If your Firefox crashes when you try to access certain websites like uefa.com or gamespot.com (also michelin.com, linkedin.com, msgpluslive.net have been reported), see if you have the Firefox extension (aka add-on) called Extended Statusbar installed. If yes, disable it and try again.

Extended Statusbar is a neat little extension and is included on my list of favourite Firefox extensions. Unfortunately, with it crashing the browser I have been forced to disable it until the bug is fixed.

One of my blog entries was picked up by the StumbleUpon community earlier this week. This is a report about the effects it had to my Adsense earnings. Read the rest of this entry »

I would just like to draw your attention to the fact that I have updated the list of Firefox extensions that I use.

Last updated: May 4, 2007

Added: Colorzilla, Download Statusbar, MeasureIt, Repagination, Tiny Menu

Removed: Digg This! [I realised that I'm not a Digg person in the end], Forecastfox [I don't really need to know the weather 24h a day]

Here is a list of Firefox addons that I currently use. I originally posted this as a reference for myself, so that I can keep my various computers up-to-date.

Without further ado, here are the extensions in an alphabetical order:

Adsense Notifier (Mozilla Add-ons link)
If you are in the Adsense bandwagon, you may have the nasty habit of logging in to Adsense every twenty minutes to check how much money your websites are making. Adsense Notifier saves you the trouble, and displays your Adsense data in the Firefox status bar.

Bloglines Toolkit
I use Bloglines to read the news and find it handy to have a direct link to my account in my browser. It also notifies me when there is something new to read, but that ends up being quite useless once you have more than 300 feeds on your list, as there is always going to be something to read, anyway. However, you can change your Bloglines setting so that you get notified only for the feeds that you are most interested in.

BugMeNot
It is rather time-consuming to have to register to online newspapers in order to read their articles. That is why Bugmenot.com exists, letting you simply copy-paste a random username and password for the website that you are trying to access. Yet, it is time-consuming to go to Bugmenot.com and do all that. That is why I use the BugMeNot extension, which does the work for me without me really even having to think about the whole issue.

ChromEdit Plus (Mozilla Add-ons link)
ChromEdit lets you customise your Firefox look.

ColorZilla
As a web developer, one needs an easy way to read colour data from websites that one visits. With ColorZilla it couldn’t be easier!

Commentful
One of the biggest problems with blogging is that, after leaving a comment in someone’s blog, no one ever remembers to check back and see if someone has replied to you. Or at least I never do. In rescue comes Commentful, a service that lets you bookmark blog posts and then forget about them until Commentful tells you that someone else has added to the discussion. While Commentful is not the only one of its kind (coComment is another often mentioned option), I find Commentful the most user-friendly. Although using Commentful’s “blinker” extension is not necessary (you can either check Commentful itself or, as I do, get a feed of your watch list), I still decided to give it a try, and now my Firefox just looks weird without it.

Copy Plain Text
An extremely simple plugin that simply allows you to copy text from a web page without any of the formatting being included. Extremely useful.

CSSViewer
CSSViewer lets you take a look at the CSS settings of different website elements by simply pointing your mouse at them. Hugely useful if you deal with websites.

Customize Google
Google is good, but it can be made better. Customize Google lets you tweak a large number of aspects including privacy, security and the look.

del.icio.us post
Browser-internal bookmarks get you nowhere if you travel a lot and use whatever computers you can get a hold of. Consequently, online bookmarking services are the way to go, and del.icio.us is certainly the best known of them. This extension adds a handy button to your Firefox, allowing you to bookmark items easily.

Digg This!
Digg is everyone’s favourite social news bookmarking website thingy, and this extension is my favourite Digg thingy for Firefox.

Distrust (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Sometimes, for one reason or another, you don’t want to leave traces on your computer of whatever pages you are viewing. With Distrust you can, with a click of a button, switch your Firefox to a mode where it does not remember your browsing history, cache or cookies used during the Distrust session, but will still keep track of whatever browsing you did before or after. Very handy for all of us paranoid androids.

Download Statusbar (Mozilla Add-ons link)
This one has quickly become one of my favourite Firefox extensions. It does away with the extra downloads window, and simply puts your downloads into a Status Bar of its own. It feels a bit strange at first, but if you get through the first couple of days you’ll notice that it makes the handling of your downloads much faster and easier.

Firefox Extension Backup Extension (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Firefox extensions don’t come much handier than this. FEBE allows you to backup your extensions and other settings for importing them again later on. Very useful, if you try to keep two Firefoxes on separate computers more or less in synch.

Flashblock (Mozilla Add-ons link)
I don’t like seeing flash animations all over the place when I’m simply browsing for information. With Flashblock, I can choose when I want to watch a flash animation, if at all. It makes your life easier especially with websites that bombard you with flash ads. (If you want to get rid of all ads, try Adblock — but I personally quite like Adsense and other textual ads.)

Forecastfox (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Brings you the weather, so you don’t have to open the shutters.

Gmail Notifier (Mozilla Add-ons link)
I read my e-mail predominantly with Gmail, so I like to have a notifier that tells me when something important has arrived. There are a number of extensions available for the task, but this particular one takes the least space on your screen, and also comes with all the basic functionality you would expect.

Google Pagerank Status (Mozilla Add-ons link)
If you have websites and are interested to see how they are doing in Google, the Google Pagerank Status is the tool for you. It displays the PR on every page you visit, and does it in a very informative, yet space-economic manner.

Linkification (Mozilla Add-ons link)
In all its simplicity, Linkification converts text links to ones that you can click. No need to copy-paste URLs that are not hyperlinked.

MeasureIt
If you deal with websites, you need to know how wide certain elements are. MeasureIt lets you know this important piece of information in the most straight-forward way possible.

Menu Editor
Extensions tend to fill your menu space. I have also always felt that the “go”, “history” and “bookmarks” menus are totally useless to me. Menu Editor has allowed me to remove the offending items, and keep my GUI nice and lean.

Methusalem
Time to time you hit a website that you want to see but which does not exist anymore. Makes you wish you could go back in time, doesn’t it? Well, Methusalem adds a context link that points to the Wayback Machine for exactly this purpose.

NextPlease! (Mozilla Add-ons link)
NextPlease! allows you to jump to next and previous pages via special keys. It works on a wide number of websites including the common search engines, eBay, Amazon and many others. It even functions on forums, making your life much easier, as you will no more need to scroll to the “next / previous pages” list, but simply hit a key combination. I have assigned the keys LSHIFT+CTRL+RIGHT for “forward” and LSHIFT+CTRL+LEFT for “back”. It makes surfing so much faster.

Nightly Tester Tools
When Firefox 2.0 was launched last autumn, my main problem was that most of the extensions I use were not updated to work in it. Yet, in most cases the problem was simply with the extension’s compatibility text, i.e. in reality the extension would have worked fine, but Firefox simply refused to install it. Nightly Tester Tools allows you to, among other things, force Firefox to believe that a given extension is fully compatible. Very handy, although also potentially capable of destroying you Firefox.

Options Menu (Mozilla Add-ons link)
When you have all the extensions I have, you wish you had an easy way of accessing their options. While you can always go to Tools > Add-ons, select the extension and press “Options”, it somehow seems easier to do this through a specific menu under Tools. And that’s what Options Menu basically does. It saves you two clicks.

Organize Status Bar
With many of the extensions pushing their content into the status bar, that space quickly becomes very unorganized and cluttered. But help is at hand in the form of Organize Status Bar, which is the tool to make the status bar look like you want it to look.

Page Zoom (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Sometimes websites are not designed properly and the text is either too big or too small for one to read. And sometimes you want to take a closer look at an image. Page Zoom lets you zoom the page. It isn’t quite as good as what comes natively in Opera, but it still does its job rather well.

PDF Download (Mozilla Add-ons link)
It is usually really rather annoying when one clicks a link and it turns out to be a PDF file that causes the computer to load Adobe Reader. PDF Download allows you to choose what to do with the file: view it as HTML, download it, open it in Adobe, or just simply forget about it. Simple but very useful.

QuickJava (Mozilla Add-ons link)
There are those who browse with Java and JavaScript disabled, either for performance, stability or security reasons. I am not one of those. Yet, there are times when I want to disable either Java or JavaScript (for example when viewing my own websites and not wanting to add to the Adsense impression counts). QuickJava adds two buttons to the status bar, allowing you to disable Java and JavaScript as you wish.

Repagination
There are times when the 10 to 20 search results you get on a single page from a web or forum search engine don’t really do it for you. Repagination lets you glue a number of search result pages together with a couple of quick clicks, letting you then for example use Firefox’s “find on this page” search to locate the information that you are really after.

Stop or Reload Button (Mozilla Add-ons link)
I don’t like clutter in my user interface, and having separate buttons for “stop” and “reload” seems incomprehensible. After all, when you need to use “stop” (i.e. while loading a page), you don’t need “reload”, and vice versa. This one fuses the two together.

StumbleUpon
One of the best things to hit the web for a long time. With a press of a button you are sent to a peer-recommended website that usually is either very interesting, a lot of fun, or both. Definitely recommended.

Tab Mix Plus (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Tabs are fab, but Tab Mix Plus makes them even better. It gives you more control over how you do your tabbed browsing, and while there are other similar extensions available, this one is the leader of the pack.

Tiny Menu
I don’t really need the Firefox menus all that often, so in order to save screen estate I might just as well put them all under a single menu item. Which, of course, is exactly what Tiny Menu accomplishes.

TinyUrl Creator (Mozilla Add-ons link)
When I write e-mails I sometimes need to include URLs to my posts. However, some of them are so long that email programs mess them up, and that is why many of us use TinyURL.com. Yet, going to TinyURL’s website is really rather time-consuming, so I prefer to be able to create a TinyURL with just a click (or two) of a mouse. And that is exactly what TinyUrl Creator does.

Update Notifier (Mozilla Add-ons link)
With all the extensions that I have, it is a pain in the neck to keep them up-to-date. Or it would be if I didn’t have Update Notifier installed.

Web Developer (Mozilla Add-ons link)
If you work with websites, this extension makes it much easier to test them.

WebmailCompose (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Like I mentioned earlier, I use Gmail for e-mail, and this extension comes in handy when you do. It changes your Firefox in a way that when you click a mailto-link or an e-mail address on a website, instead of opening the computer’s default mail program, a compose window in Gmail is opened instead. It also supports a number of other webmail systems, in case you prefer Yahoo or Hotmail, or whatever else.

Theme:

The theme (skin) that I use would like to use if it were available for Firefox 2.0 is called Breeze. It takes the least space while still making everything easily accessible. I currently use Firefox’s default theme.

Searches:

You may also be interested in my Firefox quicksearches and YubNub for Firefox posts.

YubNub is a social command line for the web and the brainchild of Jon Aquino. It basically allows you to use quick and simple commands for tasks that ought to be quick and simple to do, but sometimes aren’t. This post will explain the various methods of integrating YubNub directly into your Firefox Internet browser.

Why YubNub?

The underlying idea with YubNub is similar to search bars and Firefox’s quick searches: you want to, say, do a Google search without actually having to waste your time loading Google’s front page. In YubNub, you can achieve this by typing in g theoretical linguistics, and voilà, you are taken to Google’s search page for theoretical linguistics. The system does more complicated things, as well: xe -amount 100 -from USD -to EUR will tell you, by forwarding you to xe.com, how much 100 US dollars is in Euros. This way, you can save a few precious seconds for every search that you make.

A few seconds may not sound like much, but if you make just fifty searches a day, which is a very rough estimate of what I am doing, it starts to count. After all, with an average two seconds saved per search, you will save some 100 seconds every day, which in a year makes a grand total of 36,500 seconds, or slightly over 10 hours. If you live up to 80, which is the current life expectancy in the developed world (give or take a few years), and you start using web searches actively at the age of 15, YubNub will save 650 hours, or almost a month, of your life. You can then basically say that using YubNub makes you live longer!

As I mentioned earlier, YubNub is similar to the search bars and quick search functions in Firefox. However, I personally find search bars clumsy to use, and keeping my two computers up-to-date with quick search keywords is a pain in the neck. In YubNub, it is the community that creates the keywords, and so there is no issue of keeping two computers up-to-date, or having to recreate keywords after re-installing the operating system. They are always there.

Of course, these fountain-of-youth-like advantages that YubNub provides will not be there if you actually have to go to YubNub’s website to do the searches. It indeed defeats the whole purpose, I would say. Therefore, what you need is a way to access the Yubnub searches from your browser, which in my case is mainly Firefox. There are a few ways to achieve this, and for the purposes of spreading information they are listed below in the order of my personal preference, from the least preferred solution to the most preferred one.

Not a good solution: Add to your search bar

You can add YubNub to your search bar, if you use one (I don’t, hence this is the least preferred method for me). For more information, see YubNub’s blog. I don’t personally use search bars because they are too clumsy to get to, and although you may save a second of your time with them, you certainly won’t save two! Moreover, having both YubNub and for instance Amazon searches added is kind of counter intuitive, as YubNub already includes an Amazon search. In fact, the brilliance of YubNub is that you can do away with search bars altogether.

A possible solution: Extensions

Perhaps the easiest way to properly add YubNub to your Firefox is simply to get a Firefox extension that does it for you. There are a few of these, but RubNub appears to be the most popular one. That said, just a week ago I found and tested an extension that I personally thought was much better, however I ended up uninstalling it because it still wasn’t my preferred method, and now for the life of me I cannot find the extension anymore. So, there is a better solution than RubNub out there, but I don’t know where it is. Anyway, the point is that here YubNub will be added to your address bar, not your search bar, saving you precious screen estate. However, you don’t really need an extension to do just that for you, and hence it is not an optimal solution. This is why you don’t see RubNub in the list of Firefox extensions that I use.

A potential solution: Quick search

Why install an extension when you can simply make YubNub a quicksearch? Go to Bookmarks > Quick Searches, right click, and select “New bookmark”. Use http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=%s as the location, and give it a keyword like for instance “yub”. Now, every time you want to do a YubNub search, you simply go to your address bar and type “yub” followed by the YubNub command: yub wp theoretical linguistics would for example serve you the Wikipedia page for “theoretical linguistics”. Yet, it takes at least a tenth of a second to type “yub”, so I don’t like this solution, either.

My current preferred solution: Default search

Have you noticed that if you type something to your Firefox address bar which is not a URL, you will be taken directly to a website covering that topic? What happens there is that on default Firefox does a Google “I feel lucky” search if the input does not look like a proper web address. Why the Firefox developers have decided to use the “I feel lucky” feature and not simply do a proper Google search is definitely beyond me, but the existence of this feature allows for easier YubNub integration. This is because you can without too much effort change the deafult search to point to YubNub and not Google.

All you need to do is open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar. This will give you a list of configuration options for the browser. Now, scroll down to “keyword.URL” and what you should see is the string for Google’s search. Right click it, select “modify”, and enter http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command= as the new value. From now on, YubNub can be directly used from your address bar. For example, amazon introduction to theoretical linguistics will take you to Amazon.com’s search for “introduction to theoretical linguistics”. Handy, huh?

Not perfect, however.

My really preferred solution: A new extension

Although the solution given above is the one I am currently using, there still remains another way that I would like to use YubNub if only I could. Namely, I would like to see a more sophisticated Firefox extension than any of the ones that are currently available. This, then, is a plead for such an extension, for my own coding skills are certainly not good enough to create it, myself.

What is wrong with using YubNub as my default search is that whenever I enter a YubNub command I am still taken to my destination via yubnub.org. This not only slows down the process, but sometimes yubnub.org is down and I will not be taken anywhere. Which is really annoying, because then I need to flex my memory muscles to recall where the homepage of Google is.

Consequently, what I would like to see is an extension that does not connect to yubnub.org, but keeps (and automatically updates) the list of YubNub commands within the browser. If you use the YubNub command “ls”, you get the list of all commands, and an XML feed of the latest additions is also available there. If someone could persuade Jon to include a complete list of YubNub commands in an XML format, one could fairly easily create an extension that keeps its command list up-to-date with the help of that XML list.

This would not only make it possible to use YubNub commands even when yubnub.org is down, but it would also make searches faster (at least by half a second, I would say — that’s about a week of your lifespan saved right there). Furthermore, it would take unnecessary strain out of Jon’s server, plus it would also make searching with YubNub more attractive an option for those who are overly concerned with their privacy over the Net, as now no data would be sent to yubnub.org. The only question, then, is whether Jon himself would approve of people sidestepping his service proper in this manner.

So, anyone with coding skills and willingness to contribute to the quest for a longer human life span, please think about this. With Search Engine Watch reporting 213 million daily searches made every day, by saving half a second per search we would save an equivalent of 3.38 human years per day (provided everyone would use YubNub, but then again why wouldn’t they after this marvellous new way to do it?). Consequently, if you coded an extension like the one I have described here, you could practically claim that you save a whole human life every 47 or so days (3.38 years per day makes roughly 160 years in 47 days — of course, I will take half of the credit!).

So, think about it, all you humanitarian programmers out there!