Tag Archives: firefox

[UPDATED]Useful Firefox addons

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2009 vs 2013 Useful Firefox [Browser] Addons

Originally I wasn’t really into add ins then i got into trying loads of add ins and eventuallyi have whittled it back to the few firm favourites/favorites for the americans.
[i was going to del fav bit but then I noticed that my firefox dictionary is still set to US because of it (which is what happened back in 2009 too haha)

ubiquity beta addon for firefox – run, send email, new calendar event, update twitter.
have not tried this yet. Read about it here:
http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/26/mozilla-labs-ubiquity-is-a-firefox-killer-application/
or at mozzy labs: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
[2014 Ubiquity has died, but you can still install the addon (download using the bitbucket link)]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-ubiquity/

Favourites/remember this website

Tag sifter

Taboo – one click remember this, timeline

Readitlaterlist.com Now Getpocket.com – my cuurent fav  [2014: Still using it today]

Foxmarks

Tabs

Duplicate tab

Tab kit [Plus]- organizer of tabs

[2014 I haven’t used this in a while]

[New for 2013: Firefox: TooManyTabs                                            https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toomanytabs-saves-your-memory]

Testing this one right now!

[2014 Tab Manager]

Awesome enables Tabs of Tabs (another tab bar above so you can group tabs into projects, subjects etc)
however not available for latest firefox and the other versions are buggy/not working. 🙁

[New for 2014: Chrome: OneTab                           http://www.one-tab.com/ ]                           

There really is one tab to rule them all!Fold all open tabs down to one and free all that memory. Edit what’s ‘open’, leave it just as a single tab, or reopen (one by one or all).

I NEED to test this one when I switch back to Chrome!

Session Manager – protector and saver of tabs! [2014: integrated session managers are pretty comprehensive now!]

 

Download Them All

[2014:Still very useful last time I used it a few years ago, but internet speeds have increased monumentally since 2009, so much so that download managers are not needed for that anymore. It’s still a brilliant tool for downloading all images from a page for example]

Easy on the eyes

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Just a quick post here…

Recently my eyes have been a little strained using the computer. I think it probably has something to do with the misplacement of my reading glasses somewhere at University. Hopefully I’ll find them before my Mum finds out and goes nuts lol.

Anyways to reduce browser related eye strain, I found a handy script for Greasemonkey (in Firefox) that kinda inverts the webpage/makes it less white and a bit easier to read (higher contrast). Its not perfect but it’s a handy hack until I can do some more hunting for my glasses!

Anyway enough text, here’s the links:

Invert web page colours (lifehacker)

Direct link to Greasemonkey script

Options are customisable, so you can restrict the websites it works on…

Oh, and here’s a screenshot:

invert_webpages

Prevent Adobe Acrobat Crashing Firefox

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I’m using Adobe Acrobat (for compatibilities sake only, please post your favourite PDF program in the comments below!), but I’ve been rather annoyed recently at it having a tendency to hang Firefox if I tried to open more than one PDF file from the internet.

Simple fix/hack – make Firefox save PDF files rather than open them.

  1. Open Options (Tools \ Options in Windows and Edit \ Preferences in Linux)
  2. Open the Applications tab
  3. under ‘Adobe Acrobat Document’ change the value of the dropdown to ‘Save file’

Firefox Applications options tab. Vista I know!

  1. OK the change
  2. All done. Hopefully that’s one less annoying crash to worry about!

Ps get Session manager to save yourself loosing a window full of tabs or having to do a horribly manual procedure like recovering tabs from a accidentally closed Firefox window.

Firefox undo close window/recover closed window

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[Kirrus: Say hello to my brother, Garreth, who wrote this post. He’ll be posting every now and then :))

I am in the habit of keeping a million tabs open and having Firefox automatically restore them when I reopen

([main]\{startup}\when Firefox starts – show my windows and tabs from last time).

Unfortunately this time I left open a popup window and clicked the X close button, thereby killing all my precious tabs!

I have seen on a forum that this can be avoided by clicking File\Exit, but I’m already in the habit of Xing everything, and besides I needed my tabs back!

I found on another forum the name of the file sessionstore.bak, so I did a search and lo and behold it found a couple of session files in my Firefox profile directory. I cracked open the .bak one in notepad and there amidst loads of junk was the urls/tabs I had open.

How to

  1. I Searched for sessionstore.bak, and opened containing folder
  2. used ‘taskkill /im firefox.exe’ (yes windows xp does have a handy kill command :P),
  3. deleted sessionstore.js to the recycle bin,
  4. renamed sessionstore.bak to .js and
  5. started firefox again.

Firefox of course falls for my fake ‘crash’ and prompts me to recover my precious tabs. A swift click later and Lo and behold my tabs were restored!

I’ve now installed session manager add in again and set the ‘undo close window’ feature. Apparently Mozilla are going to integrate the feature in 3.1. (That is 3.1 not 3.01, so not just yet :'( ).

Enable Undo close window and set that number of tabs to high!

Enable Undo close window and set that number of tabs to high!

Firefox won’t upgrade!

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Firstly, apologies about the lateness of writing a new post. I’ve been struggling with my server, trying to work out why apache2 is eating RAM. I’ve made a really nasty hack to sort it out for the moment though, which will give me more time to find out what is going wrong.

One of my old friends from Church sent me an email, asking me what was wrong with his firefox. Every time he launched it, what appeared was firefox 2. Very strange, since the version of firefox he has installed is:

3.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.3 - meta package for the popular mozilla web browser

Well,  that looks like the normal browser to me. At one point, he has had the “ubuntuzilla” browser installed for a little while. (But not anymore).

A couple of questions on the Ubuntu-uk mailing list didn’t turn up anything. So, I asked “how do you find what binary a command runs”? The answer came back from Matthew Wild (thanks!):

ls -l $(which firefox)

I cheated a little. I’ve not come across $(command), but I have come across `command`. So, I asked my friend to run “ls -l `which firefox`”. He replied with:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2008-02-09 17:16 /usr/bin/firefox -> /opt/firefox/firefox

Er.. that looks wrong to me. The packaged firefox binary for version 3 is in /usr/bin/firefox-3.0. Looks like the uninstall of ubuntuzilla didn’t go so well. I asked him to run:

"rm /usr/bin/firefox && ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.0 /usr/bin/firefox"

Which removed the old link, and added the correct one. (I should have asked him to run those commands through sudo thinking about it..)

That solved his issue and he’s now happily running firefox 3. Anyone have a better way to implement this fix, if we ever need it again?

Matthew kindly explained the difference between “$(command)” and “`command`” in earlier today. No difference 🙂

$(command) is easier to send to people so they don’t have to find the backtick key. (UK keyboards, above the tab key)

Useful Linux (Ubuntu) Tidbits

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Here are just some morsels of information about the Linux Command line, and more specifically, Ubuntu Linux Command line / system.

  • Users can be added to a group with the command:
sudo adduser <username> <groupname>

In ubuntu, the default system shell is “Dash”. That does speed up your system boot, but it also introduces problems with those scripts which are designed to run in bash, but use /bin/sh to execute. (Which is a surprising amount… this has solved many problems for me. Especially with Asterisk and freePBX.)

  • To set Ubuntu back to using bash from dash, run the following command…
cd /bin && sudo rm sh && sudo ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh
  • To add a user to the sudoer list (the list that controls who can use “sudo”) use the command
sudo visudo
  • Add a user underneath the “# User privalage specification” comment. If you want just a bog standard sudo user, able to do all on the system, add the line:
<username>    ALL=(ALL) ALL
  • ?Fun? tip: add “insults” to the end of the list of “Defaults” in visudo, so it will look like:
Defaults        !lecture,tty_tickets,!fqdn,insults
  • The system will insult you every time you enter your sudo password wrongly. For a random example, it just gave me this when I deliberately triggered it:
You speak an infinite deal of nothing
  • In Firefox, select the address bar quickly by hitting the “F6” key.
  • Type “pwd” to get the full path to your current directory. e.g.:
kirrus@asus:~$ pwd
/home/kirrus
  • Monit is a useful program, that gives you a good way of keeping an eye on your servers, making sure they don’t run out of harddisk space, or get a high CPU load. It can either perform some function (like stopping a program from running) during high CPU, or send you a warning email.

http://debianhelp.co.uk/monit.htm (useful howto/basic guide)

http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/ (main website)

Monit is in the ubuntu repositories:

aptitude install monit