November 30, 2004, 11:29 AM — Last week's article looked at some of hidden features of the new Firefox browser. This week, we'll dig even deeper, with a look at extensions, customization and performance.
Extensions
One of the most interesting aspects of Firefox is its modularity. It supports Extensions, which are small programs that add new features to the browser. Extensions may end up being popular feature, because they will accelerate the rate of browser innovation.
There is already an active Extension community, and already hundreds of Firefox extensions. If you're interested in seeing what's available, check out the Firefox Extension Room. (See resources below). As of this writing there are 226 extensions available.
There are many useful extensions available. The Autofill extension highlights form fields that can automatically be filled in, and can auto complete the fields.
The Adblock extension is designed to filter out Web advertisements. Web surfers can use this to speed page loads, and web developers need to be aware the visitors may be using this. Adblock filters images by matching strings of text in image URLs. For example, it can be configured to block:
* All .gif images
* Anything served from doubleclick.net
* Items served from the directory "ad"
* Flash files
Web Developer adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. Options include converting form POSTs to GETs, hiding images, outlining block level elements, and disabling styles.
ForecastFox should appeal to weather fanatics. It's an extension that pulls in weather forecasts from the Weather Channel, and displays them in a browser toolbar.
Sage is an RSS news feed reader that integrates with Firefox. It reads the major news feed formats, including RSS .9x, 1.0 and 2.0, and Atom feeds, and displays them within the Web browser.
SpellBound is a spell checker extension. This can be helpful for users that enter in lots of copy via form fields, such as bloggers.
Other interesting extensions include: Bandwidth Tester, Blog This, FireFTP, FoxyTunes, StockTicker and the StumbleUpon Toolbar.
Customization Secrets
Firefox provides many ways to customize your browser. Firefox's appearance can be customized using Themes. There are over fifty Themes available.
Firefox can be further customized by editing a few text files: user.js, userChrome.css, and userContent.css. user.js is where various preference settings are stored. An easy way to edit this is by entering "about:config" in the URL field. This brings up a list of preference options. Double-click on settings to edit them.
Another file, userChrome.css, set the display rules for various elements in the Firefox user interface. An example file is provided, "userChrome-example.css". Rename this to "userChrome.css", and then edit it to customize the interface.
The third file, userContent.css, sets the display rules for how web content should be displayed. Mozilla again has provided an example version of the file, "userContent-example.css", that can be used as a reference.
If you want to, you can create and distribute your own Theme for Firefox. It requires some understanding of the Document Object Model and Cascading Style Sheets.
Performance Secrets
Firefox has several options that can be used to speed page rendering. By default, Firefox waits 250 milliseconds to render pages, while it waits for data to be received. You can force it to begin rendering immediately by setting the nglayout.initialpaint.delay to "0" in the user.js file.
Firefox supports pipelining an experimental option designed to improve page-load time. It's not supported by all web servers and proxies, but Firefox lets you try it out by enabling pipelining in the user.js file.
These performance mods, along with cache customizations, are documented at the Mozilla site.
Mozilla Has More Up Its Sleeves
While Firefox has already made an impressive debut, Mozilla has more Internet applications in the works. Mozilla Thunderbird is still in but, but is already an excellent cross-platform email client for Internet email. It's got good security features, intelligent junk mail filtering, and is highly customizable.
Mozilla Calendar is a cross-platform calendar client, based on Apple's open iCal standard. It works with Firefox, and supports publishing and sharing calendars via a web server.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
