Live bookmarks

[francis]

And...I'm back!

Thanks for the emails (David - hope that graphic didn't take too long to do :D ) and notes (Tom: the crit sheet turned up). As of today I'm off the painkillers and am just mooching around the flat. Don't ever have a hernia - they're painful as hell.

Whilst I was "off", Mozilla released a preview version of Firefox 1.0 with Live Bookmarks. This, I believe, is a better feature than tabbed browsing (only just), find as you type (http://www.mozilla.org/access/type-ahead/) and other numerous things. Live bookmarks (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/live-bookmarks.html) finally make RSS feeds into something other than a "ooh, look what I can do" nerd feature. Go to a site that has an RSS feed (eg, the BBC's news site) and a small RSS badge will appear on the bottom right of the browser chrome. Click on that and you can add the RSS feed to Firefox as a special kind of favourite. Firefox then reeds the RSS feed and creates favourites on the fly to each news story (or whatever the link in the feed is). As they're 'live bookmarks', the feed gets updated automatically or, by right-clicking and selecting 'update' you can force an update.

Live bookmarks make it possible to check news headlines, blog entries and anything else without actually visiting the site. So far this isn't in the latest build of Moz (but, strangely, it is in Thunderbird) - hopefully it will be soon or I might be forced to change.

Another nice touch is the FF's address bar changes colour and adds a padlock symbol when in an HTTPS zone. Nothing to do with Live Bookmarks, but a nice touch.

[Phil]

Nice 'Find in this page' function, too. Hit ctrl-f to get a useful little find text toolbar at the bottom.

(Safari doesn't quite have this, but when you apple-F, the default search string is what you've just put into the google search field, which is a nice touch, too)

[francis]

Yeah, although I still prefer the find as you type feature. I really hope they don't drop that in favour of the new bar - it's not particularly obvious as it sits at the bottom of the screen unlike IE, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Dreamweaver etc etc etc. If the bar can be dragged off the bottom and the browser remembers its last position on close (a la Dreamweaver MX versions), that would be better.

[francis]

I was playing with FF today and wondering if there was something similar to Mozilla's "tabs on drugs" Multizilla extension. And behold, there is! Have a look at tabbrowser extensions (http://www.tucsonpathology.com/blogs/index.php) - it gives loads of new options for tabbed browsing including the critical (for me anyway) "duplicate tab" function. A very nice feature is the ability to scroll through tabs by putting the mouse over a tab and scrolling the wheel. Also helpful is an 'undo closed tab' link just in case you closed something by mistake. Oh, and you can drag and drop tabs from left to right. And change the colour of tabs. And set specific permissions on a tab-by-tab basis. And you can bookmark groups of tabs (very handy for research purposes). Appetite whetted, anyone?

For me, one of FF's most irritating features is/was doing a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search when I entered a search term into the address bar and hit the Go button. But a quick look on the Firefox tips and tricks site (http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html) shows how to change this so that typing in a search term now performs a regular search. This involves changing some app files, so so you'll need these (http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#beh_search) instructions and probably this (http://texturizer.net/firefox/edit.html#user) page to see how to do it. But it's easy to do and works like a charm. Oh, and have a look at Mycroft (http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html) for additions to the search bar on the right of FF. I've just added Wikipedia, Amazon.co.uk and HMV.co.uk, but there are (literally) hundreds of others to choose from.

Oh, and I found an alternative RSS feed reader (http://sage.mozdev.org/) for FF as well. At this rate I'll be switching in a few weeks...