Topic: FireFox and its Awesome Add-Ons

[ThePerm]

yeah, thats one name for it. Apparently its difficult for windows to remove when windows is running because its lodged into some important file.

[Shift Key]

i remember way back in the day when Grey Ninja told everyone to switch to Firefox than titled Firebird.

It was the shiznit then and (aside from a few bumps in the road) it still is now.

I get so pissed when i have to use IE. I even get mad when i see others use IE. Now I'm trying to switched to Linux on Grey's orders(and cus my comptuer is infected), but its not as seemless as switching from ie to firefox.

Do what I did whenever I had to cleanup a computer after IE had introduced crap (I don't care how innocent people claim to be when this happens, stop doing stupid things on the internet). Remove the icon from the desktop and the start menu. It'll cut down on 99% of IE usage. Make it hard to get to. In this day and age, if a website mandates IE usage, they deserve to be lambasted for it.

As for Linux, its not a silver bullet which will make all your computer problems go away. Its a completely different paradigm (sure, you can get window managers which can look like Windows/Mac but underneath its a very different beast) and it can pretty bloody daunting initially - it was when I first had a go at Red Hat 6 (I think) years ago.

My advice: Start on an easy Linux distro. Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE have nice installers and support both major window managers (so you can install both and jump between the two until you find the one you like). Install it on a spare system if you can so that you can get stuff done if things go bad. Pplay around with it, learn how to do things like installing software, performing updates, customising the window manager and apps. Learn the things that are important to Linux - the filesystem setup, the command prompt, configuring update repositories, boot process, I could go on and on about this.

Most importantly, find out about what breaks and find the fixes for it - Google is your friend in this regard, and Ubuntu has a huge community with tips that you can apply to most other distros. If you've got a computer that is 12 months old or so, you shouldn't encounter any hardware issues (Wireless cards and some graphics cards are sometimes not recognised or not supported, but this is improving compared to how its been in the past) Get it to a point where you're happy with it, and make sure you've noted the key things you needed to do (URLs, steps, whatever) to get to that point.

Then, once you're feeling confident, make a list of the things you need to install, nuke it and start fresh. You don't need to know how to compile a kernel, but once you get a hang of the basics you'll appreciate the control that some of the Linux distributions offer (Arch Linux is still my favourite, and I used that as my sole OS for about 18 months at one point, but its been a while since I've been on that bandwagon).

[ThePerm]

one of my biggest problems right now is there aren't compatible drivers for my motherboard and hard drive..they're sort of weird. Its not likely there will be either. I have Ubuntu, which is pretty easy to use. I would be fine with just using my flash drives for storage while i find a different windows solution, but it won't install to my flash drives. Now I found out about this feature on Ubuntu called Persistance and the idea behind it is that you can just boot off of a live cd and its supposed to allow you to save to a flash drive of your choice, but this feature has been broken for a few releases it worked up until the 6.x time or so and then mysteriously stopped working. Which is too bad. so every time I log in its like ground hogs day. I have to set up my wireless network each time(which mysteriously didnt work in the 64 bit version, but worked in the 32 bit version). Then i have to set up pidgin and the flash browser for firefox. Other than those problems i have no problem using the computer for minimal operations.

So today I decided to look up usb and read about usb 3.0....wow thats going to be big! 5 Gb/s bandwidth. Can you imagine if computers were setup with those internally as well as externally. I can just imagine device driver problems becoming a thing of the past. Also computers shrinking in size

[Plugabugz]

I'll agree with Shift Key on this one. I installed Ubuntu via Wubi last year; its installed in Windows (and hence removable by the windows control panel) and i've been using it interchangeably since then.

It makes it more play-about-able, coz if something goes wrong you can just uninstall the entire O/S.

[Shift Key]

one of my biggest problems right now is there aren't compatible drivers for my motherboard and hard drive..they're sort of weird. Its not likely there will be either.

Hard drives are pretty standard these days, so my gut feeling is that there's something funky on your mobo that is causing the issue. Got any specs on it to find out whether others are suffering from the problem?

Which is too bad. so every time I log in its like ground hogs day. I have to set up my wireless network each time(which mysteriously didnt work in the 64 bit version, but worked in the 32 bit version). Then i have to set up pidgin and the flash browser for firefox. Other than those problems i have no problem using the computer for minimal operations.

Ugh, how annoying. I'd be getting pretty pissed if I had to do that every damn time. Seems strange to have it remember some things (installed apps) but not configuration information. For anyone who is curious about what this involves, here's a quick guide (seriously, its that short) to do this with Ubuntu 8.10.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ubuntu-810-install-using-the-built-in-usb-installer/

Can you imagine if computers were setup with those internally as well as externally.

I smell a bottlenecks discussion. But that's for another day...

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Windows 98 SE + SeaMonkey

[ThePerm]

heres my motherboard
http://www.xfxforce.com/en-us/products/motherboards/NVIDIA%20GeForceseries/NVIDIA%20GeForce%208200.aspx
here is my Hard Drive
Maxtor STM3160815AS

notes: Wubi doesnt work for me

also, i noticed my hd is on sata4. Does it matter which port its on for linux? Should i unplug it out of 4 and put it on 1?

[Shift Key]

also, i noticed my hd is on sata4. Does it matter which port its on for linux? Should i unplug it out of 4 and put it on 1?

Not unless the installer is having issues with detecting your hard drive. Most modern motherboards are able to boot from hard drives in whatever order you like (rather than the order of the port numbers) so that fact that A is plugged into B shouldn't matter unless you're seeing something specific (like, no hard drives available).

As for the motherboard itself:
This guy had some issues with getting the graphics working

And I love how the mobo has "Up to 10 USA ports"...

[ThePerm]

if only computers were as standardized as consoles

[BlackNMild2k1]

I got a new add-on for you guys:
Tinrye: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8922

or you can just goto the website: www.tineye.com

It is a reverse image look up. See an image you like, but it has been edited/censored? put it in tineye to find the original pic.
its that simple

[BlackNMild2k1]

I don't know if its just FireFox or one of its many add-ons, but I just realized(about a week or so ago) that I can edit my own thread titles without ever entering the thread. I just double click on the gray area(that not a link into the thread) and it lets me type in whatever I want.
Just wondering if anybody else has discovered that?

[bustin98]

AJAX is great, isn`t it? It works for pretty much any browser.

[BeautifulShy]

So I added Auto pager to my Firefox browser and it is great.

I have a question though.Can you add sites that you want to use Auto Pager on.
If so how do you do so?

[BlackNMild2k1]

Most sites I've used have all been added, and more sites get added all the time.
But you can check the official site (the one that loads when it updates AutoPager) and check to see if you can suggest things.

Internet Forum surfing has never been easier with Auto Pager and I find it inconvenient to have to manually click to the next page.
Sometimes I forget what page I'm on since it just continually scrolls down to the last one. Its great.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Firefox 3.5 is now out!

What’s New in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

    * Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
    * Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
    * Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
    * Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
    * The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
    * Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
    * Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
    * Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/releasenotes/

They also added a "new tab" button on the tab bar (like IE) & support for open video formats so that you don't need to d/l a plug-in.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

If FireFox got some tweaks, that means SEAMONKEY is due for some EVOLUTION.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Found another good add-on.

People that want maximum screen real estate without having to put your window to full screen can use
Pimpoflage - automatically hides the status bar at the bottom of the screen until you hover over a link or it's otherwise has something to show. You can also make it have the top bar disappear until you put the mouse up there to make it visible again.

So far its really nice & works great, but takes a lil getting used to (you can't click a link that is where a hidden bar will pop up)

[BlackNMild2k1]

I got a question for all the advanced FireFox users out there.

I at one point installed an app (which I thought was pimpoflage or menu editor) that allowed me to rearrange my entire FireFox Menu bar so that I could put the "File Edit View Etc Etc" on the right side of the same bar as the quick link bookmark icons.

Does anyone know an App that does that?

[TheBlackCat]

Toolbar Buttons has most of the menus, as well as a ton of other buttons.  If it has too many buttons, you can also use Custom Toolbar Buttons, which allows you to install an extension that only has the toolbar buttons you want (I don't know if it properly handles updates, though). 

The only button this lacks currently, as best as I can tell, is a button for the History menu (strangely).  If you want that you can use Personal Menu, which provides a single button for all menus as well as a history button and bookmarks button.