefox only goes back to 2006, when I started up Firefox Facts.  However, I had been using and loving Firefox even before that time and date.  Here are some of the best features or feelings Firefox brings to the web browsing table:

• The community of developers and users is great. When you use Firefox, and dive into the community aspect, you really feel like you are making a better browser for everybody to use.  Mozilla listens to user feedback more so than any other company I know of, and it shows.
• Firefox, hands down, has the best execution of special features out there too.  Even if they are not the first one out of the gate with a feature, once they get it – they will prove to you it was well worth the wait.
• You can theme, add on to, or hack your way around Firefox to make it best suit your needs.  Will Chrome or Internet Explorer provide you a toolset as powerful as about:config to tweak with the guts of the browser?  No.
• My last big argument for using Firefox is slowly starting to go away over time.  People love to cheer for the underdog. Day after day though, as Firefox picks up more steam and more users, the “underdog” label is slowly going away.

So there you have it.  Those are the big reasons I love the Firefox web browser.  What about you?  What you do you find most attractive or most off putting about Mozilla’s browser?

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.

If the video is stored in your web browser’s cache, VideoCacheView will find it and give you the option to export the file out of the cache and onto your desktop.  Once there you can archive it however you see fit.

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

It automatically scans the entire cache of Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based Web browsers (Including Firefox) and finds all video files that are currently stored in it. It allows you to easily copy the cached video files into another folder for playing/watching them in the future. If you have a movie player that is configured to play flv files, it also allows you to play the video directly from your browser’s cache.

You can download and try this great freeware program on almost any flavor of Windows too.  Head over to the NirSoft website to download it and give it a shot.  Hope it helps you with your video download recoveries.

When you change a regular tab into an app tab, it moves it to the left side of the tab bar and shrinks the tab down to the size of the favicon shown for the web site.  I have to have four or five browsers open just to cover all my bases on a day to day bases – so getting any type of extra tab real estate in Firefox is a good thing for me. 

To open a new App tab, just right click the tab bar and select App Tab from the context menu.  When your done with an App tab, just close it – or you can set it to restore the App tab every time you start the browser. 

If you want to enjoy this Firefox 4 feature before it becomes a standard, the App Tabs add-on for Firefox is the perfect tool for the job.

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.

How to Create the Resizing Bookmarklet

Thanks to a little JavaScript, and a very simple bookmarklet, you too can be saving multiple screen resolution sizes to change to at a moment’s notice, without the need of any extra Firefox extension. 

Right-click on the bookmark toolbar in Firefox, and select “New Bookmark…”

Here is how you will need to fill out the variables on the New Bookmark dialog box:

• Name: Could be anything, I would put Resize – 1024 x 768
• Location: Here, you want to put javascript:window.resizeTo(1024,768)
• Tags: Nothing, keep this blank
• Keyword: Type in r1 (when you type r1 into the Firefox address bar, your browser will be resized)
• Description: Nothing, keep this blank too

Now, hit the button labeled, “Add” and you are all done.  When you click that bookmark, your browser will be resized to 1024 pixels across 768 pixels up and down.  You can now repeat the steps above to create multiple bookmarks for other sizes you might want to keep handy when working on your web site’s design.  Just replace the 1024,768 in the Location text box on the New Bookmark dialog box with another size (for example, how about 800,600 ?).

Last thing for you to do would be to click the bookmarklet you created and make sure it works.

Example – Paying homage to the cooking show old TV cooking shows, I have created the same bookmarklet we created above right here.  Feel free to drag and drop this link (Resize – 1024 x 768) to your Firefox bookmarks bar.  Only thing that won’t work with this one is the keyword we used above.

Hope that helps as a very basic introduction to JavaScript and in quickly creating a bookmark to give Firefox a little more quick resize-ability. 

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.

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:

Save Page as 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.

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

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

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.

1. Screen grab to WordPress! – This addons ads to Screen Grab! by allowing screen captures to be uploaded to WordPress (2.5+) blogs
2. 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) .
3. WordPress.com Sidebar – Get quick access to your wordpress.com account from your browser sidebar.
4. MMD WordPress.com Extension – This extension adds a tiny statusbar panel that shows you your blog hit count for your WordPress.com blog.
5. 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.
6. WordPress Helper – The Firefox extension WordPress Helper helps you working with WordPress by providing useful help and tools.
7. WordPress Post – This extension lets you post the text you select in your browser directly to your WordPress blog.
8. easyComment-a-Blog – Filling out Blog Comment Forms automatically with ease.
9. 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.
10. 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!

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!

Visit this handy Plurk URL here:

http://www.plurk.com/m

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.