BlogAllAlong » Firefox

O3D Real Time Browser 3D Rendering

Bashar — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:56:10 +0000

It’s not sci-fi, it’s not just talk. Google did release the O3D API to bring the power of 3D Accelerated graphics to the web through Javascript to all major browsers, namely Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You can see below a sample real time demonstration of what this API can do. Quite promising.

If you wanna get into it, go to the O3D API Page.

Add Keyword Shortcuts to Google Translate in Firefox

Bashar — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:53:13 +0000

The number of times a day I find my self going to Google Translate or Googling for define: is really amazing, and opening the page over and over is tedious as well. Leaving the tab open is a good way, but hey it will get lost soon in the middle of all the other tabs. One good practice is to memorize and maintain it’s order in each Firefox window, say you place it in second tab. Then you could simply go Ctrl+2 and Firefox will take you to that tab, and you can do your translation. I like the faster way however, using the Keyword for search feature in Firefox bookmarks. Before going into the steps, I think it’s worthy to take a look at the main parameters of the url:

http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en&sl=en&tl=ar#en|ar|test

Now to break it all into peaces, this is my URL which lands a default English to Arabic translation in an English interface, and the parts of the URL taken apart are:

- hl=en: The default interface language. You can change this to hl=ar for instance to get an Arabic version of it.

- sl=en: Default selected source or starting language to translate from in the drop down list. In my case I usually want to translate from English.

- tl=ar: Default selected terminating language in the drop down list to which the source language will get translated, Arabic in this case.

- en|ar|test: The text after the Hash (#) sign is basically the query being sent, and it corresponds accordingly to the source language (en), destination or terminating language (ar), and the text to translate (test), with the vertical bar (“|”) character separating them.

Note: sl & tl are not really so important when you create a keyword shortcut since they only represent the default selected language in the drop down list. They’re just presented here for explanation.

Now to the quick few steps:

1. Go to Organize Bookmarks in Firefox.

2. Right-Click Bookmarks Menu and select New Bookmark.

3. Fill in the parameters as needed, using the below as example (or exactly if what you need is English to Arabic translation):

Name: Google En/Ar Translate

Location: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en#en|ar|%s

Make sure you change the en & ar to your desired from and to languages.

Keyword: Make it short and meaningful, like “ea” without the double quotes for English-to-Arabic.

Description: This is optional and just for your reference.

That’s it. By now you should be able to translate from English to Arabic (or your choice) from your Firefox Address bar like this:

For vicevers, add another Keyword bookmark. At all rates, once you have it and wanna translate a word, just do Ctrl+L to move to the address bar, write your letters, e.g. “ea Arsenal”, and Alt+Click to open the result in new tab and preserve current one.

NOTE: For Chrome users, there is a way to do just that, but last time I tried the bookmarks manager was still so amature. If you can’t find an easy way to fill in such keywords, do this stupid trick. Add it in Firefox, import it and export it to Chrome ;). Worked for my other bookmarks.

3-D Acceleration Web Standard on the way

Bashar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:27:28 +0000

With the blessing and support of leading tech companies like Adobe, AMD, Apple, Google, IBM and Intel, the Khronos Group will take the lead developing an open, royalty-free standard for the presentation of accelerated online 3-D Graphics. The Khronos Group is hoping to find ways to expose the OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 using the ECMAScript, which Javascript dialects from.

This is really a big news now with the increasing demand on web browsers to deliver strong web application support, and one could only wonder where is Microsoft from all of this. Full details are on InformationWeek.

Better Gmail for Chrome

Bashar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:11:12 +0000

(via CNET)

It’s starting now. Some real, even if hacked, extensions. The famous Better Gmail extension for Firefox that adds rich features to Gmail such as message highlighting and attachment icons has been ported to Chrome and can be downloaded from here. The installation requires you to have Google Chrome Channel Changer first, and then go the current process of extension installation on Chrome. Not as easy as Firefox, but the steps are detailed in simple here at CNET.

PS: I still don’t have my Windows PC fixed and alive after many weeks and thus I still can’t test Chrome. I guess if I was John Lasseter, my next Pixar movie would be about old computers and how the Moore’s law marks them as twice slower than recent ones after 18 months in their lifetime, shortening their happy life cycle, only to be used later for experimental and side jobs purposes.

Did you know Javascript could do that?

Bashar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:25:05 +0000

Chrome Experiments is a library of cool and complex javascript experiments that were made by people from all around the world, combined to show and test the browser capabilities, mainly Chrome in this case, but you can compare it to the other browsers. Here is one example that worked on my Firefox on Mac, but started flickering and working slowly as the Monster evolved.

Ofcourse, these experiments can only be truly fair if they’re hosted by a 3rd non-related party, or if it was made like a public community driven site. But it’s not, and while you can always submit complicated Chrome embarrassing Javascript experiments, you can never be sure Google will gladly post these Chrome failing experiments on their site. Still though, it’s a fun way to test different browsers.

Google Chrome – Last Browser Standing

Bashar — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:40:27 +0000

One day into the Pwn2Own hacking competition, and all 3 major browsers (IE, Firefox and Safari) have fallen down, leaving Google Chrome, with predicted 2% market share), standing on its own. Interesting notes are that Opera was not part of the competition, and the first one falling was, you bet, Safari! Later, the winning hacker “Nils” managed to gain control of the Safari, and hacked the other two browsers as well.

So is Google Chrome more secured, or less known to hackers? Well either way, it means it’s more secured for the time being at least.

Fennec Firefox Mobile Browser Video Brief

Bashar — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:12:49 +0000

So Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 is finally released for the Maemo OS running on Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. The Firefox browser for mobiles brings I’m happy to same the same general features (and another hot logo) and concepts of a regular Firefox browser, with search engine plugins, awesome bar, and tabs and controls bar that shows by left and right tapping the screen.

Fennec Beta 1 walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

This is only for the Internet Tablet of N810 however, and I sure do hope they keep it as good for regular mobile and smart phones. Also, I think what’s more important and useful than a search plugin, is the add Keyword for search bookmark which is extremely helpful to minimize clicks if your search plugins grow large.

[via pavlov]

NOTE: As of now, your Google Image searches for fennec returns the Fennec animal. Give it a little while and see how we geeks mess up with everybody’s lives. Soon scientists are gonna have to include -browser in their search queries by default to get what they want :).

10 ways to customize Google Chrome

Bashar — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:35:47 +0000

One of the main downsides of Chrome compared to Firefox is the lack of extensions feature and ability to do customization. TechRadar is giving however 10 ways you can customize and improve Google Chrome to your likings, including a link to how you can customize or make your own Google Chrome theme. I didn’t know that exist, although I still prefer the current one.

On a side note, if you love Flock for all the social features it has, you gotta start loving Chrome, as Flock is abandoning Firefox.

Firefox-like Extensions for Chrome in May?

Bashar — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:42:24 +0000

It would seem that the missing most critical element of Google Chrome is about to be fulfilled with what seems to be more than just plain rumors about possible Firefox-like extension support for Chrome this May. The conclusion was made by an alerted blogger who witnessed the already made announcement of future undated Chrome extension support, and then noticed the program of the Google I/O developer conference, highlighting a session on “Developing extensions for Google Chrome”. The conference is to take place on May 27-28, thus the likely availability of such feature.

While it’s still unlikely the support will be annoucned for public, developers can most likely get their hands dirty by then with it. I’m looking forward to it and hope to see the hot Firefox extensions ported here.

50 Recommended Firefox Extensions

Bashar — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:06:13 +0000

I came across this list of 50 recommended Firefox loyal users, or Mac Chrome to-be ones. And while I haven’t gone through all of them, the ones that caught my attention, or I am enjoying already are:

1- ColorZilla: One of the reasons I still open Firefox is to get the color of a certain element on a web page.

2- DownThemAll: The best download manager I have for downloading multiple files from a site at once, and with full bursting speed. Don’t expect to enjoy convenient browsing however meanwhile :).

3- Firebug: if you’re a web developer, this is simply a must. period.

4- FireFTP: Convenient and quick way to FTP to your server from within the browser. Though for large files, I would pick a stand alone FTP client.

5- Fireshot: This doesn’t only make taking screen snapshots easy. It allows further editing and annotations. For bloggers, and debuggers who want to share screen erros extremely useful. No need to launch a separate app to do little photo editing. There is a Pro commercial version of it as well.

6- IETab: This is a common statement. I only open IE when Firefox can’t open the website. Well, this plugin allows you to keep IE shut down for good. It would simply open the IE window inside a Firefox tab, allowing you to even do Microsoft update through it.

7- Web Developer: Set of tools for web developers to help altering, editing, and viewing various types of page info, like image sizes, element names, etc. You can even do resize for pages, and go through the CSS files and edit them.

8- Pencil: Sketch and prototype tool to create mockups of screenshots. While tempting, it didn’t work for me as I hoped it would. Try it out and see.

9- Cooliris: he extension that would transfer your browser into a 3D Wall easy way to navigate the web. Extremely useful for photos and videos, though have been crashing frequently with me recently. By my whole PC isn’t really in one piece anymore.

I wouldn’t prepare a top 50 Firefox extension list my self and leaveout Cooliris. The extension that would transfer your browser into a 3D Wall easy way to navigate the web. Extremely useful for photos and videos, though have been crashing frequently with me recently. By my whole PC isn’t really in one piece anymore.

Don’t ignore the remaining items, and don’t get tempted to try them all. Never feed your browser more than it can eat :)

Congrats Open World Browsers…

Bashar — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:18:00 +0000

For the first time in eight years, IE browser users percentage dropped to less than 70% (Thanks to IE 7) as Firefox soared above 20% for first time for a whole month. Chrome has it’s 0.8% share as well, and surprisingly, their launch did not stop Firefox from their expansion.

Guess it is a happy new year for Firefox then :).

Ubiquity – The Firefox Game Changer

Bashar — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:22:48 +0000

No Comments.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Visit Ubiquity page for more info.

FREE FTP Clients of Choice

Bashar — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:44:10 +0000

While FireFTP was my FTP Client of choice for some time, as it can do pretty much anything you want from within the browser, it had it’s drawbacks when dealing with large files. It takes long time, and the progress count is not accurate at all then. Another thing is that, for all the strength it has, it remains a web browser and thus it’s more resource intensive.

Another nice option was WinSCP Windows FTP client as well. Pretty good for SFTP and updating files on the fly, and it even has a terminal for firing up commands the old fashioned way. You can also change file permissions right from the editor through a GUI interface.

The latest FTP Client I’m using and finding also so much attractice is the FileZilla. It is also capable of SFTP, file updates, and file permission changing. It does not come with a command terminal however. The good thing on the other hand is, FileZilla is an open source, multi-platform client so you can get used to it and use it every where.

Which one is your favorite?

Firefox 3 Useful Links

Bashar — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:17:20 +0000

Below are some useful links relating to the new Firefox 3 browser that I found interesting, and I think Firefox users should go through, non-Firefox users may want to take a look at, and see what they’ve been missing of their web life.

Top 10 Features of Firefox 3
Power User Guide to Firefox 3: Trust me, there is something useful to learn from here about how to make your experience better. If you don’t like something, Firefox is flexible. Don’t complain, fix it.
Firefox History in Pictures
Web Browser Speed Testing: Firefox according to this article is the best in memory usage, and not bad in speed as well.
Tweak Firefox 3 AwesomeBar: The new Firefox smart bar is pretty amazing, and one of the best things in the new release. It searches your site history, bookmarks, and bookmark tags as well. But it doesn’t stop there. Through customization and plugins, you can actually do more. I will have to give it a better look after I familiarize more with current status of the setup.

Hope you find them useful. Share any others you have here.

Web Browsers Speed Testing

Bashar — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:04:54 +0000

The following is an interesting article from LifeHacker speed testing all major latest browsers, namely Firefox 3 RC 3(Releasse candidate 3), Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.1 (win), and IE 7.0.6. All tests have been carried out on Windows Vista OS. So it’s not Safari’s best place, and it definitely is what IE7 can best hope for, unless they admit Win XP is better ;).

What’s interesting is how Opera was the fastest in startup, followed by Firefox 3 and Safari was the last. A batch of 8 tabs opening at same time put Safari in the lead however, neck to neck with Opera, Firefox 2 seconds slower, and IE7 falling behind. So Safari is best with concurrent tasking, however not very often you would want to do this in real life. Personally, I do it when opening multiple search results at once, but do you?

In terms of Javascript & CSS (important for AJAX), Safari was the best, Opera 2nd, Firefox 3rd and IE7 as always the last. (I didn’t do those test I swear!).

Memory use, what’s all Firefox fans been calling for. Firefox was #1 overall, IE7 only best at startup, when there is nothing more than MSN page probably.

A point to make however is that, Firefox was tested with their latest and greatest so far, while IE8 is still coming back and the older version was put under the test instead.

My opinion: I am pretty much loving the Firefox 3 speed so far, no issues at all. It does fall behind Safari and Opera, OK! But doesn’t fall that bad to make me switch. Memory use as the benchmarks show are great, actually the best. The security of Firefox compared to Safari, which lacks anti-phishing is so much higher, and it has the richest plugins library amongs all. Firefox 3 has made it for me, more than Firefox 2 did to it’s successor. In the words of today’s generation I tell you “MAHALO!”

Please visit the original link for graphs and more details regarding the test.

3 Firefox Downloads… How much did you get?

Bashar — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:56:07 +0000

I had 3 downloads so far (Windows @ Home, MacBook Pro, and Linux @ work). Windows went perfect, Linux needed a bit of a small hack to get it replacing the old installation, Mac download broke first time and then went on.

I was thinking of crashing over parents house and doing a by-force upgrade to all their browsers. Unfortunately, things got in the way.

How much did you get? And what’s the favorite feature you found in Firefox 3 so far. I so much like the search of bookmarks and history all together, despite how it could crash on your privacy to some extent by chance. Also, the Firefox remember password now is a bar at the top that doesn’t hold back page loading. MUCH BETTER!

June 17 08, Firefox Download Day

Bashar — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:51:44 +0000

”

Don’t forget to be part of Firefox’s Download Day!

Mark your calendar, wrap a ribbon around your finger or write a little sticky yellow note. Download Day will start on June 17, 2008.

If you prefer to no longer receive emails from Mozilla concerning Download Day, you may unsubscribe here

The sender of this email is Mozilla Corporation, 1981 Landings Drive, Bldg. K, Mountain View, CA 94043-0801.”

Mark you calendar, iPhone, HTC, sticky notes, or any other way. Just don’t miss it :). Next Tuesday

Help Firefox Make the Guinness World Record

Bashar — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:59:12 +0000

With the release of popular open source Firefox 3 approaching, Firefox have launched a huge ambitious campaign to make it to the Guinness World Record of software downloads in one day, the release day. Join the campaign, and help Firefox make history if you like here. See how the current map overlay is. Kuwait so far has 152 pledges. Yeah that’s right. 152 is my number, which means there are 151 geeks in Kuwait who have beat me to it. Thanks to being so lazy and busy to check the news last week. Our number though is not bad, compared 8442 in China!, 6889 in India. The majority in 80,000+ comes from the US, and surprisingly to me, Brazil has 36,000+!

With no such previous Guinness World record already registered, Firefox would make it into the world record anyway. It’s just a matter of by how much, and Firefox is aiming to beat it’s own 1.6 million downloads for Firefox 2. Pretty smart move I say, Good luck. I’m for it. FTW!

Firefox 3.0 Preview

Bashar — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:29:46 +0000

The clock is ticking for the Firefox 3.0 release and people are looking forward to it. I was afraid things are slowing down a bit at Mozilla after the huge market share Firefox gained, but this preview from LifeHacker gives me huge relief. A group of new features and enhancements are presented with screen shots (Don’t miss the screen shots!). The features that appealed to me are:

Better Page Zooming: Not only text zooming, but images now change size accordingly as well. So you can browse normally by the zoom level you want.
View Recent Content: This could be useful. It allows you to list most recently starred pages, visited starred pages, most used tags, most visited pages and more.
Stars marks bookmarks: From the address bar, you will see a star nearby bookmarked URLs so that you don’t double bookmark it.
Tags!: YES. Bookmark folder is not enough. So now, you can tag a bookmark with as many tags you want. A site could be both Financial site, and an Online Service for example.
Default Applications and Download Actions: Now, not only you can specify which RSS Reader to use, but through the Applications Tab, for each file type you specify the action you want to do. Be it Save, Open with Adobe Reader, or Ask upon click. This could come real handy for frequen file types. For example, Save all ZIP Files and use Foxit Reader to open all PDF Files.
Tweaked Notifications: Less annoying now, when you submit your username and password, you won’t get a pop-up asking to remember your information, but rather you get a header above the page asking if you want to make such action.
Addon Management: FINALLY, you can request to Restart Firefox from Plugins tab, not only through Installation Tab when you have installed new plugin. It’s simple, but I always wanted it.

Don’t take my words for it, please take the time and go through the screen shots made available for you there. A side from all of that, I would be interested to see how their memory management behave. I still have to close my browse after a long busy day to free up memory.

Search Google quickly from Firefox Address Bar

Bashar — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 06:08:08 +0000

Probably you haven’t known that before, but Firefox Address bar has a default action to search Google using I’m Feeling Lucky sort of feature if you only type words in the address bar rather than valid url. Example is, type in your Firefox address bar “monkey island” and hit enter.

Since this is not a valid URL, instead of giving 404 Page Not Found, Firefox will send the query to the default Google Search which will search the term, and try to guess the best result “World of Monkey Island” in this case. If it can’t guess the site, it will take you to the results page, as when you search blogallalong. It still not obvious to Google what you are trying to reach ofcourse. Google must base it’s guess on large number of queries and it won’t work well for small sites. I think famous names that have multiple sites also might face problem with this as searching for Mercedes took me to the search results.

So why this is behavior, and can I modify it? It is a parameter set in Firefox, and yes ofcourse you can change it. Welcome to the open source world :). To do so, type in the Address Bar “about:config” and hit Enter. You will go to the parameter configuration page for Firefox. Now search for “keyword.url”. Update the Value to whatever you want (if you like). For example, you can force the search to be on Google normal search not the I’m Feeling Lucky one by changing the value to:

http://www.google.com/search?q=

Carthik has more details about this parameter here for interested readers.

Never use Firefox Search Engines Again

Bashar — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:04:13 +0000

I realized recently that by mastering what’s called Firefox Bookmark Keyword you can ignore something called Search Engine Plugin. The idea is very simply. Bookmark any search page, name your desired keyword, then start searching using the format below in your address bar:

query

Let’s see it in practice now shall we?

1) Right click on the desired search box field and select “Add a Keyword for this search…”.

2) Specify the name you want for this bookmark, and the associated keyword you want to use. Make it something short and descriptive. For instance BAA is Blog All Along Initials. Click OK when you finish.

3) In the address bar of your Firefox browser type: “ ” and hit enter. Example if you have followed this practice literally is: “baa Firefox”. Put it in your address bar and click Enter.

VIOLA! If you see the Firefox results from BlogAllAlong then you are there. Never care about search engine plugins again. Below is a list of keywords I find useful:

Google: Keyword G
Google Images: Keyword IMG
Google News: Keyword NEWS
Google Bookmarks: Keyword BOOKMARKS
YouTube: Keyword UT
Q8Ba7th Search: Keyword Q8
IMDB: Keyword IMDB
DailyGizmos: Keyword DG

* NOTE: Keyword is case in-sensitive here.

Ofcourse you would chose your favorite News and Image search source. It can be Yahoo for instance. Trying with Live Image Search however didn’t work. This is due to the way of implementation. It seems to be setting some variables dynamically at a certain point. So if you are Live Search user, yes you would still need the old fashioned Search Engine Plugin. But how many Firefox users are really Live users I wonder?

Firefox and the PDF Mystery Resolved

Bashar — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 09:25:21 +0000

For long enough I have been facing problems with opening PDF files from Firefox browser. Adobe Reader was one of the best must applications. Later it became a typical example of good app gone bad. Sometimes things are just good the way they are without creating a big fuss. Gradually, we started seeing Adobe needs to update messages occasionally. Then it became a habit every time. Every single time! What the hell is going around? Adobe became extremely slow in startup I began to avoid PDFs.

Now with Firefox, this has caused browser to crash times and times. The issue became worse with latest Firefox release, for me at least. Googling around a bit I came across the solution and feel obliged to post it for others. I did two things which seem to be working cool now. One is by removing ALL Adobe plugins and keeping the ones you want only. This is a bit strange I thought! Normally default setting would be for standard use, and for advanced use we get the option of extra plugins. Either way, a plugin should not cause that amount of delay. Following the steps in the article causes Adobe startup time to boost a lot. But still, Firefox was crashing when I close the tab or go back.

The solution to this is the bigger shock explained here. The writer, by debugging and tracing, found out Adobe is trying to access the folder C:\Documents and Settings\bashara\Application Data\AdobeUM\WWW_OpenURL which did not exist. How on earth could that be the solution I said? Creating it solved the problem. A bit of delay on closing, but no more crashing for me.

This might be a very old issue as you can see from the dates, but still many people have it. Try to follow the steps and see if that helps.

“Tell me what browser you use and I’ll tell you who you are”

Bashar — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:07:47 +0000

Some specialists can analyze and judge your personality through an interview, from your signature, your way of walking and other stuff. I think you can do so also by looking at a person’s PC. Does he use the default IE browser or does he use Firefox? If the latter then he is not a person who simply moves with the crowd. He is someone who is welling to change, to try different things and pick what he wants rather than live on what he was given. Ofcourse some IE users have already tried Firefox and sometimes IE7 but chose the current IE version.

You can also tell how organize this person is by looking at his desktop. Also how much he takes control of his live and try to optimize it. Many desktops are full of shortcuts to programs which the user never really tends to use, they just create them selves by default. I hate every program that does it, I should be always given the option to not create it. As a matter of fact I should be given the option to create it not vice-versa. Another terrible mistake people tend to fall into is having so many programs run on system startup by default, unaware it’s all time costly practice at the end for things they are not going to use. Why do they do that then? They either don’t know about it or can’t figure out how to disable it. Many programs do a great job to force them selves to this automatic startup, and if you ask me, it all fires back at them in the end. The more the program tries to take control over my PC the more I keep away from it.

What can you look at also? If he is someone who uses Edit -> Copy -> Edit -> Paste then most likely he is not the geek I’d like to hang out with. Keyboard shortcuts are real time savers that normal users very often ignore, despite it’s simplicity. If you see the person using a computer with an Apple brand on it, this is either a luxurious person or real computer geek who seeks efficiency.

So what do you think? What can you make out of someone’s computer use habits?

Let go the mouse, utilize the keyboard

Bashar — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:34:42 +0000

Computer geeks tend to like depending more on the keyboard rather than mouse, and in fact, if you master it, it saves a hell lot of time. This link from LifeHacker is a very good introduction to optimizing Firefox existing shortcuts, and directs you on how to configure your own.

FireFTP – The Free Firefox FTP Extension

Bashar — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 06:46:51 +0000

The Mozilla Firefox Web Browser is becoming less and less of only a browser. Being open source gave it a boost through the number of extensions that have been built. Some are for browsing easier, some for web developers, some for writers. I personally believe there is a load of useful extensions I am missing out there, which is why I try to go out and reach for some from time to time. I also like to share the interesting ones I come to find.

For web developers, it is very important to have a fast and efficient FTP client for continuous upload and download. There are many FTP clients out there, FREE and commercial ones. Firefox however has a unique extension, that will make your web browser and FTP client for you. FireFTP does just that. It is only 100 KB in size, still in Beta, but still quite good. I tried today to start the FireFTP and upload some files. The memory usage for Firefox was still below 50 MB, so it did not seem to be resource intensive. The other thing I like about it, is the separated file listing from file tree. Some clients just list the files in current directory, and you have to move up and down to see where you are. FireFTP gives you something like the Folder View in Windows (or Mac as well). You can download and try it here.

Nice Firefox Extensions – Part 2

Bashar — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:29:49 +0000

Last time we listed down some Nice Firefox Extensions, most of it was for developers use. Here is another set of cool extensions, most of it suitable for all.

Snapper: For editors who like to take snapshots of the web all the time. This tool makes it easy to specify the area you want and SNAP the picture.
VideoDownloader: What started as an over night quick and dirty stream downloading, had quickly become one of the most famous Firefox extensions. This plugin allows you to download the streaming videos from sites like Google Video, YouTube and others. Really cool I strongly recommend it.
URL Fixer: Fixes common typos errors that you write in the address bar. For example, corrects .cmo to .com or .con to .com. If you are worried it will make invalid assumptions, you can set it to ask you first.
SessionSaver: Microsoft should have come up with this long ago, as they are the ones who desperately need it. This extension saves your session tabs in case of Firefox crashes (God forbid) or if you frequently open the same set of tabs, you can save under a session name, say News. A definite must.
Server Spy: Well this is just for fun, if you want to know what is the server kind of the site you are visiting. For example you want to know if he is Microsoft fan or not. My server for example shows Apache/1.3.37.
Google Notebook: If you don’t already know it, Google Notebook is a web based notebook that you can write your notes in it, copy snippets from the web there and share them. This service doesn’t seem to be booming so far, I use it to gather my favorite quotes. You can get a Google Notebook extension to easily open the Google Notebook popup from your window and update it.
Google Browser Sync: This is a very nice powerful feature. Allows you to sync your browser settings, tabs, favorites, history, cookies and all across different computers. So your computer at work will be similar to your home computer. The reason why I stopped using it is that it requires the Google signin, and it might become annoying at every Firefox startup when it attempts to do Syncing. If you are OK with this, and don’t mind waiting few seconds, it’s very powerful.
Chickenfoot: This one is a bit advanced extension, yet gives you unlimited possibilities. You can use this extension to manipulate pages and automate web browsing, programmatically ofcourse. For example, you can have it to automatically fill in the login details to your email account and login, go to your inbox, simply by visiting the email address url. This is useful if you do a certain task repeatedly. Say if you use a site all the time, but the login session timeout fast. You can have it to automatically do the login for you. The point to take care of is not to store confidential data like your bank account login, especially on a shared computer. This is suitable for very personal computers.

I hope you find the list of use for you. Good day.

Nice Firefox Extensions

Bashar — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:29:35 +0000

One of the greatest things about Firefox is the huge and wide variety of high quality free extensions out there. Some of them really change the way you think about browsers and that they can do, as they add a whole new dimension to the equation. But since they are so much, always changing, many people (including me) don’t tend to always go looking for more. Below, however I list down some of the best I came across:

Web Developer: Well you don’t necessarily have to be a web developer to use this, but it’s pretty much more suitable for them. This extension in a nutshell gives you easy access to the site information and data, with easy way of manipulating them. You can disable Cookies and some other stuff, view and modify stylesheets, display form details and hidden values, image information and sizes plus many other stuff. For Web Developers, this is a must I’d say. And what makes it even better, is that it keeps getting updated and better.
User Agent Switcher: Very simple, very useful. Say there is a site that does restriction for IE only (Sadly many do, even my bank website does) and you want to get around the validation. You can use this extension to fake Firefox is IE6 or whatever browser you like. We also use it to simulate mobile handset browsers and see how the WAP site looks. This won’t help you however in case you fake IE and the site is using ActiveX. It’s only a simulation after all.
Firebug: For HTML, javascript, CSS, and ofcourse AJAX developers. Development tools for viewing, editing, debugging and monitoring. It will automatically highlight Javascript errors in the page you are visiting.
JavaScript Debugger: This development tool opens in a new window, and it’s a bit heavy. It has very strong features, but that fact that it takes long to load on my PC at least keeps me away from using it.
DownThemAll: Every living creature should have one of these installed. Well OK, not every living creature, but at least every Firefox user (and I think all should be Firefox users! I am not giving that up). Even though I never trusted Download Accelerator, this one is actually pretty good and free of adwares. It is intensive for bandwidth however, otherwise it wouldn’t have been a download accelerator. If you plan on keep browsing while using this with limited bandwidth, better not. But that’s only part of it. The second great part is the feature that allows you to filter and download the links you want from a certain page. Say you want all MP3 files on a website. The site owner is so nice to post them all individually for you to collect, and you have to download them all one by one. This one does it all in a minute. You just set your filter to download say all files with word Monkey and ending with MP3 like this Monkey*.mp3 and voila! You can alter the naming conventions and other nice stuff.

Well, I don’t want to over load you, so I will try to list the extension in batches. Enjoy!

Firefox 3 Alpha out

Bashar — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:49:50 +0000

Firefox, the famous open source web browser that caught the attention of millions, is already out with Firefox 3 Alpha for developers to test and modify. The project, called cairo, is aimed tentatively for launch in May 07, and will be solely based on Gecko 1.9. RegDeveloper have reported earlier on this project with a bit of more details.

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