A widescreen LCD is excellent for watching widescreen format media such as TV series, movies, application development IDEs, but the same doesn’t apply to browsing the web.

Due to the plethora of cross-browser issues, many web designers/developers have resorted to restricting the width of web pages to 800 pixels which is somewhat the minimum resolution which most users displays has been set to. As such, opening these web pages end up with a lot of blank wasted space on the left and right of the content on widescreen LCDs.

One way of getting around this is to have 2 browsers open side by side like this:

To get to that state, you would have to resize each window to fit half of the screen besides positioning it. Fortunately, there is an add-on (extension) called Split Browser which enables a single Firefox window to be split up to house multiple tabs. Screenshot of it in action:

Instead of 2 separate Firefox windows, they’re both tabs within one.

Opera users would probably be pointing out that this capability is already built into the standard Opera browser, but I guess this entry is targeted towards Firefox users who would like to have this ‘feature’ without having to switch to another browser. ;)

A proxy server is a computer that offers a computer network service to allow clients to make indirect network connections to other network services. A client connects to the proxy server, then requests a connection, file, or other resource available on a different server.

If you’re wondering about how to configure proxy for your Firefox web browser (the client), don’t worry – The configuration is pretty easy:

• Open your Firefox browser

• Go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings

• Pick “Manual Proxy Configuration“, key in the proxy information (the host name as well as the port). You can either use the proxy in particular protocol only or use it for all protocols (HTTP/FTP/SSL etc…) Other than that, you can skip the proxy several IP/web addresses (for example, your router gateway – 192.168.1.1) – for list of proxies that can be used – refer here

• Click on “OK” to confirm the settings.

Yo guys, that’s about it :-)

The new setting introduced in version 0.3.5.2 and is automatically enabled (checked) is “Open link with target attribute in current tab”. To revert to how it was before, uncheck that setting in the Tab Mix Plus options and your Firefox would be back to its normal behaviour again.

Screenshot of the Tab Mix Plus options dialog with the setting which needs to be unchecked highlighted:

Navigation
Nothing fancy. There’s the typical Back, Forward, Stop and Reload buttons you’d find in most browsers. In addition though, there’s a Rewind and Next button which is where Opera tries to make an educated guess on how far Backward or Forward you want to go in when browsing. I reckon it goes back to the first page of any website domain which is good if you’re multiple links down for sites like Wikipedia or news sites. Another feature is the Mouse Gesture feature, which I will explain much later.

Tabs
Tab Browsing has become de facto standard in most browser. In tab browsing, Opera gives you a quick snapshot of a page in the tab, if you hover over it. Useful if you have many tabs open and can’t see the title of the site (or recognize the site’s iconized logo) and need to find the right tab. Right click on a tab gives whole bunch of options – Lock tab, duplicate tab, tile them differently – you name it. Dragging tabs around is also no problemo. If there was only one reason to love Opera, persistent Tab browsing would be it (at least for me). Persistent tab browsing in the sense that Opera caches all the tabs you open, and even after you close it, it gives you the same open tabs when you re-launch opera. Because of this, I find that I often times, don’t need to bookmark pages. Great but sometimes I find that it make it too easy to open up too many pages and I find my self overwhelmed with stuff that I want to read. Well at least I don’t kick myself in the behind when I accidentally close a browser window and lose all my open tabs (though some browsers like Firefox do give you a warning when trying to close multiple tabs).

Zooming In and Out
Different font sizes for different sites (some too big, some too small?) no problem. Opera allows you to zoom in and out and even lets you set different zoom levels per tab and therefore per site/page. If you aren’t bothered then just hold down the control key and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can also zoom in on pictures without the need for an image editor.

Notes
I use the notes feature a lot to jot down ideas, pre-write online forum debate replies and also to pre-write blog post. Notes is something similar to what you find in Outlook. I also use it to store info I copy off the web before I close the page tab. Copying texts to Notes is made even easier by the right click context menu which gives you the option of “copy to notes (ctrl+shift+c)” when you highlight texts in any web pages.

The right click context menu on highlighted texts also gives you several neat options like perform a search through Google or translate the highlighted text via Bablefish as Opera has all these sites intergrated into it’s search.

Mouse Gestures
This allows you to navigate by using the mouse pointers and a sequence of movements in place of the normal back/forward/stop surfing buttons. To use a mouse gesture you simply hold the right button and drag the mouse in a certain direction. I use it a lot for back, forward and opening new tabs.

RSS Feeds
RSS in Opera uses Opera Mail and it’s a simple 2-click affair. The feed will show up under News feeds and are presented and handled in the same manner as e-mail messages and Usenet news articles. This makes it easy to forward a news feed item by e-mail to a friend, access stored items using the search and “Quick find features”, label particular items for follow-up et cetera.

IRC
Upon starting the built-in IRC, Opera prompts you with initial info to create an account in which you need to enter such as nickname, email address, etc. The IRC client fells very natural. It supports XDCC and other IRC function and I use it mail to replace MiRC for my XDCC anime downloads from fansub group channels. XDCC downloads also use the download manager’s UI and XDCC resume is supported :).

Dictionary
Highlighting text also gives you the option of Spell-checking With Opera and on Windows, Linux, and UNIX, it uses GNU Aspell which has to be installed independently along with at least one Aspell dictionary. The dictionary is also used in the Opera Mail and Notes for spell checking.

Bit Torrenting
With the built-in Bit Torrent, by simple clicking a torrent file, you will be presented with a window asking for a save location. Digging around the Bit Torrent preferences and you’d get the standard upload, download, and port options settings. The Bit Torrent function uses the same UI of the download manager with the status bar at the bottom indicating your torrent(s) vital stats. Just make sure it is configured properly for your environment (router, bridge, etc) as with all Bit Torrent clients.

The Wand – password manager
The Wand is basically a password manager with a auto-login feature. The first time you visit a website that requires you to logon with a username and password, the Wand will ask if you wish to save this information. Clicking yes, tells Wand saves this data for this specific website and when you come back the fields will be highlighted in yellow. By just clicking these highlighted boxes again Opera will sign you in and you are good to go. Doesn’t work for all but it works for most.

Widgets
Similar to Yahoo widgets which are small applications that sit on the desktop and provides easy access to frequently used functions or provides some visual information such as news aggregators, clocks, calculators, calendars and weather forecasts. Widgets are also a feature on Opera. Widgets for Opera must be approved by Opera and and to install them simply go to Widgets | Add Widgets and a new tap with a bunch that are available to you. These widgets are a very cool feature but they come at a cost of processing/RAM and despite their usefulness they actually clutter up your taskbar instead of appearing in tabs.

With all these goodies what’s not to like about Opera? :)

Download from here.

Fortunately, it’s a rather easy to get around this, which is just to select and install the appropriate dictionary from here. Once that’s done, just right-click on any text box/field/form and you should be able to select the dictionary you want to use (screenshot below):

Once that’s done, you’re all set! :)

IMO, Firefox is on the right track. I’d anytime prefer a web browser that is originally simple but can be shaped/tweaked/configured to the way I like. In contrast, I don’t need a bloated browser that has tons of functions but end up utilizing maybe only 30% of them.

However, not all extensions are perfectly developed. Some of them come with spyware/malware, some of them aren’t actually practical to use, while some of them are just too bloated for minimalists. Thus, I’m here to share all my favorite extensions that are proven to be trustworthy and I personally find them useful:

• Adblock Plus
• Are you one of the web surfers who’s annoyed with web banners and irritating flash animation? Adblock Plus is very efficient extension that allows you to block unwanted content to make your web surfing experience better. Comes with Filterset.G, it has actually blocked 95% of the ads without having you to do anything. For the rest of the 5%, just block it manually! (for example, Right Click and click “Adblock Image” in the menu)
• All-in-one gestures
• It allows you to send specific commands to the browser by combining mouse movements (for example, holding the right mouse button, pushing it up, and release the button will open a new tab for you). It’s one of my favorite extension in Firefox, and its convenience cannot be just described in words! I can even add new gesture whenever it’s needed!
• BBCodeXtra
• As a LYN regular, I use BBCode very often to add formatting to my posts. With this extension, it can be done easily without having to type all the tedious [b][/b], [img=XXX][/img] or [url=xxx][/url] tags.
• DownloadThemAll
• You can call it an extension, but I’d call it a fully functional download manager that’s integrated into my Firefox. With DownloadThemAll, I don’t have to install external download manager and install Flashgot to get them integrated together. Other than that, I’m also very impressed with its download speed.
• Fasterfox
• A zero-configuration extension that significantly increases the speed of your net surfing, also comes with a pop-up blocker. However, choosing “Turbo Charged” preset is not recommended as it exceeds the RFC spec and increases the server load.
  
• ImageShack Toolbar
• Imageshack is one of the most popular yet reliable free image hosting sites. If you upload images to the web frequently, this is a useful extension as you can just do it with two clicks instead of going to the homepage. However, because it’s a toolbar by itself – it does actually occupy some space of the browser.
• Tab Mix Plus
• An excellent extension that greatly enhances Firefox Tab-browsing capabilities. For example, you can force all the links to be opened in existing tab instead of a new tab, you can choose whether or not to have ‘X’ button in every tab, just to name a few. On top of that, it also comes with a built-in session manager.
• Video Downloader
• I’m a frequent visitor of YouTube and Google Video. With the pathetic speed of my “broadband”, it’s almost impossible to view the videos smoothly, moreover, some of the good videos are meant to be collected :) Video Downloader is a simple add-on that adds a small icon on the status bar, allowing you to click on it and get the direct download link of the video.

Of course, the above are just the extensions I’m using. I’m sure they are more FF extensions that you might like. Just visit the add-on homepage to discover it by yourself!

[ Original thread in LYN ]

Close button tweak

One of the more obvious user interface changes in this version of Firefox is the position of the close button for tabs. Practically all other web browsers with tabs have tab closing buttons on each tab as opposed to Firefox’s choice of having it at the extreme right of the tab row up until now. With version 2.0, the default close tab button position is now on each individual tab.

This is probably a good decision in a way, but after such a long time of using Firefox, I’ve been too accustomed to the close button being there and would rather not have that change (I use the scroll button to close tabs nowadays, but selectively closing multiple tabs with the ‘x’ at the end is pretty useful). Fortunately there’s a setting which can be easily changed to accommodate the behaviour you want.

Here are the steps to have the close button back at same position as pre-1.5 days:

1. Type ‘about:config’ in the address bar.
2. In the filter textbox that appears below, enter ‘browser.tabs.closeButtons’.
3. Double click on the browser.tabs.closeButtons preference, and a message box should appear.
4. Change the value to ’3′ and click OK.

And you’re back with the close button at the same position as before the latest upgrade! You can easily revert to the default Firefox 2.0 behaviour by changing the value back to 1.

Default:

After change of value:

Here are some other values you could use for that preference:

• 0 – Display a close button on the active tab only
• 1 – Display close buttons on all tabs (Default)
• 2 – Don’t display any close buttons
• 3 – Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)

browser.tabs.closeButtons values and explanations taken from MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Minimum tab width

In Firefox 2, the width of each tab has a minimum and when that’s reached, left and right scroll buttons would appear on each end of the tab row so you can scroll through the list of tabs. This was introduced to ensure the tabs do not get so small that the titles are totally obscured. A quick fix as follows:

1. Type ‘about:config’ in the address bar.
2. In the filter textbox that appears below, enter ‘browser.tabs.tabMinWidth’.
3. Double click on the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth preference, and a message box should appear.
4. Reduce the value till you’re fine with the amount of tabs the row can accommodate (range is from 0 to 100) and click OK. I’ve set mine to 75 currently.

Explanation on browser.tabs.tabMinWidth preference can be found at MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Form/forum shortcut keys

I usually use the shortcut keys ALT+I, ALT+B rather frequently at a forum I visit to get highlighted text in the post box to be italicised or bolded, but in Firefox 2, this shortcut keys no longer work by default. You now have to add the SHIFT key into the mix, so it goes ALT+SHIFT+I instead. If you don’t want to use the SHIFT key, you can edit two values in about:config (like for the close tab button previously):

Change:
ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Taken from MozillaZine forum.

Those are the 3 tweaks which I personally found to have affected my usual browsing. Hope you found them useful. :) For more about:config tweaks, head over to this page and for other Firefox tweaks, check this guide out.

Notable updates include the integration of functionality similar to the SessionSaver extension into Firefox’s history function, close buttons being added to each tab, anti-phishing filter, a redesign of the preferences dialog and minor user interface tweaks.

At time of writing, Firefox 2.0 is currently at RC1 (Release Candidate 1) which denotes a final product which is ready for release unless some serious bugs surface. Do note that installing Firefox 2.0 RC1 will overwrite your current Firefox installation and may disable some of your extensions which are incompatible (I’m using Nightly Tester Tools extension to get around this). However, if you would just like to try 2.0 out without having it replace your current Firefox installation, you can get Firefox Portable 2.0 RC1 which will run in standalone mode.

Firefox 2.0 is scheduled to be released some time in October, so you shouldn’t have to wait too long before your Firefox browser gets upgraded!

Screenshot:

Figure 1: Connecting to Tor Networks

Well then you if you fall into the aforementioned category then Torpark is the browser for you. Based on a mod version of Firefox, Torpark was created by a Group calling itself Hacktivismo (the reincarnation of the renowned Texas-ased hacker organization called Cult Of the Dead Cow)and is touted to protect your privacy from governments intelligence service and data theives. Torpark uses its own network (Tor network) of net routers and encryption to anonymise the traffic and also regularly changes the net address that someone appears to be browsing from. It’s also stand alone installess but weighs in at 9.3Mb.

Figure 2: Security menu from the right click mouse button.

Figure 3: Torpark in action

download from here.

The resurgence of a strong competitor to IE in the form of Mozilla Firefox has caused Microsoft to restart its efforts in this arena. After about a year and a half since the announcement that the 7th version of IE was in development, Release Candidate 1 (latest version at time of writing) of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been released to the public for testing. A RC1 status would mean a close to complete final version where the goal would be to iron out bugs which appear before the final release is shipped. With lots of promise by Microsoft that this browser will help stem its eroding market share, here are the new features which have been introduced to regain its foothold.

New look-and-feel (and name)

First thing you would notice once you start it up is the name change. As part of Microsoft’s rebranding exercise, it is no longer called Microsoft Internet Explorer but Windows Internet Explorer instead. The overall look and feel of the browser has been tweaked rather substantially, with the placement of buttons changed and certain toolbars hidden from view by default. Compared to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), it is slimmer and thus takes up less vertical screen space. The address bar is now sandwiched between the back/forward buttons and the stop/refresh buttons which are on its left and right respectively. Most other browsers have these buttons grouped together on the left of the address bar and if this was aimed to differ it from other browsers, I personally believe it is a mistake. Another addition where the idea seems to have originated from other browsers is the search box, located at the right of the stop button.

Tabbed browsing

A greatly overdue feature that should have been implemented years ago is tabbed browsing. It allows multiple websites (tabs) to be contained within a single browser window which reduces clutter on your taskbar when you have too many IE windows open and also allows you to quickly switch between different pages more efficiently. IE based web browsers such as Maxthon and Avant Browser have long had this feature by encapsulating multiple windows into its shell, but this is the first version of IE from Microsoft which has tabbed browsing built-in.

A nice feature which is currently unique to IE7 is the ability to visually preview the content of the currently available tabs and switch between them through the Quick Tabs function.

Security features

Security vulnerabilities have continually plagued IE6 allowing alternative web browsers to use this point to lure people away to use their browsers instead. ActiveX, a technology which is enabled in IE to enable interactive content on websites has constantly been the main entry point of spyware/malware infections as it is easily exploited. In IE7, an ‘ActiveX opt-in’ mechanism has been put in place to ensure only the essential ActiveX controls are enabled while the rest are disabled unless explicitly allowed to.

Phishing filter

Phishing (pronounced ‘fishing’) to the uninitiated is using scam-like techniques to fraudulently gain sensitive information such as credit card details or passwords. Tricks usually revolve around emails which are carefully disguised as legitimate official correspondence from financial institutions with links pointing to a fraudulent website. The phishing filter built into IE7 would scan websites you visit and immediately block access if it finds a match in Microsoft’s database of known phishing sites. If the site is not found in the database but contains elements of a typical site of that nature, you would be alerted as well. Judging by its usefulness, it seems odd that this feature is actually disabled by default.

RSS

As publishers everywhere have started syndicating their content using RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it was only natural for IE to support this. A feed reader and discovery tool is included in IE7 which enables the automatic detection of a feed presence as well as viewing and subscribing to feeds.

So, should you upgrade to this browser when the final version is released? Well, it actually will be done automatically unless you tell it otherwise. The update to IE7 will be automatically distributed as a high priority update through Windows Update when it is released.

That said, IE7 does indeed resolve shortcomings prevalent in IE6 besides introducing much needed features to bring it up to par with alternative browsers currently available and thus is a worthy update. Unfortunately, Microsoft would have to do a lot more if it wishes to regain the market share it has lost as the new version does not offer anything revolutionary but only manages to keep up with the two of its closest competitors, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.