Best Firefox Addon For More Productivity
The basic speed dial window all browsers have.
I usually don’t like to post stubs or preliminary articles like this, but I went all reviewer on Mozilla.org this morning and, of course, ended up writing a review of my favorite Firefox add-on of all time, Speed Dial. As that review got longer I felt myself wanting to show people how to really maximize productivity with this Firefox plug-in by configuring Speed Dial the way I have ended up tweaking it and setting it up. Don’t get me wrong, my why isn’t the only way, but when you see the power and customization of the Firefox Speed Dial plug-in in use in my setup, you can see why I think that Speed Dial is the most important Firefox add-on anyone can have. In fact, it’s the one real drawback to Google Chrome for me right now.
There is a Speed Dial extension for Google Chrome on the Google extensions website, but it is a pale imitation of this powerful Firefox add-on. It doesn’t have dial groups which is the main powerful feature of the Speed Dial plugin.
Anyway, it would be irresponsible of me to get into posting my Speed Dial Firefox extension review right now when I have deadlines barreling down on my like runaway trucks with no brakes on the side of a steep mountain. However, I don’t want anyone following the link I threw onto my review at mozilla.org to arrive and wonder where in the heck the review I promised is. Therefore, I’m going to post a couple of screen shots that I think will help any user with even a little bit of power browsing experience to understand the kind of productivity gains that are possible with this plugin.
If that is you, either install the plugin and start messing around with it. Just got to Tools -> Add-ons -> Options and start customizing away. (I recommend setting up either a Speed Dial icon on your toolbars, or doing like I did and setting the right click on a page to include the context menu option to Add to Speed Dial. You can make that work by right-clicking on the tab if you prefer, but I’m used to right-clicking on the page itself when I want to do something. One of the best things about this add-on is how much it can be customized to work exactly the way you need it to in order to help out with your own time management by making browsing faster and easier.)
The quick, quick, version of how to use Speed Dial to speed up your Internet browsing and boost your online power goes like this:
- Use Dial Groups – Every web browser offers some sort of dial based start up screen. Opera was first, but Google Chrome has one now too. IE has a similar concept although it is done via text links instead of actual configurable dials. What makes Speed Dial great is the ability to have MORE THAN ONE page of dials.
- Set Speed Dial to show up in new tabs instead of waiting to click something. Every time you press CTL-T you’ll get a list of your speed dials to use. Just make your current homepage the first dial on the first dial group to keep instant access to it.
- Customize the dial group tabs – You can change the colors to make tabs easier to find. Just don’t go crazy or you’ll hate it.
- Customize the dial groups – Need more than 9 websites for one dial group? No problem. One of the configurations is how many sites to show on a speed dial group. You can change both the default, and even better change on a per group basis. You can have 12 dials under Work and 6 dials under Facebook Games or vice versa, depending on your lifestyle
– If you have a widescreen monitor take advantage of that width by setting your default dial group configuration to 3 rows and 4 columns.
Lastly, if you are a power user looking for maximum time savings, you’ll end up with a lot of dials that link to a lot of webpages. By default, the speed dial thumbnails refresh frequently which means you could end up with a slow running Firefox when running Speed Dial and switching through several dials because thumbnails are being generated for each site no matter how fast you click. (See the link for details.)
There is lots more power. Read the docs or poke around the settings to see what else you can do to improve online productivity with Speed Dial. Or, come back here in the next day or two when I get time to go on full tilt. Even easier, grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed to make sure you get the updated Firefox plugin reviews as soon as they come online.
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- Configure Right Click Context Menu for Speed Dial
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- Configure Speed Dial Groups
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- Configure and Organize Dial Group Tabs
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- Configure Speed Dial Options
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- Productive Powerful Speed Dial Configuration
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- Speed Dial Power User Setup Productivity Boost
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- The basic speed dial window all browsers have.
Then you can check out my post about Firefox personas if you need to read more about the Mozilla web browser.
Firefox Personas Preview Feature
When you spend a lot of time in the world of technology it is easy to get jaded. New features that are promoted (self-promoted, and then echoed by lazy writers) are almost never as useful as they are supposed to be, and half the time, they are not even new. I almost ruined my eyes looking at computer monitors full of accolades for Microsoft Internet Explorer 7′s “new” tabbed browsing feature, especially since I had been a power-user of tabs in web browsing since they came out in Firefox years before.
When new features are both truly useful and actually new, like the Ribbon Interface in Office 2010 (updated from a partial integration in Microsoft Office 2007), they are often met with initial resistance.
As a freelance technology writer I not only spend a lot of time in the tech world, I am actually forced to look at and use new software features regardless of how useful I could possibly find them because a client needs a review of new software utilities or a customized newsletter could benefit from a comparison of program features.
Check out a review of Citibank Thank You network rewards program.
The other thing that happens to us technology types is that we stop reading about what a program does. We most certainly do not watch videos that show us how to use new features. (How many seconds of your life does it waste to watch someone show you how to click File then New on a training video?) Fortunately, most of the time it works out just fine because when you are used to how software works, you know where to look for functions you need. However, from time to time, I miss out on a cool new feature or a great new function that would increase my productivity.
Firefox 3.6 Coolest New Feature
When it comes to software development, there are two kinds of functionality. One type of functionality affects the usefulness of the product. These functions make the software, better, faster, easier to use, and so on. The other type of functionality makes the computer software more fun to use, or just makes it look nicer. These days, it seems like there is a lot of action in the latter category.
Most of the “improvements” in the user interface design realm are actually just ways to make a software product look nicer, or most commonly, to make it so that you can superficially customize the application. Think of it as the equivalent of being able to add bumper stickers to your software.
For the most part, I don’t have much use for these beautification features. A computer is, what a computer is, and while using my own wallpaper is fun, it doesn’t really matter what the wallpaper is when I’m switching between eight full-screen windows in a desperate race to beat an important deadline.
As you can imagine, I haven’t played around much with Firefox’s personas feature.
This morning, however, I was bored (actually, I was procrastinating and rendering my ADD planner worthless) and I ended up on the Firefox Personas page after re-installing the Firefox NoScript Plugin.
While I don’t have much need for a new persona for my web browser, I was clicking around to see what was on the Mozilla website when I noticed something happen to my default Firefox browser.
When you hover over the sample picture graphic of a Firefox persona, it previews what that persona would look like if you installed it on your Firefox 3.6 installation. Tons of applications do previews like this, but the fun part is that Firefox previews the persona on your real installation. That is, the browser you are currently using to browse the available personas actually changes when you hover your mouse over the preview.
Now this is fun.
Normally, would have to download and install the browser extension or browser skin in order to “play around” with what it would look like. Then, when I am finished wasting time, I would switch back, and if I remembered, uninstall all the different personas I downloaded to check out. Hopefully they all uninstalled cleanly and there were no residual effects, although that is never a guarantee.
But, with the Firefox persona preview functionality I can see what my browser would look like with a hundred different personas, all without downloading or installing anything. So, I can see what my Firefox would look like if I installed the Kelly Brook persona (First, calculate the odds of the wife using my computer and Firefox…). Or, for a more whimsical (and socially acceptable at a client site) persona I can check out the Snoopy persona.
Here is my usual Firefox (the default) persona:
Here is the Kelly Brook persona:
In the end, personas are a play thing, like putting up a Go Buffs sign on my home office wall, but sometimes, playing is good. After all, all work and no play make Jack go crazy and try to chop up his family at the Overlook Hotel.
Firefox Beats Chrome But…
Recently, I wrote about why Firefox is better than Chrome in a head-to-head browser comparison between Firefox 3.5 vs. Google Chrome 2. In the end, it basically came down to certain specific features that I just cannot live without because I use them on a daily basis to increase my productivity.
However, I do switch back and forth between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox a lot. In doing so, I have developed a list of things that I wish Firefox did that Chrome already does. For the most part, these are little things that make surfing the web faster or easier, rather than make or break requirements. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t really like to see these Google Chrome features show up in the next version of Firefox.
Chrome Better Than Firefox Features
The biggest one here has to be speed. You have to give it to Google and their open-source browser project Chromium. What they have put together is hands down the fastest web browser. Each browser developer out there from Microsoft, to Opera, to Apple’s Safari, all have specific tests that they construct to showcase their browser’s speed. But, when it comes to real-world browsing speed, Chrome is undeniably the fastest.
Where Internet browsing surfing speed really counts is in a user’s ability to get to the Internet and then do what they need to do without having to wait for the browser program to load or refresh, or whatever. Start the timer when you click to run the program and stop the timer when your favorite website or homepage has finished loading and nothing comes close to Chrome’s speed regardless of which carefully chosen website the developer wants to use.
The reason is that Google’s Chrome browser has the fastest start-up speed. True, it cheats a little bit by displaying the interface and giving control to the user before it is actually ready to do anything productive (it keeps loading in the background), but even if you account for that extra boot up time, Chrome is still the fastest to start.
Firefox, on the other hand, is a NIGHTMARE to start-up, especially if you purposely left a bunch of tabs open to automatically reload the next time you started Firefox. Here is the rest of the list. (I do know that some of these things can be done by plug-ins or add-ons for Firefox, and that is one of the great things about Firefox, but, frankly, I already have a TON of plug-ins loaded. I’d like to start cutting down on the number of Firefox add-ons I have, not increase them.)
Things I Wish Firefox Did More Like Chrome
- Load Faster
- Search from the Address Bar – It’s awesome, but it doesn’t do this.
- Paste and Go in the Address Bar – Nothing has saved me more keystrokes.
- Incognito style privacy – I get why Firefox does privacy mode the way it does, but I really like being able to have a private session going concurrently with a normal browsing session. Getting to choose between the two types would be ideal.
- One Tab = One Process – For research purposes, sometimes I right-click a dozen or more search results before I go look at what opened up in those tabs. Sometimes one of those websites is junk and ends up hanging the whole smash. In Chrome, I open the task manager find the garbage site and shut it down without even looking at in. In Firefox I have to wait until I get back control and then hunt down the offending site myself.
How about you? What features from Chrome would you like to see in Firefox?
Reopen Last Browsing Session Internet Explorer 8 By Default
I’m not a huge Internet Explorer fan. IE 8.0 is better than the unremarkable IE 7 and light years better than the virtually unusable IE 6, but, it still chock full of annoying quirks and weird Internet Explorer functions.
The latest nuisance comes courtesy of the Reopen Last Browsing Session feature, or more specifically the fact that there is no way to automatically reopen last browsing session. (Although there is a way to disable reopen last browser session if you want to do that.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m finally glad to see this functionality in Internet Explorer. It’s bad enough for your browser to crash, but it really stinks for it to erase all of those open websites you worked so hard to find.
If you haven’t used IE 8 Reopen Last Browsing Session yet, it is probably because it isn’t really all that obvious that IE even has that feature, especially if you remember trying to find something like that in earlier IE versions and came up empty. It isn’t a leap to assume that something that was missing last time is missing this time. (Click the little gear icon that means settings or functions or something, and it’s the first choice at the top.)
It does say “Restore Last Browsing Session” on the screen that appears when you open a new tab, but if you use your browser a lot, or if you use another browser, chances are, you’ve been using tabs for so long, that you didn’t see the need to read whatever Microsoft decided to add once they decided it was a feature worth copying.
Ironically, for many users, having the option on a new tab is too late. For example, I use the same feature in Firefox (which has had it for years, now) to help remind me of the things I was working on when I last shutdown my computer or browser. If I had two more sources to go through, but it was getting really late, I would just leave those two tabs open. When I started Firefox the next time, those two tabs would pop up right away and remind me to finish out the work I was doing. That keeps me from having to write down a list, or put a sticky note on my monitor, or whatever.
Internet Explorer does not restore the last browsing session by default. Microsoft says that this is because they carefully considered all the options and decided that for privacy reasons, it would be better if the last session did not automatically open when you opened IE.
That is fine with me. I can see the arguments on both sides and certainly cannot fault anyone for coming down once way or another. What is annoyingly preposterous is that there is no way for a user to customize this behavior and configure IE to do what they chose. In other words, Microsoft has decided that, not only is it better to not display the last session by default, but that users are so stupid and inferior to Microsoft’s user interface design team that we shouldn’t even be given the choice!
One more time for the cheap seats, LET ME DECIDE HOW TO USE MY SOFTWARE ON MY COMPUTER!
You see, as it turns out, I am reasonably intelligent. I can learn new things, figure things out, and yes, even use a computer that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. I can guard my own privacy. I can use Private Mode browsing. I can delete cookies. I can delete history. I can use CCleaner. In other words, I don’t need Microsoft to be my mommy and wipe my nose and watch out for my privacy. Just give me the tools to handle it myself (like Private Browsing Mode) and then let me handle it myself.
For Microsoft to assume what the best way for my software to be configured for me is patronizing and infuriating. I know Microsoft is used to the people using its products being the non-computer savvy drones who just use whatever they have at work, or whatever comes installed on their computer by default; but if Microsoft ever wants the respect of people who actually know even a little bit about computers, then it needs to stop treating us like incompetent drooling monkeys.
Give me an about:config screen like Firefox. Put the choice behind a button that says “Advanced”. I don’t care what you do, just do something.
But don’t you dare decide what is best for me!
