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Posts tagged firefox
Quick Tech Post
Jun 8th
Firefox, I’m sorry, but you’re losing. You have nothing going for you anymore.
Chrome and Safari both have extension support now and a javascript engine that is far superior. I was actually quite amazed that the latest Safari 5 outperforms the latest dev build of Chrome. Very interesting indeed. Then we have IE9 which by the way things are going will be the most standard compliant browser once it reaches final. I’m not saying it’s full standard compliant now…far from it but the way the dev team is working (shown through their blog) I won’t be surprised if they come out on top in terms of standards.
Ironic.
In the mean time Mozilla is holding onto everything they have. Development cycles are way too slow and performance improvements are subpar compared to the competition.
As you may all know Apple just announced the iphone 4. Too bad it’ll be released in Australia one month after it’s release in the States. I think I can wait. Hopefully Optus provides some form of discount for existing iphone customers to cancel their contracts like they did last year.
The Apple fanboys are jizzing in their pants whilst the Apple haters are crying “It’s not magical! It’s not revolutionary”.
Well you know what? It’s not about inventing something that’s “new” it’s about taking what exists and making it work.
Windows 95 was “revolutionary” but Xerox had the concept like 20 years earlier. Touch screen isn’t new either, we had PDAs since the 90s. But the problem was that none of it was widely adopted! Technology was shoddy, it needed someone to step in, raise the bar and force the industry to innovate. People in the tech business are lazy, mainly because they’re run by old money who have this philosophy of “milking as much out of one technology as possible”. I mean really, before the iphone it was simply which phone had the “better” camera. What else did a phone have to offer? Now it’s a platform, so much more than just a “phone”.
It’s unbelievable, you’d think we’d be living in a world where video calls are common place. But I doubt many have ever made one. I’m not including webcams here. CISCO does a good job with it’s “Telepresence” system but it’s made for corporations and not feasible at all for the everyday user.
What else do I have to say?
I don’t care what you say about Jobs, his cock is tasty.
Firefox Extensions for teh Pros
Nov 3rd
So with every installation of Windows/Ubuntu, I find myself reinstalling Firefox and then reinstalling all the extensions and then configuring the extensions to match my needs.
Unfortunately, Mozilla only has this crappy service that syncs your bookmarks (which 100 other extensions do already) and does not offer extension or settings sync.
I’m just gonna list a run-down of all the extensions that I use to improve my productivity.
- Adblock Plus – Blocks ads!
- Better Gmail 2 – It just runs several greasemonkey scripts to make your gmail experience that much better. It emulates “Folders” and allow dynamic Favicon displays.
- Download Statusbar – One of the most annoying things about firefox is that when you download something it opens it up in another window. Why?! This extension displays everything in a neat statusbar.
- Echofon (Formerly Twitterfox) – If you use twitter then this is an extremely light and simple twitter client. Most clients that I’ve used are generally extremely verbose. This displays a tiny icon in your statusbar and alerts you when there’s a new tweet.
- Faviconize Tab – I find that at any given time I always have two tabs open, Gmail and Google Reader. What this extension does is that it makes the tab size of selected tabs to be the size of the favicon. This way you reduce clutter and allow more tabs to fit on the one screen!
- Fire Gestures – Brings mouse gestures to Firefox!
- Hide Menubar – One of the simplest extensions I have installed! It allows you to hide the menubar. To use the menu you just press ALT. You just saved x-pixels of screen real estate!
- Net Usage Item – This basically checks your Net usage, it pretty much supports every ISP in Australia. However, the UI isn’t that great. But since I’ve hidden the menubar I just dock it in the corner of the menubar. Press alt when I want to see it. It beats having to install a separate Usage Checking client.
- Skip Screen – If you follow me on twitter/facebook/msn, then you’ve probably seen this. But this is an amazing extension. It basically skips the waiting time when trying to download files from Rapidshare and what not.
- Speed Dial – Whenever I show people this extension they’re like “Oh so it’s just a copy cat of Chrome!”. No you ignorant fools! It’s copying speed dial made by Opera! Unlike Chrome though which shows you the sites you’ve visited the most, it only allows you to select the sites that you want to visit.
- Tab-mix plus – To put it simply it’s like your tab-bar on steroids and then injected with Rhino hormones. The main reason that I use it is that it supports multiple-row tabs and also allow you to customise the size of each tab.
So this is the result! It only demonstrates couple of the extensions but the changes are quite significant. If any of the extensions interest you give it a try! If you know of any other funky extensions, drop a comment!
Tutorial: Getting Firefox to Remember Password for WebCT
Jun 5th
One thing that has frustrated me for MANY MANY years is the fact that Firefox does not allow you remember the username/password for WebCT. I cannot express how annoying this is. Opera was able to do it fine why can’t firefox?!
Usually I’m fine with just typing in my password and my relatively weak password to get access to WebCT. But today I really couldn’t be bothered any more. Did a bit of searching on the Internet and realised that it really isn’t Firefox’s fault that it doesn’t remember the password, it’s todo with the way that WebCT is written.
Okay so how do you get Firefox to remember the password?
- Press ctrl-b to open up your bookmarks in firefox
- Drag and drop this LINK into your bookmarks
- Open up the login screen to WebCT
- Click on the bookmark you just saved
- Type in the your username and password and firefox should give you an option to Remember it!!!
If you want to extend your password manager capabilities take a look at Secure Login
Note: The above method will work for any website that does not want you to remember the password.
Edit 07/06/09:
If you’re annoyed at WebCT logging out after 10 minutes of inactivity you can simply get Firefox to reload the webpage every 5 minutes. It’s not so elegant but I guess it works.
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