Well since I am a little partial to using Notepad++ for just about everything these days looks like with a few easy steps you can change the default source editor in Firefox to use Notepad++ It is very simple:
Go to about:config
Search for “view_source.editor.external”
Change this value to “true”
Search for “view_source.editor.path”
Change this to the path of your editor “C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe”
So last night I was bored and decided to redo my entire website (again). I just changed the theme about a week ago, but the more I dug into it the less I liked it and decided I would spend a little more time redoing my blog. After picking a theme I put it on a local copy of WordPress and started banging away. I started changing header images and fixing CSS issues with AJAX overlaps and image overlaps and fixing up a few other issues I noticed. This is usually pretty typical for themes I have found in the past. You get what you paid for and because all these themes are free I guess that would make sense.
One of my co-workers turned me onto Firebug which is a Firefox plugin that reads the CSS and breaks it out into a tree structure so you can see what is really going on behind the scenes with formatting. This application saved me probably about 2 days of frustration searching through the CSS and the PHP files trying to find the correct classes and div’s to edit to make it look how I want it to. The program allows you to edit the CSS on the spot so you can see if what you thinking works…this is great for things like spacing or overflow or text size. This application is a must have for any web developer or anyone who likes to tweak their WordPress themes to get the most out of them.
So my favorite skin for gmail has finally completed and released their redesign for greader. I am a big fan of it and it looks really clean. Looks like for now you have to manually update the plugin for Firefox and then update the styles after that but the end result is very nice.
Below are three options on how to change FireFox’s new Awesome Bar settings. Personally I love the new URL bar and actually use bookmarks and tags now and thanks to Foxmarks all my computers have the same bookmarks. However in the case of my girlfriend she didn’t like the new feature so below are your options if you fall in the same boat:
Option A: Disable autocomplete drop-down entirely
Use this if you don’t want Firefox to display any kind of suggestions in the Address Bar be they from your browsing history or from saved bookmarks.
Open the about:config page and set the value of browser.urlbar.maxRichResults as –1. Restart Firefox and your Firefox 3 address bar will behave just like that of Firefox 2.
Option B: See web addresses that you have typed
In this option, the drop-drop remains enabled but it will only suggest website addresses / URLs that you have previously typed in the location bar.
Open about:config and set the value of browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped to False. Now none of the entries from your browser history or bookmarks will appear in the ‘awesome’ address bar.
Option C: Remove Bookmarks Completely from Address Bar
This is probably the option you are looking for. Firefox 3 uses the Frecency score to determine sites that should appear in the drop-down. We can set frecency value for bookmarks to zero and thus they won’t appear in the location bar.
Open the about:config page, and set value of places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus to zero.
Setting places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus to 0 will prevent bookmarks from appearing that you have never visited while places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus will prevent display of bookmarks that you have visited since the last time you cleared private data in Firefox.
Well finally the add-on people are starting to catch up to the latest release of Firefox so I have been able to switch over fully. One word comes to mind when reviewing this new version of Firefox…FAST. It is much faster and seems to take a much smaller memory imprint on my computer than the previous version. It still looks like it is missing spell check and a few little bugs here and there but RC2 is on the horizon for the near future and hopefully a GA release by the end of this month.
This application is well amazing! It installs as a little application on your toolbar and is always running when you run Windows. You can set it up to automatically load when Windows does. This little guy finally manages to keep Firefox from hoarding all your memory. It does slow down FF a little but nothing that is too bad and it is worth the memory savings. Lately I have been noticing that FF has been taking up on average 445MB of ram on my computer. After this application is running it shrinks FF down to an amazing 1K. I am sold!
I know the FF3 is supposed to solve this issue and I have listed a few fixes before. But until FF3 is in a stable state or at least supports all my plugin’s this will have to do.
I have added a few things to my Firefox lately, so here are some of the icons that are sitting on the toolbar
Stylish. This plugin works very similarly to Grease Monkey, I am using this right now because they have an awesome redesign for Gmail which allows me to use Gtalk and AIM from work through Gtalk.
Meebo. This one adds little notifications (similar to guifications for PIDGIN) to Firefox for Meebo which makes Meebo just that much better, this way you know when you get IM’s regardless if you are focused on Firefox or not.
IE Tab. nothing new been using this one for a while
Foxmarks. This one is amazing because it syncs all my computers Firefox’s bookmarks making bookmarks actually something that I use.
Fast Video Download. This allows you to download any YouTube video with the click of a button. It downloads the file a .FLV
Autocopy. Nothing new here have been using this one for a while.
I have finally found a new theme that I can live with. This one is very clean and nice to use. I made some very very small tweaks to userChrome.css to fix a few things but other than that this is a great new look for Firefox.
Download: iAqua
As with Google Reader there is a plugin for making Gmail look better and function better as well. It is called Better Gmail 2. Today I also found an application called Gmail Redesigned which gives you a nice skin to throw onto Gmail. I don’t use Gmail a lot as I usually use Yahoo to do my web mailing but one thing Gmail does do is it allows me to spoof the email I am sending from so I can email from my school email account straight from Google. This is a lot easier then logging into my school email account. Lifehacker says that they are going to update Better Gmail soon so that it has skins but until then using Stylish and this script Gmail is much prettier now!
This plugin is one of the best plugin’s I am using for Firefox these days. This one fixes it so that little screen that pops up after you click an RSS feed link that lets you choose Google reader or iGoogle goes away and defaults to Google Reader. It also allows you to skin the reader with a few different choices. I am a fan of the OSX theme (yes I hate Macs but their color schemes are usually the best) this theme is very clean and gives Google Reader a new look. Also it allows you open the link in the RSS feed right into the browser making it much cleaner and easier to use.
The code is written by our good friends over at Lifehacker, I also like it because I am not a big fan of using Grease Monkey scripts and that used to be the only way to change the look of Google Reader but now this is just a stand alone plugin. Click the picture to get the plugin.
