When you’re typing in the Location Bar, a green Go button is shown:

That switches to a red Stop button when the page is loading:

The thin line you see in the location bar is a progress indicator that indicates how much of the current web page has loaded – I don’t like the way it looks and I think it’ll probably change in future.

When the page has fully loaded, it changes to a Refresh button:

This leaves a minimalist and compact toolbar:

I should actually remove the Home button – I don’t ever use it.

To try out the new stuff coming in Firefox, download a Firefox nightly build now.

While a page is loading, the button acts as a Stop button:

When it’s done loading, it becomes a Reload button.

I’m always up for 1 less unnecessary button. I think this feature is copied from Safari (I might be wrong).

As an example, here’s the Youtube webpage of the owner of Maru the Cat:

To open the thumbnail image of Maru in a new tab, right-click the image, and then middle-click the View Image item from the context menu:

It should open up in a new tab:

You can also do the same for background images (middle-click View Background Image from the right-click context menu).

Anyway, enough with all that self-indulgent background – I’m writing this today to rave about how cool this one particular feature, auto-completion in the Location Bar (or the Address Bar, you know, where you type in URLs), in Firefox 3 is. Yes, you probably have already read about it and all the other neat new features and changes in Firefox 3, but I’d love to single out this one because it was the one thing I noticed that made browsing so much better when switching from Firefox 2.

So what is it? First, a screenshot of it in action:

Yup, typing into the Location Bar brings up a list of matched webpages from your browsing history. You can see from the screenshot that I entered “javascript” and it brought up not just URLs that started with “javascript” (which is the current Firefox 2 behavior), it also brought up URLs that contained “javascript” anywhere and even pages with titles containing “javascript”.

What’s the big deal? Well, one of the worst (“worst” being a relative adjective, relative to my opinion) things that can happen while looking for a page you once visited is forgetting its URL. If I’m lucky I can find it by bringing up the History sidebar in Firefox 2 and searching for it by some keyword or dredging through my browsing history.

In Firefox 3, I just need to type in some keywords related to the page and most likely it’d come up! Here’s how I start posting a new blog entry to this very blog:

No need to type “blog.c” and then selecting the correct page from the dropdown while remembering that the new post page is “post-new.php”. Less typing, no need to remember URLs. Just page titles and website names. If that isn’t useful for you, “you’re doing it wrong”. What’s more, Firefox 3 uses adaptive learning to keep an eye of what you’ve typed and what you select. After some time Firefox will learn from your choices and provide better suggestions in the autocomplete list. Sweet.

If you haven’t tried out Firefox 3 yet, go grab the latest beta. And then come back to this blog to get Firefox 2 and 3 running at the same time. I’m quite sure you’ll thank me for it (because this is not the only great feature in Firefox).

Update: Phil Wilson pointed to this extension for Firefox 2 that has the same auto-completion functionality.

Well, if you wanna check out the proposed Mac OS X Firefox 3 UI for yourself, grab yourself a copy of Firefox 3 Beta 1 and go get the Proto theme.

MooTools Plugin to uninstall Internet Explorer from any machine within network range

Try it for yourself with the text here:

First line.
Second line.

Well, all that is gonna go away in Firefox 3, which replaces newlines with spaces. Small change perhaps, but definitely needed in this fanboy’s opinion.

Oh and it works for the Address bar too, only the newlines get removed instead of getting replaced with spaces. Could be useful for multi-line URLs which appear quite often in emails!

Anyway, in simpler words (and some screenshots to follow), what this means is that whenever you login to a site that requires your password, Firefox will no longer wait for you to tell it whether it should remember your password. I bet this looks familiar:

Its usability is lacking because of 2 things:

• if I entered the wrong password told Firefox to remember my password, I’d have to go to the Password Manager to delete it, and
• Firefox doesn’t submit your login until you tell it what to do with your password, annoying for 2 reasons:
  1. Sometimes I’m not sure if I entered the right password – but I’d be pretty sure of that if I get to the next page (i.e. if my login request was submitted).
  2. It’s just plain faster if Firefox submitted the login and asked about my password together/later – blocking the submit is just a waste of time (i.e. a non-modal dialog would make more sense).

So, especially since I’ve used used Firefox for 156 hours at work since a month and a half ago (my most used application apparently), it’s pretty cool to find out that Firefox 3 will come with a non-modal “Remember my password” dialog. Here’s what it looks like:

The dialog appears on top right after Firefox submits the login form. One more thing to look forward to in Firefox 3!

As its name suggests, it allows you to group your tabs in, er, groups. Forget the verbiage, just look at the screenshot:

This extension is a godsend for those of us who usually have a bazillion tabs open in Firefox (personally I keep it under a bazillion tabs so all those tabs don’t slow Firefox down – I usually start killing tabs once I hit 30). By allowing you to group your tabs into logical groups, such as one group for work, one for play, and one for your many Gmail accounts, it brings some order to the “tab hell”, which usually happens when you have to scroll or Ctrl/Cmd-Tab through more than 20 tabs to find the tab you want. Some people may use an Expose-style extension to show thumbnails of all their tabs at once, Showcase is one example – those are quite nifty as well though I’ve always found them to be unmanageably slow when there are too many tabs, which kinda defeats the purpose.

Anyway, coming back to Tab Groups extension… This is an extension that’s going to be absolutely necessary for those of us who like having many tabs open at once. For those of you who are less tab-crazy, or even, god forbid, surf in single tab mode, I’d expect you’d be much less excited about Tab Groups.

Tab Groups is pretty much early release software (the author considers it pre-alpha), but it’s very much already usable at this stage. You can create groups, rename them, and start dragging tabs into whichever tab group they belong. There are several features that are missing but almost definitely planned for future releases. For one thing, you can’t move tab groups around, but I’m sure that’ll be baked in soon enough. Also, the tab selector (the dropdown list of tabs thingie on the extreme right of your tab bar) stops working if tab is in another group. Another thing is the Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-T to reopen closed tabs currently reopens tabs in a new tab group. All small inconveniences (that would be soon be removed once Tab Group history gets baked in) for a very nice extension.

Via Lifehacker via CyberNet News.

Anyway, I found the answer today after some Googling – Lifehacker’s “Manage multiple Firefox profiles” article.

Basically, once you have started Firefox in a profile that you want, you can start another profile by passing the ‘-no-remote’ switch together with the name of the profile you want to start with the ‘-P’ switch:

/path/to/firefox -P profile_name -no-remote

It does mean you need 2 different profiles though, for the 2 different user sessions. Oh well.

No thanks to a CSS bug in IE6, we were delayed by a week. The last thing we expected was a CSS bug hanging IE6 with all the JavaScript we were pushing out, but yeah, well, it was. At least now my conscience is clear – everything works nicely in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Well, the ad actually labelled it as a “Red Panda“, but we all know that red pandas are also called firefoxes.

Long version for Windows Registry newbies (alternatively, you can create a .reg file and run it like someone said in the thread):

1. Click our Start button, then “Run…”.
2. Type “regedit” into the box that appears and hit Enter. This will bring up the Registry Editor.
3. Drill down the tree on the left pane under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT until you find the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\ {c90250f3-4d7d-4991-9b69-a5c5bc1c2ae6} entry.
4. Delete the entry.
5. Close the Registry Editor – you’re done.

Anyway, turns out this is a bug caused by having “IE7 Beta1 in an unsupported side-by-side configuration with a version of IE6″, as officially stated in IEBlog.

Painfully, I had to look all over again for the solution back home because I didn’t bookmark the page and it didn’t make sense to run over to the office just for this. Now it’s bookmarked in del.icio.us and blogged so I won’t forget.

Recently, after reading Ingoal’s post on an update to his score, I tried out Silktide again and to my surprise, got a respectable 8.6. (Ingoal’s a fellow Advisor at SitePoint – this guy knows computers.) After some fixing some XHTML-validation borkage, I eked out a 10 for accessibility and managed to get a 9.2 overall score (and a 9.3 once). That puts me in the top 10 (true to form, I’m right at the bottom at number 10 below SitePoint).

I’m not sure it means anything except that it goes to show what a poor boy I must be to keep posting about rankings and scores. Perhaps it’s my low self-esteem working here.

But I have to say again, thank you for your donations to Firefox and keep donating whether you do so via my donation link or not! (What am I talking about? Read more. This too.)