Useful Firefox extensions for being a support guru!

Addons

General

  • AspellFox

  • Australian English Dictionary

  • Greasemonkey

    • Install this script to allow Firefox to remember passwords, for sites which usually disallow it. Always check the source before installing any Greasemonkey script.

  • MozEX - Allows you to use external applications (like gvim) for editing text areas, among other things.

  • Noscript - Disables all Javascript, Flash, or other active content. Will break functionality of many sites, but can always be disabled selectively.

  • Tabinta ("Tab in Textarea") - Insert tab characters in text boxes.

  • It's All Text - Use your text editor of choice from your browser.

Technical

  • Live HTTP Headers

  • lori ("Life-of-request info") - Times page loads (has a bug with timing of new tabs though).

  • ShowIP - By default ShowIP's max cache age is set to -1 (infinity), which is almost certainly not what you want. Set it to 0 to make sure the current IP is always shown.

Development

Search engine keywords

Firefox has a cool feature that allows you to select a search engine by typing a keyword followed by the search string in the location bar. To activate simply add the URL to your bookmarks and specify the keyword you wish to use under the bookmark properties. Some useful bookmarks that we use at Anchor are:

Keyword

Notes

URL

g

Google

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%s&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

w

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

dict

Dictionary search

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=%s

You will also need to have keyword.enabled set to true under about:config.

Under about:config, set keyword.URL to http://www.google.com.au/search?btnG=Google+Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

If you press Alt-enter, the link will open up in a new tab.

Search engine plugins

HTML(<script type="text/javascript" src="/wiki/common/js/searchengine.js"></script>)

Hint: Press Ctrl-K to give focus to the search input. Press Ctrl-Up or Ctrl-Down to change search engine used. Alt-Enter will load the results page in a new tab!

Fun stuff

Hints

  • Boost download speed by going to about:config and setting network.http.pipelining to true.

  • Prevent information leakage by changing network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0.

    • Ergh. This breaks ANZ Internet banking.
  • If you want to open a bunch of webpages at the same time from your bookmarks (akin to the pipe-separated thing you can do for your homepage) put all the sites in bookmarks in a folder. Then middle-click the folder to open all the bookmarks in it.

    • By default it will replace all open tabs. If you want it to add to the existing open tabs, change the internal setting browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace