Firefox 1.5 review

Okay, I installed Firefox 1.5, looks good and most of my extensions worked as well. And the ones that don't work, it is showing them as disabled so that I don't lose track of them. There is also an find update option on each extension so that if a future release of the extension is compatible with it, it would be downloaded and installed. I also found this useful link to tweak Gcache extension to work with it.

First impressions, I didn't find much difference between the older version and this. The options screen has changed and it has this really cool setting of "Force links that open windows to open in new tabs". I always find it annoying when clicking on a link opens up a new Firefox window. I liked the way opera had everything contained in itself. Now firefox supports the same feature.

Other than this there is nothing tangible that I can point out, and I still have to figure out some of the extensions stuff, but the web surfing just seems cooler ;-)

Update: Jus tnoticed that upgrading made it lose the search engines that I added. Also, there is no direct way of deleting those search engines (there is an extension though, but I am feeling lazy to google right now)

My Firefox Extensions

This is my last post using Firefox 1.0.x. Firefox 1.5 is out and I will waste no time to install it. Only thing I am skeptical about is whether all the extensions I use will work. So I am listing all the extensions here for now. I'll update the post to add descriptions of each extension later.

1. Flashgot - recommended. I use it with Free Download Manager.
2. Disable Targets for Downloads
3. GreaseMonkey
4. View Rendered Source Chart
5. View Formatted Source
6. Google toolbar for Firefox - recommended.
7. Tamper Data.
8. StumbleUpon
9. Gcache.
10. BookmarksHome
11. SessionSaver - heavily recommended.
12. Yahoo Toolbar
13. ScrapBook - recommended for offline users.
14. FasterFox
15. BugMeNot
16. Web Developer
17. FlagFox.
18. Adblock Plus

I have added recommended to extensions that I simply can't live without. This list and descriptions are likely to change though. Firefox 1.5, here I come.

Firefox extension: Session Saver

It was december 2004 when I first said that "Firefox Rocks". And its still rocking. In this same post, I mentioned the need of "saving the last open windows on exit" feature that I so much loved in Opera. Finally there is an extension that does exactly what I want.

SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase it.

Though still in early phases, works pretty well. Make sure to install from the forum link that is given at the end of the page. Only issue is that I had to disable LiveHttpHeaders extension. I don't use that extension anyways.

Firefox market share up to 10%

Triumph of the Open Source :) ... While most open source software has been confined to the geeks till now, this killer app is actually reaching the masses. After all, its not everyday that a M$ product loses its 10% market share to an opensource freeware.

Tweaking Firefox

Just came across this link to the mozilla forum which discusses about various firefox tweaks for improving its performance.
If you find it too long and bloated to read, you are not alone, so did I. But hey, here is this really handy utility Firetune, that would do all this for you.
I just ran it and selected the "Fast Computer, Fast Connection" option for my office pc and my firefox is now noticeably faster.
I always like this line "Your favourite application just got better ;)"

Firefox rocks

A lot of people have said this before. Why am I saying this? Because of this setting.
Who is the default handler of URLs? The browser. So who should decide how an URL should be opened, the browser or the application which contains the url?
In my opinion, this right belongs to the browser. Now all the URLs I access open in the same way (New tab window in Firefox) no matter from which application I access them from.

I have been using alternate browsers since more than 2 years now and I have tried Opera v7 to 7.5 and Firefox 0.93. But it took this feature this feature of Firefox to make this browser my "default" browser.
Opera has this feature to save the last open windows on exit and open them again on browser restart. A killer feature, and I would love to have it in Firefox.