Tab preview for Firefox in Windows 7

By Henning Eiben in Software 0 Comment

While the first beta of Firefox 3.6 did not offer the tab-preview for Windows 7 (you know, those little previews when you hover over running programs in your taskbar, which allow switching direct to a certain tab within Firefox), this feature was removed in the third beta. 🙁

Actually, this feature wasn’t really removed but rather just disabled. In order to re-active this feature you have to open the advanced settings (about:config) and then just enable browser.taskbar.previews.enable.

If you even want to be able to cycle through the browser tabs using [CTRL]+[Tab] you have to enable browser.ctrlTab.previews (you might have to create this settig if it does not yet exist) as well.

Boost Firefox performance

By Henning Eiben in Software 0 Comment

Since version 3.x Firefox is using SQLite-databases to store it’s interal stuff like history, awsome-bar etc. Because the database can get fragmented over time, you might want to do some cleanup once in a while.

To do so, just open up Tools\Error-Console and evaluate this statemant:

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

This should freeze the UI for a couple of seconds, but after that you’re all set to go.

The next level of FireFox

By Henning Eiben in Internet, Software 0 Comment

So I upgraded recently to the current beta of FireFox (which makes this FireFox 3.1 beta2). Everythings looks really cool, except that you will have to tweak your profile a little to get all the nice extensions working, which are not yeat aware of FF 3.1.

This is just like the move to FF 3.0 … so I did what I already knew about twiggeling FF for extensions.

But still one extensions is just not “behaiving”. That is the Tab Mix Plus extension 0.3.7.3. But fortunatly the new dev-build 0.3.7.4 fixes this issue.

YSlow?

By Henning Eiben in Internet, Programming 0 Comment

This is quite a common question – YSlow? So this nifty Firefox plugin can help to analyze how to improve the client/user experience of web-applications. It acutally integrates into Firebug and gives you some hints on what you might want to consider to improve your site.

Although this is nothing complete new, but these are things we might tend to forget from time to time.

Upgrading to Firefox 3 – and keep your loved extensions

By Henning Eiben in Internet 0 Comment

After doing the long awaited upgrade to Firefox 3.0 I realized, that most of extensions would no longer work.

Of course, you might say, they are not compatible with FF3 … that’s true, but does that mean, I have to say goodbye to long trusted fellows? No!

There is a tweak for Firefox, which will allow to keep those extensions:

  • Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
  • Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
  • Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
  • Restart Firefox.

Well, this doesn’t make all extensions available in FF3, but at least you can get extensions to work which have been disabled because of the newly introduced security features of FF3.