Mozilla | Technology Blog

Load Websites With Hotkeys In Firefox

December 25th, 2008

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Web browsers usually offer several ways on how to access websites quickly. Users can type in the url, assign keywords to urls or use their bookmarks to do that. Something that has not been on the radar yet is the ability to use hotkeys to launch websites. It is actually a very good question why no web browser is offering that feature yet. What’s easier and faster than opening a website with a keyboard shortcut?

Site Launcher is a Firefox add-on that adds this functionality to the web browser. It does that in two ways. The first is by proving access [via CTRL SPACE] to an overlay menu which displays the configured websites that can be launched from there. Each website is assigned a single key on the keyboard which has to be pressed to launch it.

The second method [via ALT SHIFT KEY] is there for keyboard junkies who prefer to press one hotkey for the same effect. Adding websites to the Firefox extension is easy. It is possible to open the Site Launcher Manager right away and add websites manually or add websites directly when they are loaded in the active tab.

It is furthermore possible to change the default hotkeys if other combinations suite you better.

Page Bookmarks

December 15th, 2008

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Bookmarks are references to websites that are stored on a computer system. They are usually stored in a web browser to make it easier to open a website at a later time again. They also aid the user by storing the relevant information like the url so that those do not have to be remembered by the user.

A page is usually displayed from the top on which is problematic on very long pages. Maybe the relevant information are stored somewhere in the middle instead of the beginning. It could also be that you were not able to work yourself through all of the page and bookmarked the page to continue reading at a later time. You would need to scroll and search for the place where you stopped in both scenarios.

Page Bookmarks aid Firefox users by providing the means to save a bookmark that does not only remember the url of the page but also the position of the scroll bar on the page. All functions are available through the right-click context menu. Whenever you want to save the position simply right-click that page and select the Page Bookmarks entry from the menu. The extension does not only save the position of the website but also the zoom level which is great for users who regularly zoom in and out of websites.

Display Timezones In Thunderbird

December 13th, 2008

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If you grow up with the 24-hour system you will have troubles with the 12-hour am/pm system. Add to that the various timezones and you are up for lots of confusion. If you regularly correspond with people from all over the world you should better know their timezone and how it differs from yours. This can be helpful before sending an emergency mail to your system administrator or starting a call to someone only to find out that it is deep at night over there.

FoxClocks can help by displaying various timezones in the status bar of Thunderbird. By default the time for the UK, US Pacific, Hongkong and GMT / UTC are displayed. Thankfully though the zones can be removed and others added if you need different timezones. You can perform a search for a city or country or pick one from the list.

The default format to display the time is Location: Day Time. This can be changed in the options to include additional information such as the date. There is also the possibility to move the timezones from the status bar to its own toolbar so that the information can also be displayed in the top toolbars of Thunderbird.

Open Random Website In Firefox

December 1st, 2008

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Are you feeling bored right now? Don’t know what to do? If you want to spend time on the Internet but don’t know where you might let fate decide instead. Random Site is a Firefox add-on that opens a random page in the currently active tab in Firefox.

It takes those pages from Google Search History. It’s a service by Google that is recording the web activities of a logged in user. To be honest I have no idea how the random pages are fetched only that they are not necessarily the pages that you visited previously. A quick test with the test search lead to Engadget, BoingBoing and Youtube.

The random site add-on is powered by a small button that has to be moved to one of the Firefox toolbars. This is done with a right-click on blank space of a toolbar and the selection of Customize from the menu.

Fasterfox Lite

October 30th, 2008

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Fasterfox is a controversial Firefox add-on mainly because of its prefetching setting that caused unnecessary load on web servers. By default Fasterfox was only using this techniques on webpages where the website developer explicitly enabled prefetching. Users could however change this to prefetch all static links. All ten static links of a website would be loaded even if the user would only click on one or none of them. This meant a huge bandwidth increase both for the user and web server.

Fasterfox Lite is Fasterfox without prefetching. The option is not available in the add-on’s interface. It does however come with the same set of options to speed up web browsing. It provides access to four presets and one custom setting.

The four presets range from default, which simply uses the standard Firefox settings, over optimized to turbo charged. The speed difference is visually noticeable. A timer can be enabled which displays the page loading time in the Firefox status bar. A right-click on the time provides access to clearing the Firefox Cache which is essential for testing purposes and to the options of the add-on to change the preset.

Access Google Calendar Without Leaving The Page

October 28th, 2008

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GCal Popup is an experimental Firefox extension that is compatible with Firefox 1.5 to 3.x. It integrates Google Calendar nicely into Firefox by providing a button in the Firefox status bar which, when clicked, will open Google Calendar as an overlay of the current website. The benefit of using Gcal Popup is that it is no longer required to open Google Calendar in its own tab or window to work with the online calendar.

Every add-on that is added to Mozilla is an experimental add-on at the beginning which basically means that only registered users may download and install the add-on. It is no indication of the quality of an add-on which is important to note.

Google Calendar will be displayed in an overlay that resembles a popup only that it is only visible in the tab where the button was pressed. The website below is shown at the edges and a click on that part will close Google Calendar again and display the website fully. A second click on the status bar button has the same effect.