Stimulating Pixels

One more Firefox extension to help out anyone who does web development work or is otherwise interested in a quick way to clear your Firefox browser cache: Clear Cache Button. This extension adds a new toolbar button that you can access by right clicking on the browser tool bar and selecting “Customize”. Then just find the new icon and drop it where you want it.

In Firefox 2.x the clear cache got bundled in with a bunch of other privacy things which is okay from one stand point, but makes it a huge pain when all you want to do is quickly empty the cache and start fresh. This is another fine example of a relatively minor change that’s made to a major product outside of it’s original development team thanks to the wonderful world of Open Source software.

Even though it only takes a few clicks to get to the original functionality, when you are in the middle of a development effort you end up needing to do it a lot so the time can add up to a decent amount. Worse for me is that it requires switching mental modes for a few seconds. This can really reduce the thinking momentum. I don’t have a way to quantify this type of change cost, but I’m sure it has an impact. And depending on how much of a break it causes in the thought process (even for only a few seconds), it can be significant for me.

If you ever need to do screen grabs of web pages and especially if you need to annotate them, check out the FireShot extension for Firefox. I’ve only played around with it a little, but it seems to be very robust. You can grab just the visible portion of the page or the entire page (including the parts you would have to scroll to see). Once you have the capture, it defaults to opening in an editor where you can crop, make annotations and do other basic editing.

It’s a great example of a simple tool to get a job done. It’s no wear near as powerful as something like photoshop, but when all you need to do is highlight an area and tag it with a note, having to start up photoshop is a pain. Here’s a quick example that I clipped while writing this post.

One note is that it has problems with flash stuff sometimes. I think this has to do with the way the flash engine is does rendering outside of the main application render engine. If you have problems with something another screen capture utility that I use is ScreenGrab. In it’s options menu you can choose from using the Firefox render engine or a Java one. If you use Java, it captures the flash elements that are sometimes missed by the the Firefox instance.

I moved to Firefox 2 a little while ago. One of the nicest features in it is the fact that it has spell check built into it now. So, when I write a blog post, I no longer have to use another application to catch all my stupid spelling errors. Very nice addition.

In Firefox, you can apply Themes to change the look and feel of your browser. I use Noia. I don’t really care about the skin itself, though it is nice. The main thing that I look for is that the right side scroll bar touches the side of the desktop.

This means that you can just slam your mouse up against the side of the browser and you will be able to click and scroll. A lot of themes that are out there (including the Firefox default) have a one or two pixel border on the side so you actually have to aim a little when you are trying to scroll. This doesn’t make sense to me since you have to be that much more accurate with your mouse for a task that really doesn’t reuire it.

I use Mozilla FireFox most of the time, but have to check stuff I’m working on in IE (since it has the vast majority of the market place). One thing that has alwasy bugged me is the “click” sound you get every time you go to a new page, or a page refreshes. Someone just told me the way to kill the sound. This works in Windows XP at least, but it may be the same for other Windows machines.

- Under your “Start” menu, select “Settings” then “Control Panels”.

-  Choose the “Sounds and Audio Devices” control panel and open it up.

-  Select the “Sounds” tab inside the control panel.

- In the “Program Events” scorlling window, Find the “Start Navigation” element under “Windows Explorer” and change it sound to “None”.

You know, because, that was easy to find…..

Just found a “pagesaver” tool that’s a Firefox extension that takes a page and makes a graphic out of it. Very helpful for those times when you need to screen grab an entire web page and it breaks the fold of your monitor.

http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/

Can even be run from the command line. So, if you don’t mind dedicating a machine to it you can scirpt to pull a grab of a page at a regular interval.

Someone should bulid a firefox extension that lets you track FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc.. direclty in your browser. Like in the status bar. You just enter the number and it tracks for you showing the status.

This will setup FireFox to make multiple connections to a web server and pull stuff down faster.

in the location bar type:
about:config
to bring up Firefox’s configuration settings.

Change the values of these parameters as follows:
network.http.pipelining = true
network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 8

Create a new one for the following at set it to true:
network.http.pipelining.firstrequest = true

One that may cause a few problems, so try at your own risk is to create this new boolean param:
nglayout.ititialpaint.delay = true

(To change settings, just double click on existing items. To make the new ones, right click and select “New -> Boolean”, then set the value to “true”).