Sephy’s Platzish

As some of you may remember, I wasn’t too impressed with Firefox 2 when it first came out, mostly to do with a single change to the structure of the search box. However, I finally broke down and upgraded to it and I’ve liked it, especially with the addition of a few extensions like tab mix plus to make my browsing experience my own.

Strangely, though, when I went to my home page, Firefox Central, and saw the redesign of the page the other day, it was a sign to me that the new version of the browser was out. Now, you’d think that with my prior history with a new version of software and not liking it too much, I decided that I’d be back on the cutting edge of technology and download the new version. So I did, and I have to say that I’m impressed overall, but there are a few qualms that I have.

New Location Bar

The most talked about feature by far of the new version is the redesigned location bar - dubbed as the "Magic Bar". It’s not a lie - it is quite magical. For example, if I know I saw a page about something, but can’t exactly remember the address (which for me is highly unlikely, but that’s me ), I can just type in a word that was in the title, like "Gruen" and that will bring up a list of sites that I’ve visited or bookmarked that has Gruen either in the title or in the address -

Something that you don’t see is that when a site is bookmarked, it’s got a little gold star next to it, which brings me to my next feature - one-click bookmarking. I didn’t buy into it before, but in practice, it’s devilishly simple. To bookmark a site, I usually drag it to my folder called Sites on the toolbar, but now all I have to do is click on the star in the toolbar (it shows where the go arrow is in the screenshot above) and it’s saved. Then, another click brings up a menu, which lets you file the bookmark where you want it. This even works for sites you’ve already bookmarked, such as my local radar -

Other neat features

One of the things I have a lot of are links to different RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar, and from time to time they don’t work. Usually it’s because of an error, but one thing that they’ve added to the menu that comes up when you click on a "livemark" is something deadly simple - a menu item that says "Open "Site name"" - which does just that - open the main site for the livemark so that you can view that page directly.

Also, they’ve added some other useful menus, such as the Most Visited under the bookmark toolbar, where you have a list of the ten sites you’ve visited the most over the last few days, along with the option to save your session without having to tweak your homepage every time you want to use that feature. Of course, you can still just exit the browser, but this way you have the flexibility to do that if you want.

One caveat

And it’s not even Firefox’s fault. Whenever you upgrade to a new version of Firefox (or any browser for that matter), some things tend to break. It’s no different in this case where some of my most favourite add-ons have proven to be incompatible with 3.0, but I think that’s more of a simple coding change that needs to be done.

At first, Adblock (I have regular adblock, not adblock plus) was incompatible, but just as I went to check for updates, it looks like it has been updated.

However, Firebug, Fasterfox, Tab Mix Plus, and All-in-One Gestures are not compatible yet. I would suspect that it won’t be too long before that’s sorted out though.

Overall impression

Overall, I have to say that I’m glad I’ve upgraded to the new version of the browser - it adds quite a few features that are really neat (including being able to resize the search box), and it uses quite a bit less memory - I’ve had it open for quite a while now and it’s only using 117MB of Virtual Memory and 108MB of RAM. Also, and to be honest, I haven’t noticed this too much since I have relatively fast Internet, it’s apparently much faster at loading pages.

If you’re someone who waits for software to be stable before it’s released, that’s alright, but I don’t think you’d be going wrong to take a chance and upgrade to Firefox 3.

Not a lot of y’all know this, but I have quite a decent knowledge of Spanish - I’m not completely fluent, but I have advanced conversational skills, and can compose emails with minimal assistance from online translators. However, one thing that I can’t normally do with Spanish is have my spelling checked in Firefox.

This is something easily fixed, and in the process of my installing this particular language to my Firefox, I’m going to show the rest of y’all as well (I’ve already done this to add another language, which you’ll see when I show you the menu later).

The first thing is that you need to be at a text form (it can be any type of input line - even the search box that comes up when you go to Scroogle’s homepage can suffice). In this case, I’m going to use the title line of this post. You will need to turn on spellcheck for that particular field by right clicking and turning on Spell Check This Field first.

Next, right click again on the field, and go down one line below Spell Check This Field, and you will see Languages, which will expand into a new menu, with (in most instances) only one language in the list. Select Add languages… from that sub menu.

That will bring you to the Firefox Add-ons page which has a whole list of dictionaries that you can select from. They’re organized by the language’s first letter, in that actual language - thus, you have Welsh (Cmyraeg) listed before English.

Go through the list until you find the language you want to install, and then click the Install link. This will bring up the standard warning about the extension you want to install being unsigned. However, since you are downloading it from the official Addons site, it should be safe to use.

Then, the Add-ons window will open, and the new dictionary will install itself. After it’s done, you will need to restart Firefox to use your new dictionary. Unless you’re working on something important (like this blog* post, or an online application), you can go right ahead and restart right away, as it will keep your current tabs remembered for when you restart.

After you’ve restarted, it’s as simple as going back to the Languages sub-menu and selecting the newly installed language as the one you want to check your spelling in. Firefox will remember your choice from then on.

*Apparently, in the Australian English dictionary that I downloaded from Mozilla, “blog”, “firefox”, and “Mozilla” are considered misspelt. Go figure…that’s why there’s the Add to dictionary option, I guess.

For the Tuesday Think Tank this week, I’m departing slightly from the planned HTML topic to talk about something that can help you diversify your searching - the Firefox Search Bar.

It is that thing that you always see at the upper right of your window in Firefox (usually next to the address bar on the Navigation Toolbar). In previous versions of Firefox, you could hide the bar and a popup would appear, but they changed that in Firefox 2.0.

In fact, There was a time when I was against upgrading my browser, because of it not allowing the popup. However, soon after posting that, I installed the new version and have come to love the redesigned search box. It is actually one of the most powerful tools that come with Firefox now, in my opinion.

One of the coolest features is the ability to add as many search engines as you want to it. As it stands right now, these are the search engines in my search bar -

Most of these engines have been added when I’ve visited various sites, and for the most part, I’ve kept it fairly stable with what is in there; in fact, most of the additions to the bar have been made over the last couple of days.

How do I add a search?

It’s fairly simple to add a search to the search bar. There are a couple of ways to do it.

Directly Adding at a search site

The first, and most common, way is to go to, say, Technorati - and take a look at the upper right of your browser window. It’ll look something like this -

Click on the blue box, and your list of search options will pop up, with something added to the bottom -

Click on Add “Technorati Search”, and Firefox adds it to your list of engines and selects it -

Adding Search Engines via Mycroft Project

You’ll probably have noticed by now the last item in the menu for search engines - Manage Search Engines. When you select that, a quite powerful window is brought up.

Here, you can move the search engines in your list around, delete search engines, and gain quick access to the Mycroft Project. All you need to do is click on Get more search engines… and you will be taken to Firefox’s main Search Engine add-on page.

At the bottom of the page, there is a link to Browse through more search engines at mycroft.mozilla.org - simply click on that link, and you’ll be taken there. Now, you can search for your favorite site. For example, if I wanted to find a plugin for Dogpile (a site which doesn’t automatically pop up the blue box), I’d search for it and be sent to a result page.

When at the result page, click on the version of the search engine you’re looking for and a window will pop up verifying that you want to install that search engine.

Click Start using it right away if you want it to be your search engine of choice right away, or else you can just install it and switch to it later.

How do I change the Search Engine I use?

That’s a simple process. Just know that when you change the search engine in the upper right, you change the engine that you use when you do a right-click search. For example, with Technorati as the default search, I can search for words I come across on a website by selecting them and right clicking, which will bring up this menu (which I will add is quite a bit longer than most right-click menus ) -

To change the search engine that you use for both types of searches, it’s as simple as going back up to the upper right and clicking on the icon of the current search (the same place that you click when it turned blue), and select your new search engine.

Using the search bar

To use the search bar, you can do one of three things - first, click on the bar and type your search in. If you prefer to use the keyboard, you have two shortcuts - Ctrl+E and Ctrl+K, both of which focus to the search bar. Type your search in and hit enter or click on the magnifying glass. A new tab will open up for you which will have your search in it.

Over to you

Taking advantage of the phenomenal tool is quite simple. If you haven’t tried it out yet, give it a go, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Also, as always, Snoskred and I are open to suggestions for future topics to be covered in a Tech Tuesday Think Tank. If you have something you’d like to be explained, feel free to drop a line via the Contact form.

One of the most frequently used gauges of a blog’s success is the Alexa Rating. It’s something that has been around, seemingly, since the beginning of the web, and there was a point in time when almost every single person on the web had access to, and possibly sent rankings, their system. The reason? It was included in Internet Explorer, and at one point in time, about 5 or 6 years ago, almost 95% of all users were using it.

Now, of course, some people opted to remove the Alexa software, mainly because it got listed as adware. I can’t blame them, since nobody likes to have someone tracking where we go. However, many people still use Alexa as an almost Gold Standard to a site’s success.

I don’t really get why, but it does make some sense when you consider that, aside from raw server data, there really is no way to publicly gauge the popularity of sites. The problem I have isn’t so much with the fact that it’s being done, but that by using Alexa so prominently, you’re saying that a site’s success is based on a small subset of web users, not on all users, or even probably a majority of users.

Most of the reason of the selectivity is that Alexa only count visits by people who use Internet Explorer and the Alexa toolbar. You would think that since the number of users who use IE as their primary browser, combined with the growth of Firefox’s use as the “number 2″ browser in the market, Amazon (who own Alexa) would seriously consider creating a toolbar for Firefox.

However, that has not happened. Fortunately, there is an open community for developers to create their own extensions for the browser, which led to someone sitting down, slapping some code together, and coming up with the Smart Toolbar addon. Not only does it let you see a site’s Alexa rating, it supposedly also sends your browsing data to Alexa. Of course, you have to be comfortable with the data being sent to a server, supposedly anonymously, and you have to be willing to allow others to have an inkling of your browsing habits. However, it is a step forward to allowing users who are so inclined to share their data, and increase the (in my opinion) increasingly irrelevant rankings of sites they visit.

Interesting side note - on my old address, I didn’t get an Alexa rating until about a month ago, and that was after quite a few months of blogging. However, I’m confident that this site will pick up some Alexa traffic sooner than the old one did.

You’d think that I’m talking about food here, but nope; I’m talking about my browser - the vernerable Firefox 1.5.0.11. I’ve been using version 1.5 since it was in the Beta 2 stage, in last 2005. However, the introduction of version 2, along with some policy changes, means that Mozilla have terminated support for version 1.5. I have this sneaking suspicion that I will have to adapt sooner or later to changing the look of my browser.

You see, in 2005, I had made a choice to save some space on my screen by removing the Navigation toolbar, removing buttons that I hardly ever used such as Reload, Stop and Home. Included in the things that I removed from my toolbar was the Search Box. A really neat feature that occurred because of that is that when I hit Ctrl+K to start a search, this pops up -

Pretty simple and neat, no? Add that to the fact that, combined with the tabbar, the top area of my window covers the same real estate as if I were to have the “proper” arrangement of toolbars and such (never mind the fact that the whole space next to the menu bar is wasted space in that configuration).

However, it was decided to remove this feature on the basis that it was a) something most users don’t see (fair enough, I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t hidden the search box myself) and b) buggy (something that the developers probably had a good reason to declare it so, and, most likely, if they were to explain the reason it was buggy, it would just kinda float above my head and blow by. :)).

I had said in October that this was the only thing keeping me from upgrading. As it is, I have a widescreen monitor (1680 x 1050 resolution at that) and horizontal space isn’t that big of a concern. There are also extensions that will allow you to make the size of the search bar so I can always sort that out after installation.

Considering that there aren’t any plans to release any additional security upgrades for version 1.5, it’s best for me to just build a bridge, donate a little screen space to the search bar, and keep my hopes up that someone will be innovative and come up with an extension to bring back the search dialog (considering that 7 months have gone by without one coming out, it might just be nearly impossible for it to be fixed without breaking the browser).

Update: I’ve upgraded to version 2 now. So far everything is going well; the only minor issue now is that new tabs from searches focus instead of load in the background.