8 steps to my personal Firefox setup for productivity
I need to give you a bit a background so you can see what my priorities are when setting up my favorite browser. I am a computer programmer that deals with web stuff as well as back-end stuff. I am NOT a designer in general, mostly a coder. I am running Firefox 3 beta 5 (not RC1 yet) since it is compatible with almost all of my extensions.
Step 1: My Theme
NASA Night Launch - This has little effect on my productivity but I get asked about this more than anything else. I like the cool blackness and the fact that this theme is Firefox 3 compatible.
Step 2: Get Extensions
Adblock Filterset.G Updater - Update ad killer- Adblock Plus - Kill ads
- All-in-One Sidebar - Really, really slick sidebar
- Delicious Bookmarks - I use del.icio.us for bookmarking everything so having this is a must. I basically switched to FF3 once this extension was compatible.
- DOM Inspector - For all those tricky userChrome.css questions you give me ;)
- Firebug 1.2 Beta - In case you haven’t heard there is a new beta with some more cool features!
- Firecookie 0.5beta - Firebug extension that is now essential for cookie debugging
- FireGestures - Simple mouse gestures extension. Compatible with FF3 unlike many others
- Fission - Not a productivity enhancer, just cool to put my progress bar behind my address bar like Safari
- Keyconfig - Configure everything to be a simple key command away! OK, you got me, the latest keyconfig is not compatible with FF3b5. Wait, what’s this I made for you?
- Live HTTP Headers - Analyze traffic. Useful to see exactly what is being POSTed and where.
- Web Developer - Another staple for anyone doing web development work.
- XUL/Migemo - Enhances search by allowing regex search with nice highlighting. Way better than I can describe in this one-liner.
- YSlow - Web performance analytics tool that works through Firebug. Another must-have.
I also plan on using this extension when they are compatible with Firefox 3:
- Google Browser Sync - Sync history, bookmarks, cookies, etc. across my many Firefox instances.
Step 3: Menu & Interface Customization
I right click and customize my top toolbar by dragging the back, forward, etc. buttons to the top, as well as the address bar and the search bar. I remove pretty much everything else and am left with only the Menu Bar and the Web Developer Toolbar on top.
I first configure All-in-One Sidebar by making basically everything except "Page Source" open in the sidebar. I leave the hotkeys at their default values and enable the thin sidebar switch. I put a few buttons for things on my sidebar but really I use hotkeys to access everything on the sidebar. Ctrl-B gets me my searchable del.icio.us bookmarks, Ctrl-H for searchable history etc. More on that in Step 7
Last but not least, my status bar with Firebug, YSlow and Greasemonkey sits on the bottom. I also use the XUL/Migemo extension to freshen up my search, allowing it to use regular expressions and highlighting the text just like Safari. A lot of you have specific questions about this, so keep ‘em coming by contacting me.
Step 4: userChrome.css
You have probably already seen most of my userChrome.css file posted in a couple earlier posts, you can just grab the file I use here (Right-click to Save Link As…). Here are instructions just in case ;)
Step 5: userContent.css
I am not going to post the thousands of lines of code in my userContent.css file, but you can download my personal userContent.css here (Right-click to Save Link As…). Allow me to give you the important bits - the titles are pretty self-explanatory:
Just like editing userChrome.css, and instructions are here.
Step 6: about:config
You might be surprised to learn that I don’t use all of the about:config entries that I have posted. Let’s go through the ones I DO use:
browser.cache.disk.capacity » 150000 browser.cache.offline.capacity » 20480 browser.download.manager.closeWhenDone » true browser.search.openintab » true browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground » true browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick » false browser.urlbar.hideGoButton » true browser.urlbar.maxRichResults » 5 network.http.pipelining » true network.http.proxy.pipelining » true zoom.maxPercent » 400
I seem to remember there being more that I used with Firefox 2 but Firefox 3s interface just suits my needs more so I don’t have to do so much :)
Step 7: Special bookmarks
Lifehacker provided me with some really cool chrome bookmarks that I use to quickly get to pretty much any Firefox setting quickly. Let me give you some examples: Ctrl-L goes to the URL bar, then I type "opt" to access Firefox options. Similarly, I can type "gmonkey" to access my greasemonkey scripts. You can also set this up yourself to access Live HTTP Headers and friends. Cool, huh?
Step 8: Hotkeys etc.
The point of many of these tweaks is to make everything available with few keystrokes. Of course, I set hotkeys for pretty much everything. Another really important part of my setup is bookmark keywords. I use this alongside del.icio.us to make my browsing super-efficient. When you hit Ctrl-D to enter a bookmark, make sure you have a short "keyword" so that you only have to type "g" and hit Enter to go to Google.
Use all these things and I think you will be a master web browser. What do you do to optimize your browsing? Which extensions? Let’s hear it!
A 24 year-old programmer for
If you like “Nasa Night Launch” you should check out “In The Dark”.
Oh, and don’t worry, it’s much much cleaner than you might think from the logo at AMO.
@Leigh:
Cool, I’ll have to check it out. Thanks!
Adblock Plus doesn’t need Adblock Filterset.G Updater, because it can update subscriptions itself.
Nightly Tester Tools bight be very useful with incompatible add-ons, You should try it.
As GrzegorzJZD said, you don’t need Filterset G Updater. Even the developer of Adblock Plus recommends not to use Filterset G (see here: http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project#filterset.g).
Ares
@GrzegorzJZD and Ares:
Cool thanks for the tip there. I think I knew this at one time but I may have forgotten somewhere along the line and just got it again.
As far as Nightly Tester Tools go, I had some preblems (as one tends to do when removing the compatibility check) so I have it disabled. Great thought there as well, though. Thanks!
@Leigh:
I tried out "In the Dark", and it’s clean, but I feel like NASA Night Launch is more polished and updated more frequently. Just my 2 cents :)
Hey Eric Wendelin…
I was brought to this article from here: http://tinyurl.com/4zpwyk
What my agenda is, is about your ‘Step 7: Special bookmarks’…
I understand that you use a FF version that is minimum FF3B5. And that you also use the ‘opt’ keyword.
What I then wanna know is if you experience the bug that I mention here: http://tinyurl.com/yv287z . If you do then please confirm it + vote for it in bugzilla. It wasn’t present in FF2.
Maybe you also have a solution to my request in my post right above the one just mentioned: http://tinyurl.com/yv287z
Something totally else:
Also it would be great if you could figure out the code for me to: hide the ‘Tags:’ option from CTRL+D AKA add bookmark dialog. Also I would like the code to add a ‘Description:’ option to the CTRL+D AKA add bookmark dialog.
I’m asking you this because I know that you have came up with the code to add the ‘Location:’ option to it…
Thanks in advande :)
Hi…. i was searching for nina axelrod and i came across your post and it is definitely the most sensible thing i have seen in a long time, and in my opinion you got something good going here, i have to get my friends to subscribe to your post about nnial 2007 - salvatore iaconesi - del.icio.us poetry.
Hi Eric. I have a doubt.
I want to know how can I do to gmail automatically attach files using the “Send to” option of Windows context menu with Firefox.
Sorry but my english is poor.
Greetings and thanks for your help