On 13th July 2008 @ 12:53 pm by Arul N S
Eventhough Shiretoko, is going to have Visual Tab switching feature inbuilt, it will be still some more months before we get the stable release. Till then Ctrl-Tab extension should satisfy the Firefox Tab addicts. This extension emulates the Alt+Tab feature which helps to switch between windows in most of the operating systems. It is much more faster in Firefox 3 than the previous versions.
Pressing [Ctrl]+[Tab], brings up a thumbnail preview of the tabs, and repeated presses of [Tab] proceeds in the order of tab usage. Releasing the [Ctrl] selects the particular Tab window. Holding the [Tab] makes the scroll faster. Press [Shift] to make the scroll in the reverse order.
For those who want to see all the tabs present in the present Firefox session, just press [F4] or the List all Tabs button in the right end of Tab bar to bring up a grid view of all the tabs. There is a filter option also thrown in for the hardcore Tab addicts.
I am using this add-on in Firefox 3 and really recommend all to try it out for yourself. It’s worth the effort.
Download Ctrl-Tab
On 12th July 2008 @ 11:40 pm by Arul N S
For those who blog with WordPress.com or have their self hosted WordPress and think that CSS stands for Canadian Secret Service, they might have been frustrated when they attempt to customise their WP theme to their liking. Even though there are loads of themes available in the World Wide Web, its a pain finding them and they testing each and every one of them to find that some element in the entire theme is not great. You would have wished that if only there was a tool that just gives you the output what you wished. Thanks to Jaroslaw Dobrzanski, we have a Online WordPress Theme Generator. People who love a simple, minimalistic WP theme would fall in love this generator.
You can customise the look of your blog, without having to know what is CSS or PHP… You can change the colours, fonts, layout, header and all other settings. The best part of all is that you can see the output right away when in the preview pane. So if you don’t like the way how it turned out, then just redo it till you get it right. Once you are done perfecting the theme, just download the zip, and unzip and load it right away into your dashboard.
On 9th June 2008 @ 11:19 pm by Arul N S
One of the features that got attention was the bookmarks management in Firefox 3. Lately I have had the need to bookmark many of the links in my bookmarks toolbar. With the favicon displayed next to the side, it was pleasing and eye-catching. But the space was restricted and the links started to overflow the given width. So little googling to increase the height of my bookmarks toolbar brought me to MozillaZine (which I should have done before going to Google). This is how you go about it….
- Go to Firefox’s Profile directory ( Press [Win]+[R], and type “%APPDATA%” to go to your apps directory and you will find a directory called Mozilla and then navigate to your profile directory inside)
- In chrome folder, there might be a file called “userChrome.css“. If not you might have a example file and even if that is not there then create one using notepad.
- Inside type the following based on which version of Firefox you are running. Please change the height variable according to your needs. 54px worked out for me. Then save the file and restart Firefox to have as much bookmarks as you want in your toolbar.
For Firefox 2
/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
#bookmarks-ptf {display:block !important;}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator {display:inline !important;}
and sometimes you might need to add this also
/* Sometimes you may need this */
#PersonalToolbar {max-height: none !important;}
For Firefox 3 (this worked out for me)
/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar for Fx3b5pre*/
#bookmarksBarContent
{display:block !important;}
.places-toolbar-items
{display:block !important;
height: 54px !important;
overflow-y:auto !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent toolbarseparator
{display:inline !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent .bookmark-item
{visibility: visible !important;}
.chevron {height: 0px !important;}
On 9th June 2008 @ 10:08 am by Arul N S
Sometimes device driver maintenance can be a pain in the wrong place, esp in Windows. XP is good with USB devices with automatic detection and configuration, but it’s not so good with removing them. The device drivers are not removed automatically and they create a havoc in your system on a longer run. My office laptop came with pre-installed XP and it’s been running for past 3 years and it has seen it fair share of new hardware. For a automation engineer it’s a nightmare to add devices knowing that somewhere something is going to wrong because of your unused drivers. Also every time your OS boots up, it loads your unused drivers too until you physically uninstall them. Below is a procedure to remove your unused device drivers from Windows XP.
- Go to System properties dialog box from your control panel or press [Win] + [Break]
- Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button which is quite below.
- Click “New” button below the System Variables panel.
- In the dialog box, type “devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices” in the Varibale Name field and “1 ” in the Variable Value field.
- Click OK to exit.
- Right Click “My Computer” in the desktop and click “Manage” to take you to Computer Management.
- Select Device Manager in the left menu, and then go to View menu in the top and select “Show Hidden Devices”
- In the devices tree shown below, expand the various branches in the device tree and look for unused devices or hidden devices which will be indicated by grayed-out or washed out icons.
- Right-Click the devices and select Uninstall to remove the device driver.
- Continue this procedure for the entire list of unused drivers.
Source : [Tech-Republic]
On 7th June 2008 @ 03:58 pm by Arul N S
After I switched over to Firefox 3, I noticed that my Firefox used to freeze whenever I was downloading or to be more precise whenever a huge download finished. After few spending some time with the task manager and Google, I came to find that the culprit was the built-in feature of Firefox which scanned the downloads using the already installed anti-virus application in my system. Even though this feature is a good one, in my humble opinion its a drag for somebody who downloads in and out daily. It could be useful feature for a novice or my grandma if she ever wanted to use a computer but not certainly to me. I believe any person who spends more than an hour over the Internet daily would be sensible enough to have a anti-virus application running and update it frequently. Your own anti-virus application should be able to take care of it instead of the browser taking the load.
So after spending some time with Google, I got lead to gHacks who had a detailed article on it. So here is how you disable this feature, type “about:config” in your Firefox’s address bar and run a search filter for browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone and change the parameter value to false which will disable the automatic scanning.
via [gHacks]
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