Nightly Tester Tools

I’ve recently read in blog entry (taking a step backward) about folks who love the new functionality of Firefox 2.0b1/2, but who can’t live without their favorite extensions from 1.5.0.X which are not yet compatible in Firefox 2.0b1/2. Simple solution is the Nightly Tester Tool extension. This extension once installed will allow you to ‘make compatible’ most extensions that currently do not work in (or were never designed for) a newer version of Firefox (also works for Thunderbird).

Now, a word of caution…while MOST extensions seem to work fine when forced to work with Firefox 2.0b2, some may not. I have discovered two for sure that did not ‘play’ well with Firefox 2.0b2.

• Download Manager Tweak, broke my options Window. Fortunately, since ‘download’ (and a bunch of other words) were appearing in red at the bottom of the window, it did not take me long to find the culprit. I can live without this extension and have found an alternative.
• Tabbrowser Preferences, did not do anything dramatic to my Firefox, in fact it did not do anything at all (except incorporate itself into the options window under Tabbed Browsing). Sadly this is one of my favorite extensions, but the developer says a new version will be coming for Firefox 2.0

One of the nice new features with the Add-Ons User Interface in Firefox 2.0, is now all you have to do is click a button to Disable an extension. In Firefox 1.5.0.X builds you had to right-click on the extension then select Disable.

Firefox 2.0 Tweaks

I mentioned in my Using Firefox 2.0b2 As Default Browser post, CyberNet Tech News has a great article on Firefox 2.0 Tweaks. Although Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 is in the title, all tweaks apply to the current release of Firefox 2.0. The article shows demonstrations of the new Inline Spellcheck (no more SpellBound) and Undo Close Tabs* features. Tweaks are done by editing Firefox’s about:config and include:

• Session Restore
  • Crash Recovery or restore the browser from when you closed
  • Note: This feature became available in the ‘Options…’ (via Tools Menu) with the release of Beta 2
• How to disable or change the scrolling tab-bar. Personally, the whole ‘tab-overflow’ or scrolling tab-bar thing is dumb. I was glad to see in Beta 2 they added the ‘List all tabs’ option which they introduced in Minefield (FF 3.0)
• Red X Close Button setup
  • On each tab
  • Active tab only (my preference)
  • No tabs with button at end of tab-bar (just like it is FF 1.5.0.X and earlier)
• Adding More Feed Readers. Don’t know much about this since I just use the ‘Live Bookmark’ feature to keep track of the few blogs I frequent. I suppose if I had more Blogs I visited this could be useful.

* I have discovered Firefox 2.0 lists closed tab in the History Menu, under Recently Closed Tabs. The sub-menu (similar to SessionSaver’s Snapback Tab menu) allows you to select which tab you wish to reopen (1 at a time) or reopen all tabs.