Interrupt19

9 of The Best New Tips, Tricks and Hacks for Firefox 3

Photo courtesy of Mozilla

I was one of the 8 million who downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. While I like it much better than Firefox 2, there’s a few things that need some work. That said, here are nine of the best Firefox 3 hacks that I’ve found on the net:

Turn off the smart location bar:

I really don’t like this feature. I also think its annoying the Mozilla didn’t program in a checkbox within the Preferences to turn this off. However, knowing that there’s a hidden advanced configuration area, I figured there must be some way to turn this off. Turns out there is.. Thanks to PCMech.com, here are the instructions to turn it off:
PCMech.com.

View PDFs within Firefox 3:

Since Adobe’s browser plugin only works within Safari, download the Firefox-Mac-PDF plugin from GoogleCode and install. Taking advantage of OS X’s built in PDF rendering, it will view PDFs inline, just like Safari. Requires 10.4 (Tiger) and up. Credit to Mac OSX Hints

Proper rendering of photos with embedded profiles:

Firefox has the ability to render photos according to their embedded ICC profiles. This solves the little problem of photos looking slightly different compared to other browsers. This feature is turned off by default, most likely because enabling this will cause Firefox to take a performance hit. If this is something important to you, here’s two methods to enable Firefox 3’s embedded profile rendering:
Firefox 3 supports colour managed web browsing.

Selecting Multiple Lines of Text:

Firefox 3 allows you to select multiple lines of text. This feature is really something that I enjoy. All you have to do is select something, hold down the Control Key and select the next portion of text additionally. Repeat for more text if needed. To see this in action, visit the following screencast at labnol.org.

Viewing Privacy and Security Information for Individual Sites:

With Phishing and forgery attempts running rampant on the web, Firefox 3 allows you to check out any websites privacy and security information. Look at the location bar at the top and click on the site’s icon image to the left of where you can type. (Next to the icon of the House) Courtesy of Watching The Net.

Moving Saved Passwords from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3:

Looks like the Ultimate Geek Girl ran into trouble with her saved passwords during her upgrade from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. Read her instructions of how to fix this here.
Note: Her instructions are for PC. Firefox 3 on OS X stores the passwords file here:
Macintosh HD/Users/(username)/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/(xxxxxxx).default/signons3.txt

Moving/Backing up Saved Bookmarks:

Another change within Firefox 3 is the handling of bookmarks. They used to be located in a file called “bookmarks.html”. Now they are located in a file called: places.sqlite. If you need to back up or move your bookmarks, this is the file to copy. In OS X, it is located in the following folder:
Macintosh HD/Users/(username)/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/(xxxxxxx).default/places.sqlite

When you wish to restore your bookmarks, make sure to run Firefox 3 first, then copy the places.sqlite file into the profile’s directory.

Five extensions you won’t need:

Some of the new features in Firefox 3 take the place of common extensions we needed back in the days of Firefox 2. Here’s a list of five of them, courtesy of lifehacker.com.

Beginner’s Guide to Firefox 3’s Key Commands:

Our final tip is one for beginners and more advanced users alike. Its a nice page at mozilla-europe.org which highlights some of the more useful Key Commands available in Firefox 3. You may visit the page here: Mozilla Europe: Tips and Tricks

Edit: Re-posted because the original was inadvertently cut short.. I’m not exactly sure what happened or why it did, but its fixed now..