Maxim’s blog

Here some tips and tools to improve your Firefox browsing experience using keyboard shortcuts, extensions and other tricks

Keyboard shortcuts

Web browsing using Mozilla Firefox could be faster with some keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl-Tab Ctrl-Shift-Tab – Navigate to next/previous open tab
• Alt+1 … Alt+9 – Go to tab with specified position
• Alt+D – Go to address bar
• Alt + ← Alt + → – Go back, go forward
• F11 – switch to/from full screen mode
• Ctrl+K – go to search engine text box
• Ctrl + B – opens bookmark sidebar
• Ctrl+T – open new tab
• Ctrl+W – close tab
• Ctrl + + Ctrl + - – increase/decrease font size
• Space – page down (could be more convenient to use than “Page down” button since some laptops may not have this key)
• Shift+Space – page up
• Ctrl+Shift+P – start browsing in “private” mode.

Comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts page on Mozilla site

Mouse + keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl+left mouse click – opens link in new background tab
• Shift+left mouse click – opens link in new window

On the page search

• If you want to find phrase on the page, instead of pressing Ctrl+F, just type “/” followed by your keyword. For example “/firefox<Enter>”
• Hyperlink search is done by prefixing a keyword with ‘ (apostrophe)

Browser extensions

Firefox has thousands of useful extensions. The following extensions I use would be useful for anyone. If you are web developer, have a look on my Toolbox page for some other extensions.

Delicious Bookmarks – Delicious is a well known social bookmarking service. Firefox extension allows you to create public and private bookmarks with optional description and categorization tags. This Firefox extension simplifies creation of new bookmarks (just by pressing Ctrl+D) and integrates bookmark list with the browser. If you use multiple PCs (such as home desktop, laptop and office computer) adding a bookmark to Delicious makes that bookmark available on all other browsers and on Delicious website, which is convenient in case you use your friend’s computer or internet cafe.

AdBlock Plus – removes advertisements from pages you browse. Could be configured to use different subscription services providing a list of addresses to block from loading. Your pages will load faster and you will save your bandwidth if use it on the go.

FlashBlock – selectively blocks flash animations

FlashGot – makes downloading media from web page easier. Just select a text with links and all links will be added into your preferred download manager. Also allows YouTube video downloads, support URL shortening and redirection services,

DownThemAll! – download manager built in into Firefox. Supports simultaneous downloading and convenient user interface. Integrates nicely with FlashGot.

LastPass – online service to store your login passwords and registration form details. I would use it for storing all non-critical accounts. Makes life easier by making automatic login to websites, registration form prefilling and sharing your account details accross multiple computers.

FireGestures - Faster navigation by using mouse gestures

Google Reader minimalistic - get a full screen view of news reel in Google Reader using this Greasemonkey script.

Pixelpipe – Upload pictures, video, and audio with Pixelpipe and get your content posted to your favorite social network, blog and photo/video services. Over 110 supported destinations to choose from MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, twitter, Photobucket & more

ScribeFire – Full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

Other tricks

• If you are using Linux, you may try Swiftfox which is a special edition of Firefox browser optimized for Linux computers.
• Multiple profiles allow you to run Firefox with different sets of extensions and browsing history. For example one for home and another for business usage. More info on Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows
• Got web site blocked in the country you are in? Just use free proxy server. For quick switching between proxy server you may use FoxyProxy extension.

I’ve created a list of websites which support formatting for small screens. In some cases the site has a separate URL (e.g. m.google.com) in other cases the server detects device being used and displays mobile version of content (e.g. www.amazon.com). Since I’m using Google Nexus One myself I can’t guarantee how the sites would work on other platforms, but I think almost all of them should be working with iPhone and other web enabled mobile phones, such as my old Samsung Z510.

List is available at

http://m.kozlenko.info

I’ll try to keep that list up to date with new websites. Your additions are welcome in comments

After analysing a list of 32 million passwords used by users, Imprerva released a report which shows that  it is common for users to choose very weak passwords for their accounts with passwords like “123456″ and “12345″ being the most popular ones.

All you need to do is to change your Yahoo mail settings from Yahoo Australia or US into Yahoo Asia. Yahoo offers a free SMTP and POP access to Yahoo Mail in Asia.

Now the POP account becomes available:

Reporters Without Borders Internet censorship ratings.      No censorship      Some censorship      Under surveillance      Internet black holes (most heavily censored nations)
Persavive censorship: Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, People’s Republic of China, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam
Substantial: Bahrain, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

Source: Internet censorship article on Wikipedia

Now you can browse Mars and Moon surfaces and sky above us in Google Earth (do they plan to rename it?). It shows Moon and Mars landing places and tracks traveled by automatic stations or humans with links to high resolution photographs, YouTube videos and article references.

Street view and travel information is not available yet

Yes, Internet Explorer 6 was amazing… in 2001.

Fast forward to 2009 and not only is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) still here,
but now it’s even more disastrous:

• Security holes that are never quite patched.
• It crashes.
• The CSS model for it is completely worthless.
• Big workarounds for Flash
• No tabbed browsing and we all know how much we love our tabs!

IE6 has next to no support from Microsoft and there are a number of other free
browsers that are vastly superior, yet something like 35% of all
internet users still use IE6 even though it just takes minutes to
upgrade to a better browser!

http://www.end6.org/

There is a lot of changes since Kazaa’s early P2P days, but now you can’t get a music from them unless you happen to live in US and using Windows XP or Vista. So no unlimited Kazaa downloads for me here in Australia with Linux Ubuntu. So the DRM, which is also known as Digital Restrictions Management is really resticting me from using their services.