11 steps to better browsing

There are a few Firefox tools I've come to depend on so much that I well up with anxiety at the thought of losing them. Others are just nice or handy. I thought I'd share for those who haven't already come across them.

#1 - Form Recovery

Have you ever spent half an hour composing a brilliant comment (or any other web form content), only to hit the wrong button and lose it entirely? It's even worse when it's the browser's fault. Even if this hasn't happened to you (and I find that hard to believe), there's no reason for you to not install this form recovery plug-in for Firefox as insurance for the future.

True, it raises some privacy concerns when anyone using your computer can pull up form data you've entered, but the security options provide a range of solutions, and I'm sure there's one you can live with.

#2 - Keyword searches

This is another crucial tool that I was ignorant of for too long. In Firefox, any time you're confronted with a search box, you can right-click it and select "Add a keyword for this search". The image here shows how you'd do it for quick Wikipedia searches, for example.

A dialog will pop up to add the keyword. You'll notice it's stored as a bookmark. The name you give it doesn't matter so much. I store all my keywords in a separate subfolder, but that doesn't matter much either. Make sure to put something in the "keyword" box, though. I use wp for Wikipedia. Then you can do quick Wikipedia searches by going to your browser's location bar (that's the one with the URL, get there quickly by hitting Ctrl+L) and type, for example, "wp molasses flood" to learn about the Boston molasses disaster of 1919.

I've got a whole pile of these set up. dc to look up words in the dictionary, th for thesaurus, of course, yt for youtube videos, gm to look up addresses in Google Maps, kj to look up things i'd like to buy off kijiji, wpl to search for books in the Winnipeg Public Library, mec to look up products sold at Mountain Equipment Co-op, gg for a straight up Google search, and on and on.

If you want to get fancier (this is probably not for the faint of heart) you can also set up keywords for searches that take multiple search inputs, no search inputs, or append default data to your search terms. I have a we keyword that brings up the current weather (no search terms needed). For searches that take multiple inputs, you can construct a URL for the keyword using the token %s where you want your search terms put in, and default values for the other terms.

If you want to get really fancy, you can actually set up keyword searches that take two user-specified inputs. For example, I often use the City of Winnipeg Assessment site to look up properties. Sometimes because I care about the assessment, but more often because they also offer maps that give you a much better idea of where a specific building is located than Google Maps. It takes two inputs, a street number and a street name, so I wrote a wrapper php script that accepts one input, breaks it into words, uses the first as the street number, the second as the street name, and throws the rest away. I then redirects you to the Assessment search result using those inputs. Feel free to try it out and use it as a keyword at the link above.

#3 - Download statusbar

Tired of that cumbersome Firefox downloads window? The download statusbar add-on unobtrusively keeps all of your downloads in sight at the bottom of your browser window.

#4 - AdBlock plus

The best way to eliminate annoying ads & pop-ups is AdBlock plus. If you want you can get rid of Google's text ads, a.k.a. "AdWords", also.

#5 - Canadian English Dictionary

It never hurts to have a spell checker that actually works properly. Here's the Canadian English Dictionary add-on.

#6 - HTTPS everywhere

The fabulous Electronic Frontier Foundation came out with the HTTPS everywhere add-on earlier this year. It's basically a privacy thing. Many folks aren't aware of how easy it is to "listen in" to what others are doing on the internet. In this age of widespread warrantless and illegal wiretapping, that's cause for concern for many people. HTTPS everywhere is basically a dead simple way to encode your web communication with whatever websites allow it. A snoop could still easily see which web sites you were connecting to, and how much information was being transferred, but all of the contents of the information being sent would be scrambled.

In practice, the add-on doesn't even do much but redirect you to, for example, encrypted.google.com, the encoded version of Google, whenever you try to communicate with its normal site at google.com.

#7 - Googlesharing

If you're worried about the power Google is accumulating and its ability to track and store your personal information, the Googlesharing add-on may be for you. It tries to hide your information and activities from Google, basically by re-routing it through a deluge of accounts so it's impossible for Google to track who's doing what. It doesn't interfere with your normal use of Google. IIRC, it's pretty limited, since it doesn't work when you're logged into a Google account.

#8 - URL fixer

This add-on tries to fix common typos you might make, like entering .cmo instead of .com, for example.

#9 - Stylish

Stylish lets you re-style web pages through their CSS code, which I would probably never do myself, but you can also install re-stylings other people have come up with. The one that's helpful for me is getting rid of an annoying little "2 users liked this" box they added into every item in Google Reader a year or two back that was driving me crazy.

#10 - Firebug

If you do any work with website CSS you can't live without Firebug.

#11 - Inline MP3 player

I recently came across this script that adds an mp3 player into your browser any time a link to an mp3 appears, so you can just hit play instead of having to download files and open them in some player every time you want to listen to something. To use it you need to have a Firefox add-on that allows custom scripts called Greasemonkey installed.