6ix Passions

Improve your Firefox Search and Browsing Experience

Long time ago, at least it sound like it in our Internet Age, I was using Maxthon (also known as MyIE2), a freeware web browser based on Internet Explorer. That browser was amazing, not only because it adds tabs to the current Internet Explorer 5, but also because everything was thought to improve your browsing experience.

It took me a long time before switching to Firefox, at least until all the add-ons (extensions) existed to get the same browsing experience I had with Maxthon. Today Firefox represent near 40% of the browsers market share and can be extended with more than hundreds of add-ons. If you ask me today, if I will consider another browser, I will tell you that is really unlikely because my experience with Firefox is at its peak.

Now I will show you my experience and all what you need to set it up for yourself.

First download Mozilla Firefox (if you don’t already have it) and the following…

Essential Firefox add-ons:

• Tab Mix Plus to enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. You can download my current Tab Mix Plus settings and import it (click on the settings button at the button of the add-on preferences pane and choose import settings).
  
• Drag de Go to execute several commands (open link,save link, search selected text) by the direction you drag and drop. Here’s my current Drag de Go settings that you can import the same way you did it for Tab Mix Plus.
  
• All-in-One Gestures to execute common commands using mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page. Don’t forget to choose the mouse button you wish to use with your mouse gesture in the add-on preferences pane under the tab Advanced Prefs #1.
• FaviconizeTab to adjust the tab width of your most-used sites to becomes small up to the size of favicon. Enter the URLs you wish to faviconized in the add-on preferences pane. Don’t forget to add the /* at the end of all your URLs to make sure all the folders/pages under the main address are included.

Before your begin tweaking FireFox and its add-ons I suggest that you to learn some very…

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts:

• Open Location (Command+L | CRTL+L on Windows): If you only need to learn one keyboard shortcut, then learn this one. It focus your cursor in the Address bar, so you are always ready to type an URL. If an URL has already been type, you’ll notice that it’s selected so you can replace it easily.
• Add www. and .com to any domain (Command+Enter | CTRL+Enter): Type a domain without the www. and .com in the address bar and just press the keyboard shortcut, notice that it add for you the www. and .com before and after the domain you had type. Quick and easy!
• History Back and Forward (Command+Left & Right Arrow Keys | CRTL+Arrows): Press the keyboard shortcut to simply move backward or forward in you browsing history.
• Move between browser tabs (Command+Option (CTRL+ALT on Windows)+Left & Right Arrow keys): Move between browser tabs using your arrow keys. You can also press Command + number key to access a specific browser tab (i.e. Command+1 to access the first one, Command+2 to access the second one, and so on up to 9).
  
  

To merge your Address bar with the Google Search bar simply follow the next steps:

1. Type about:config in your address bar
2. Type keyword.URL in the filter input
3. Double-click on the current Value and paste the following URL: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=
   

After those three simple steps, every keyword or keyphrase you enter in your address bar will be a query in the Google Search Engine.

To setup other quick searches with different search engines or website:

1. Open your favorite site
2. Do a simple query in the input search box
3. Look at the URL in the address bar and notice where the keyword or keyphrase you had type is. (on IMDB for example a query for Men will return http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Men&x=0&y=0 in the address bar)
4. Bookmark the link
5. Open your bookmark sidebar, right-click on the bookmark and select properties.
6. Change the name of the bookmark for more suitable one (optional)
7. In the Location input go where the keyword or keyphrase is in the URL and change it for %s. (in the last example it will give http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s&x=0&y=0)
   
   
8. Assign a Keyword for that bookmark (mv in the last example will be a good choice).
9. Now try a search query in the address bar. (in the last example I will try mv Spiderman - notice the space between mv and my keyword).

You may also want to consider those very useful additional add-ons:

• Foxmark Bookmarks Synchronizer to backup and synchronize your bookmarks automatically between your Foxmark private and secure account and all the computer(s) where you have installed the add-ons.
• Linkification to convert unclickable text links into genuine, clickable links.
• Perl Crescent Page Saver Basic to save an image copy (in PNG or other) of your browser window (including the none visible part below the scroll bar).
• TinyURL Creator to easily create a tiny and easy URL to copy from the long url you get some times in your address bar. To use it, simply right-click the page you are and choose Create TinyURL. The current URL of your address bar is sent to TinyURL.com service and the Tiny link is automatically copied in your clipboard, ready to be paste wherever you want.
• Firesizer let you resize the window to specific dimensions. Specially good for designers and developers.

Regarding the Theme that I use to transform my Firefox skin into the one of Safari here are the links:

• GrApple Safari Theme for Firefox. I used the UNO version.
• Fission combines address bar and progress bar. It will complete the Firefox-Safari transformation perfectly.