Archive for the ‘Extensions’ tag
Moving to Opera
Though I did move to opera as I’d said in my earlier post, I missed the extensibility of Firefox that I had much used. I had used the following extensions usually on Firefox:
Off the list, I do not care much about Adblock Plus or Google Gears except for the fact they made browsing easy to look at and faster respectively. Can do without them. (I know Opera has a way of blocking too, but am not interested in blocking ads for a while now, maybe when I get irritated by them again.). And Stylish like features is obviously well built into Opera, so 3 tasks done by default.
Coming to Gmail Manager and FireFTP, for Gmail Manager I looked for desktop packages called kcheckgmail and other widgets but some refused to work while the other required a dependency I was not willing to install. As always when this happens I headed to Qt-Apps and got myself QGmailNotifier. Built it with a [qmake - make and make install] and I was ready to launch qgmailnotifier and work well it did. Qt applications always ftw for me! For FireFTP, the existing Dolphin and Konqueror of my KDE sufficed. I created an FTP folder for my site and a WebDAV one for SourceForge and it were done, again too simply. 
The only thing missing now is a notifier for Google Reader. Maybe I’ll look into sources of some widgets and combine it with QGmailNotifier. But I guess that’d have to wait. Could there be an alternative way?
No Opera widgets please, they are just not how I need it. It has to be either a desktop tray software or a notifier within the browser in some toolbar as an icon.
Two more Firefox extensions
Don’t worry, both of these are just minor UI improving Mozilla Firefox extensions and not one of those heavy-weight resource hoggers. And you’d probably need the first one installed, its like a bug-fix. Read on …
First one would be the Long Titles extension.
As you’d have noticed on Firefox at times that the title attributes (tooltips/titles) in various pages are never displayed fully and always end abruptly with a “…”.
Like this image below:
This is cause of certain bug in Mozilla Firefox. Though this has been fixed in the upcoming Firefox version 3.0, you can fix this partial-showing in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 with this extension - Long Titles.
After fixing they’d look like below: (To get what am talking about)
The second extension is a rather personal pick of mine. Its called Hide Menubar.
Does what its named as, hides the menu bar (File, Edit, Favorites, History, Tools, etc …) and shows them only when you hit your ALT key.
Before:
And, after installing the extension:
Just like IE 7 does, perhaps. I use this to get more viewing space since I don’t really use my menu bar that much.For bookmarks, I use the Ctrl + B sidebar feature instead, when required. (This plugin also auto hides your menu after a certain amount of time, neat!)
