Running Multiple Versions of Firefox on Windows

I hope this is a trivial problem and googling it around gave me no trivial solution

Faced by many web-developers around the world, this context switching issue is definitely a time-sucker ! You lose the session, the cookies, the password, the settings, the plugins and a lot more than that, the time.

Coming to solution, I use portable firefox personally (if you don’t know what this, check out ProtableApps).

To run parallel firefox versions you just need to make a few changes in the configuration.

1. Goto folder \Other\Source and copy FirefoxPortable.ini to your firefox portable root, where the FireFoxPortable.exe is located.

2. Open the file in editor and change the following line:

AllowMultipleInstances=true

(Basically we are allowing multiple instances of FireFox)

PS1: If you have installed both version of firefox as portable you need to make changes in both the installations. (Simply copy the same FirefoxPortable.ini to other folder.)

Caret browsing in Firefox

Well I really don’t know If this is really a good topic for a post, but I feel it’s really worth so here it is.

How many times we have wanted that we could use our keyboard to select some text from a webpage instead of mouse. Wouldn’t it be better if you could select some text using up-down and shift and could copy the selected part using just Ctrl+C and paste it using Ctrl+V ?

Well I really needed something like this but since it wasn’t too important to talk about so kept it like a lurking desire.

Enter the Caret Browsing feature (particularly in FF, since I am not using IE now), just press F7 and it prompt you that F7 toggles Caret Browsing, click Yes and here you go.

Just click your mouse pointer once inside your webpage and you could do whatever we discussed above.

Try it !

Real performance enhancing addons for Firefox

Well there are many addons for the already power packed browser Firefox, but installing to many of them or installing heavy addons that take up huge system resources prove to be of no use at all.

I faced such useless addons in past and I always wished that I could have a standard set of addons that I could install without even thinking once.

So here after a bit of research I got my primitive list of addons, that actually do what they intended to do without taking much of resources and add boastful of utility to the browser.

So here’s the list :

1. del.icio.us Bookmarks – to access and add your bookmarks from browser.
2. PDF Download – to get a nice menu while opening PDF, instead of browser hanging.
3. StumbleUpon – to explore really good stuff from the internet.
4. Firebug – the messiah of web development, normal users can skip this.
5. Adblock Plus – a must, my advice : don’t ever use firefox without it !
6. Web Developer – one more tool for developers, normal users can skip this.

Hope I will be increasing the list shortly !
~rd

Tab Clicking Options for Firefox and Flock

One of the major drawback that I felt while using Firefox was unavailability of double click on the Tab bar.

As it worked in IE, that when you double click on a tab it automatically closes it and double clicking anywhere on the empty space in tab bar opens a new tab.

This feature proves to be very handy while browsing and users can very easily close or open new windows without looking at the tiny ‘x’ that allows us to close the tab.

So here I found a nice tiny add-on for Firefox and Flock that allows us to do the same.

See Tab Clicking Options for use with Firefox.

See superT for use with Flock.

Configuring these addons is very easy, you just have to set your favorite shortcut to do the desired action.

Give it a try !

~rd