My Firefox Add-ons

A sneak peek at the add-ons I use in my default Firefox setup at home,

I also run another profile for website management that uses a slightly different set. Combined, you can find all my fav add-ons in my Add-ons Collection over at mozilla.org.

Google Transit comes to Wellington

In a New Zealand first, Wellington’s public transport info is now available in Google Maps letting you plan trips via bus and train with Google’s Transit service. To test it out, I gave it a simple trip from home to Molly Malones on Courtenay Place and it presented an interesting solution first up,

The recommendation (to get me to town at the earliest time possible) was to take a bus the couple of hundred metres to the end of the street, walk down to the airport, then jump on the Airport Flyer to town. The second option was to wait 20 minutes and get a direct bus to town arriving 15 minutes after the first option. Think I’ll stick to number 2!

This type of public transport trip planning was already available in Wellington via the metlink website, but Google’s implementation is far superior in that you can enter business and place names, not just streets or addresses as with the metlink journey planner.

The real benefit however, is likely to be for Google Maps users on mobile phones. Google’s services work particularly well on cellphones (esp “smart” phones) and this will be a boon for anyone out and about in town (even those enjoying a beer at Molly’s) wondering about public transport options…

So props to Greater Wellington and Google for further improving an already useful service!

Damn squirrel

Just when you thought you were getting a nice holiday snap, this little critter jumps into the photo and steals the limelight,

lol

Dubbed “Crasher Squirrel”, the little guy popped up into the photo of a couple of tourists in Canada and he’s now the latest viral fad on the internet, appearing in dozens of places!

xkcd on gaming

A couple of favourite xkcd webcomics on gaming.

An oldie, but a goodie! – I’m sure many a gamer has been here…

Flash Games

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and for those of us slow to get around to playing and completing games (yes I’ve been here!)

Cutting Edge

Firefox 3.5 – likes and tweaks

Gotta say I’m loving Firefox 3.5 – it’s stable, fast, not IE(!) and simply works.

Here’s my top five favourite new features,

1. Clickable links in view > page source (ctrl+u)
   This is great for anyone who frequently dives into a page’s code. Want to know how that site you’re viewing implemented it’s style sheet? No problem. View the page source, look for the style sheet link, click it and you’re viewing the CSS in source view. Nice.
2. Tab tearing
   Previously I’ve used add-ons to enable something like this, but no more with tab tearing built-in. This feature lets you drag a tab out of your current window to have that tab spawn a new window. Great if you want to quickly refer to two open tabs/pages at once side by side.
3. Smarter “AwesomeBar”
   Firefox’s already super useful location bar, aka the “AwesomeBar”, just got even more awesome. You can now search smarter via new operators. Use ^ to search only history, * to search your bookmarks only, and + to search your tags.
4. Private Browsing
   Also dubbed “porn mode”, Private Browsing is just that – a mode you can enter which keeps your session private – meaning no data for the session will be cached or saved to disk (eg cookies, history, search, passwords). Great if you share a computer and want to do some secret shopping for your significant other… (or yourself!)
5. Under-the-hood: Speed and Standards
   A new engine called Tracemonkey makes rendering Javascript faster and changes to database querying make for speedier access to your history and bookmarks. Other changes behind the scenes include more standards support including native audio and video as defined in the HTML5 spec. Anything that improves speed and standards support get a big thumbs up from me.

And the Mozilla Links blog details some more new features in their All about Firefox 3.5 post.

Of course Firefox isn’t perfect for my needs, but with my set of add-ons it almost is! Beyond those add-ons, read on for some other tweaks I make to fresh installs of Firefox…

No love for Internet Explorer 6

…and rightly so!

It’s high time the world ditched the 8-year old IE6 for good IMHO – afterall it’s slow, notoriously bad for security and just plain horrible at rendering modern web standards.

Here’s a look at how a few “social” sites are encouraging IE6 users to upgrade to something (anything!) better,

Twitter posts a simple message “There’s a better way to browse the web!” and goes on to recommend you upgrade to the latest version of IE (pity they didn’t recommend upgrading to Firefox!)

Facebook suggests “you may want to upgrade” since “Facebook will work better for you if you upgrade or switch to another browser“. In addition to suggesting IE8, they also post links to switch to Firefox, Safari or Flock.

YouTube has by far the most compelling upgrade message in stating “we will be phasing out support for your browser soon” – in other words if you want to keep using the site, ditch IE6 now! Not surprisingly they list Chrome first up, followed by IE8 and Firefox 3.5.

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So there you go, three of the biggest (if not the biggest three) social network sites have spoken. If you’re still using IE6, shame on you and upgrade now!

Note: no PC’s were harmed in obtaining these screenshots. These were snapped on XP running safely sandboxed in a virtual machine – I’m a Firefox fanboy afterall!