Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Some useful Firefox add-on for productivity

Here is a list of add-ons which I use with mozilla firefox to make it dance with me-
  1. Adblock Plus - pretty obvious I believe.

  2. Auto Copy - anything you select within the browser goes to clipboard, so I dont have to press ctrl+c and I can direct to a ctrl+v.

  3. Colorful Tabs - For aesthetic purpose.

  4. del.icio.us bookmarks - To access my delicious bookmarks.

  5. Dog ears - To mark important parts of a web page and easily find them.

  6. Download statusbar - Instead of a separate window, download happens on status bar making it easy to track.

  7. ErrorZilla - This turns the usual "404-error not found" to a list of options out of which my favorite is to use Google cache.

  8. Fasterfox- firefox's better performance.

  9. Firefox showcase - this feature is just like Internet Explorer-7 to have a bird eye view of all the opened tab.

  10. IE Tab - for sites like cricbuzz and iiitb which are viewed best in Internet Explorer.

  11. pdf Download - It searches the url and if it finds that the file is a pdf instead of a web-page, it gives me useful options like download, view it outside firefox or view as html.

  12. Cooliris Preview - point to a link and it will show you preview of that page without clicking, hence saving a lot of clicking and coming back. especially useful while googling.

  13. Clipmarks - Lets u save and share contents of a web-page without having to bookmark the whole page.

I came to know about these through browsing but one article was particularly helpful.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/12/50-best-firefox-extensions-for-power-surfing/

There are some less useful add-ons as well
  • Gmail Manager - Gmail account management.

  • Last tab - Allows the user to navigate using most recently opened tab instead of usual left to right thing using ctrl+tab. (One can also use ctrl+pg up or down without this extension but it won't show u a preview of that page.)

  • Stumble upon - Is a great time pass and source of information.



  • As far as the themes are concerned, I found Noia 2.0(eXtreme) the best.

    Hope this was useful.


    Some firefox tweakings are as follows -

    first type the about:config in the url box
  • search for network.prefetch-next and set it to false to avoid firefox to prefetch pages it thinks you will click.

  • search for browser.cache.memory.capacity and set it to value depending on your RAM size, like 5000 for upto 512 MB RAM and about 16000 for more.

  • Right click on about:config page and create a new boolean named config.trim_on_minimize and set the value to true. This will ensure that when you minimize your firefox, the contents go to hdd instead of remaining in RAM.

  • Search for network.http.pipelining and set it to true.


  • Give network.http.pipelining.maxrequests a high value, about 10.

  • Create a new boolean content.interrupt.parsing and set it to true.

  • Search network.dns.disableIPv6 and set it to true.

  • To avoid downloading complete page before displaying it to us and show it as it downloads, create a new integer content.max.tokenizing.time and give it a value of 2250000.

  • To set min. time to wait between reflows, create a new integer content.notify.interval and give it a value of 750000.

  • To neglect initial paint delay, create a new integer nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it a value of 0.


  • Some other information -
    To view info and statistics regarding your disk’s cache, including the name of your cache’s directory and a list of the entries, type about:cache on browser url bar. By default, Firefox doesn’t allow you to view the cached webpages, so this can be an useful option.

    about:plugins gives a list of plug-ins installed.

    about:Mozilla gives book of Mozilla. (More to read "High quality funda")

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    Monday, February 26, 2007

    Lets write

    I just read an article which said that to increase your productivity, one should write something daily. Though the article said the best time to do it is the morning, I am doing it on night since I have some spare time. I (try to) maintain a digital diary, which I prefer not to share with others. So lets start writing here as well.
    I don't know what I would write about but it doesn't matter, one ounce of work is better than years of planning and finding the perfect moment.
    Lets start a series of unintentional writing and then see the result.
    If any one wants to contribute, he is more than welcome.
    I will resume writing tomorrow morning.

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