topher

Well, I’m finally breaking down and trying Firefox as my main browser again.  I’ve been a Galeon user for a really long time.  Since well before Mozilla 1.0 actually.

Galeon is a Gnome browser, and runs in Linux.  It was started because the developers thought it would run faster as a native application than with Mozilla’s XUL interface.  It’s really great, and I love it, but Firefox’s extensions are a siren song I can’t ignore.

I tried switching a few months back, and it just didn’t work for me.  Too many things didn’t work at all (like editing bookmarks).  Those seem to be resolved now, so we’re giving it another go.  The real litmus test is that my wife is also trying it.

There are several things that Firefox does not that Galeon does that I’ll miss greatly.  One is more than one Bookmarks Toolbar.  In Galeon I can turn any bookmarks folder into a bar.

Another is setting Alt-R to be the reload key-combo.  It’s just a habit learned from Netscape 4 in fvwm95.  I’d still like to be able to edit those though.

And lastly, being able to get a middle click paste to load in a new tab.  In Linux, you can copy a URL from anywhere, and middle click anywhere in the browser and it’ll load the page.  In Galeon it loads it in a new tab.  In Firefox it loads it in current tab.  I even got the Extra Tab Features extention, no luck.  🙁

If anyone has any advice on these, please let me know,

8 thoughts on “Switching to Firefox

  1. You should use del.icio.us and then Live Bookmarks in Firefox. It’s really cool. You can get at all of your bookmarks from anywhere. So, my home computer, and my work computer have the same bookmarks. I was able to slurp my existing bookmarks into del.icio.us with a perl script. My friend Andy got me hooked. You can read his blog about it here:
    http://blog.aharbick.com/archives/000069.html. Some other tips: Create a bookmark to post to del.icio.us so it’s easy to add new bookmarks. Also, for every del.icio.us tag that you want in your Bookmark’s toolbar, you can use the little orange icon in the lower right corner to add a live bookmark for that set of tags.

  2. i’m in windows at the moment, but ctrl-R does the reload instead of alt-R and by “middle” clicking (i’m actually using my mouse wheel to click) on a link, it opens the page in a new tab….again, maybe that’s just the windows version…fwiw.

  3. Yeah, I want alt-r. 🙂 And middle clicking on a LINK opens in a new tab, but I want to middle click out in the middle of nowhere.

  4. Congrats on the switch. Have you tried using the Tabbrowser Extensions extension (different from Tabbrowser Preferences)? It’s listed in the Extension Room, and has a ton of options. Not sure if it has the middle-click thing or not.

  5. Might I suggest the SaferFox Xpanded theme. It is pretty cool. Very simplistic and stylish. Some of my favorite extensions include Web Developer, User Agent Switcher, FoxyTunes (for controlling music programs within browser), fireFTP, the gmail notifier (since I have a gmail account, which by the way if anyone wants a gmail account I have like 50 invites), Sage, and the Mozilla Calendar. Also, for all you web developers out there, check out cuneAform. It is an dhtml based text editor that I am fairly certain you could incorporate into a website (although I haven’t tried yet).

  6. I know we differ on the whole bookmark toolbar thing, but I personally find the ability to use folders and nested folders as a viable (and for me, preferrable) alernative to having multiple bookmark toolbars.

    It takes a little time to organize the first time through (and to clean up now and again), but too many toolbars is something I try to avoid.

    As to the middle-click thing, I’m not sure exactly what you’re getting at with that. Any link in any page that I use middle-click on by default opens up in a new tab (in Linux and Windows)…

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