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Firefox!
Without a doubt, Firefox can make web browsing far more efficient, easy, and fun. If you don't have it, click the above button to get it now. There are the obvious benefits of Firefox, including popup blocking and tabbed browsing, that has been mentioned by everyone everywhere. But there are a lot of further tweaks you can also do to make your internet experience even better.
~~ Preferences : Edit menu -> Preferences
~~ Configuration : Type about:config in the address bar
~~ Shortcuts : Smart Keywords for quick searching
~~ Extensions : External add-ons
~~ Layout : Appearance matters
- Privacy -> Cookies: I have this set to not allow cookies by default, and whitelist sites I know are clean (see extensions for a management tool). A less harsh restriction I would recommend is to allow cookies, for originating site only, until you close Firefox.
- Web Features -> Block Popup Windows: obviously yes.
- Web Features -> Enable Java: No. Java is rarely useful. I can turn it on in individual cases.
- Web Features -> Enable Javascript: Yes, but go through the advanced menu and deselect everything except "Change images". None of the other options have ever been used for good.
- Advanced -> Accessibility: Select "Begin finding when you begin typing". See config section for lookahead find info.
- Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing: Open links from other applications in a new tab in the most recent window
- Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing: Force links that open new windows to open in a new tab
- Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing: Hide tab bar when only one...
- Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing: Select new tabs opened from bookmarks or history, but NOT from links.
- Lookahead find: This is crucial if you want to minimize mouse use. When you want to follow a link on a page, you start typing the text of the link until the right one gets highlighted and press enter. Ctrl+G cycles through the links with your typed text. Incidentally, if you want to find non-link text on the page, just type '/' and your search string, again with Ctrl+G cycling.
- accessibility.typeaheadfind = true
- accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly = true
- accessibility.typeaheadfind.flashbar = 0
- accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout = 1000
- Speeding up requests: I'm almost always on a nice fat broadband connection, so I can speed up network actions.
- network.http.max-connections = 200
- network.http.max-connections-per-server = 100
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy = 50
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 10
- network.http.pipelining = true
- network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 100
Use them! Basically, to each bookmark you can assign a "keyword", which is a shortcut you can type in the address bar to mean that bookmark. However, a literal "%s" in the bookmark link will expand to whatever you type after the keyword. Thus you can use it to make search shortcuts. That is, I can type "g foobar" to search google for the word "foobar", or "i Beauty and the Geek" to search IMDB for the phrase "Beauty and the Geek". My smart shortcuts, which you can import into your own bookmarks, are:
- gl : Google "I'm feeling Lucky" search
- g : Google search
- p : Search www.php.net function list
- m : Search .mit.edu pages
- fe : Translate a french phrase into english
- d : Dictionary lookup
- t : Thesaurus lookup
- i : IMDB search
- mw : Wolfram's Mathworld search
- gg : Google glossary
- gly : Google lyric search
- wa : Hindi-English dictionary
- r : RPMfind search
- ml : Open Mailinator mailbox
- b : Search .berkeley.edu pages
- dk : Digikey part search
- qp : Quant-ph article search
- wu : Weather undeground zip code search
- sw : Wolfram's Scienceworld search
- w : Wikipedia search
Coming soon...
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