Devil is Blogging

Hey guys, a lot of people (well, not so much ) have asked me what Firefox addons am I using. Here I’m compiling a list of my 25 favorite Firefox addons. I cannot even think of surviving a day without most of them.

1. AdBlock Plus 

This is the first addon I always install when I freshly installs Firefox. AdBlock blocks annoying advertisements from websites and emails. Some people says blocking advertisements in websites is un-ethical and thereby we are attacking the ability of website owners to earn revenue from their efforts. Well, it is another whole talk, so it’s up to you. (Anyway I love it)

2. Web Developer Toolbar

An incredible MUST HAVE for all web developers. This addon is like a Swiss knife and has a lot of functions. Believe me, if you have never used it before, you will thank me once you install it and feel it. It enables you to manage cookies, images, java, javascript.. No no, I cannot even list them. Try yourself.

3. Firebug

Another incredible one. This one is a little difficult to get used to. But once you get used to it, you will bow to it. Incredible tool for debugging your layout, analyzing and optimizing your sites performance etc etc.

4. Zotero

Like firebug, you may not like this addon on first bite, but if you are inclined to learning new stuff and taking notes, you will never again part with this addon. Very easy to save web pages, links and stuff. Every student who uses the internet for academic purposes in any way MUST have this. Once I downgraded my Firefox to an older version, just because Zotero was not working in the newer version of Firefox. (Now it is updated and works with the latest releases till date)

5. TryAgain

(Not compatible with Firefox 3.6)

This is a simple but very useful addon. If a page fails to load, this addon will keep trying until the page is loaded. Very very useful if you have a slow or not-so-good internet connection. This one was my fav with AdBlock, but this addon is not compatible with Firefox 3.6. I’m just hoping the author will update the addon soon.

6. Firesomething

Firesomething is not very useful, like the addons we discussed above. But I keep it for mere geek pleasure. This addon will let you change the name of your Mozilla Firefox to something else you like. It also has a set of preset random names. Right now, as of we speaking, the title of my Firefox reads – Mozilla SulpherMonkey. Isn’t that hilarious? (watever, I love it). You can also change the Firefox logo in the About box.

7. YSlow

Another pretty useful addon for web developers. Useful for analyzing your website’s performance based on several criteria. The best part is, it is developed by Yahoo!

8. User Agent Switcher

A cool geeky addon. This addon can be used to fake your browser’s user agent. S’pose if a website is allowing access to only Internet Explorer users, then this addon can help you. I have narrated another cool use of this addon in my previous post.

9. FEBE

FEBE Stands for Firefox Environment Backup Extension. With this addon, you can all your addons, preferences, saved passwords and a lot more. Also you can restore your backups at a later time. I recommend this addon very much. I owe so much to this addon for saving me a lot of time, work and data. (You can also export all your installed addons as a single installable addon)

10. Fission

Fission is another geeky addon. Using this addon, you can combine your address bar and loading/progress bar, as in windows 7 and vista. Very geeky.

11. ColorfulTabs

Another super-geeky addon. This addon will give different colors to different tabs. Will look really attractive if you work with a lot of tabs open. (After installing this addon, I even thought the default tab color is boring)

12. MeasureIT

A useful and handy tool for web and layout designers. This addon will enable you to measure the the dimensions of objects in a webpage.

13. CookieSwap

This tab will enable you to have and easily manage multiple profile in Firefox. Has other uses too. Suppose you have 50 tabs open in your browser and you have logged in you your GMail account. payPal account, blog and a few other sites. Suppose if you want to go out for a quick bite or something. It won’t be wise to leave the browser open and leave the computer if you are logged into many important site. And if you close all the tabs of just log out of those sites, it will be a chore to log back into each one of them when you come back. In that case use this addon and just switch to a different profile when you go out and you will be automatically logged out of all the sites. When you come back, just switch back to the previous profile, and you are logged in.

14. FoxTab

FoxTab is a cool addon that will let you flip through your Firefox tabs in 3D. The addon is highly customizable and stylish, and sure geeky.

15. View Source Chart

This addon lets us view the source of web pages in an easy to understand manner. Different regions – head, body, divs etc are given in different, easily distinguishable colors. Handy. (No, it doesn’t highlight syntax)

16. xclear

xclear comes in handly when you want to quickly clear your address bar or search box. Give it a try, you will like it.

17. ColorZilla

ColorZilla is very useful for web designers. It comes with a color picker (eye dropper), with which you can find the hexadecimal color code of any element in a page.

18. Total validator

Total validator is a one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like. It is very easy to use too. The only problem is that it needs an internet connection to function.

19. TabRenamizer

This is an incredibly useful addon. It can be used to change the title and favicon of tabs opened in your Firefox window. You can rename all tabs with a shortcut. Comes in totally handy if you want to quickly hide what sites you have opened.

20. Locationbar 2

Locationbar 2 will can segment the url in your address bar for easier navigation to other parts of the same site. I have described a use of this addon in another post – 7 Points to Stay safe in the Social Web.

21. Leet Key

A cool geeky addon with which you can easily type in 1337, ROT13, Hexadecimal, Morse, Binary etc (and more) and type and encrypt text using DES and AES. This one is incredibly geeky and can be used to surprise your friends by quickly type in reverse or in 1337 (h4x0r) when you are chatting.

22. ReminderFox

Easily manage your schedule and set remainders and alarms in your browser. This one is also a featured Firefox addon.

23. ScreenGrab

ScreenGrab enables you to quickly takes screenshots of web pages. The best feature is that we can even decide whether to take the screenshot of only the visible portion or whether the whole page.

24. TwitterBar

Post tweets directly from your browser. Minimal user interface and clean.

25. FireFTP

A full featured FTP explorer right inside your browser. Comes in handy for web devs.

Now tell me what you think and what your favorite addons are. Also, give some love by using the social bookmark icons below.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Hey guys, ever wanted to see how Gmail looks in iPhone? Well, look below.

I don’t own an iPhone, and definitely the window size in the above screenshot is wider than an iPhone. Here is what I did.

Step 1: Installed the Firefox addon called User Agent Switcher.

Step 2: Switched my user agent to the ‘iPhone user agent’

Step 3: Opened GMail as normal.

(Sorry if you were expecting more. but that’s all)

Is there anything useful in this?

Yes. Besides just curiosity, this technique of switching user-agents are sometimes useful too.

How is it useful?

A lot of websites are optimized for mobile use. So if you visit them using a mobile user-agent, you will be presented with a low-weight version of the site. This is very useful when you are using a slow connection (not to mention if your computer is connected to the net using your phone’s GPRS)

How much will I save?

Hmm, that depends. Just before writing this post, I accessed Gmail normally (without changing the user-agent). I measured the page load size – it was more than 2 Mb (WTF)

But when I accessed it with iPhone and Android user-agents, the page loaded in around 150 Kb.

Here see some more of the screenshots I captured with iPhone user-agent.

Twitter

Google Home Page

Facebook

Popularity: 23% [?]

I recently got a scrap in my orkut profile. It looked like total rubbish coz the language it was written in was totally unknown to me.

Google’s Translation service is very good and I thought of decrypting the scrap through Google Translate. Once I reached Google Translate,  I pasted the entire scrap in the box provided there… Then there was another problem.. I couldn’t specify the source language (ie, from which language to english) Aah.. then I got an idea(!!). I just pasted the whole scrap message in Google Search and searched it. Then I examined the URL’s in the search results. Amazingle, most of the search results came from sites with cc TLD (Country Code Top Leve Domain, like .in, .us etc) .br. That means thar most of the search reults are from Brazilian sites..

Yay!! So the language I got the scrap was the ‘Brazilian language’
. So which is the language of brasil, the easiest way to find such facts is google, as always. I just searched ‘language of brazil is‘ in google and it was written in the topm of the results page that ‘Portuguese’.

Now this were easy. I went to google translate and gave the source language as portuguese and destination language as english. Then Google translated it for me.  I’m cool na??

Popularity: 25% [?]

You ever wanted to sing on a mic?? I did, but I was (am!!) too reluctant to do so in a public stage. Aah, so in fact I never did it..  until..

So now we are going to redirect the voice from your microphone to your speakers. Sounds cool na? And no additional software is required.

• Right click on the speaker icon in your system tray.
• Select ‘playback devices’ >> ‘Speakers’
• Choose ‘properties’ >> ‘Levels’
• And then unmute the mic symbol (if there are two mic symbols, unmute ‘front mic’) and increase the volume

Now plug in your mic (or the mic jack of your headphone) and turn up the speaker volume….

… and rock the walls.

[ The configuration instructions are based on windows vista, hope it will be easy to find them in xp too, if you encounter any problem, let me know.. ]

Popularity: 85% [?]

We all agree that Gmail is the coolest mail service out here. I recently read from the Official Gmail Blog two more cool features of Gmail. To be honest, I never knew about those before.

1. Suppose your gmail id is kingjacc@gmail.com, then you can aswell receive mails addressed to king.jacc@gmail.com, or k.ing.ja.cc@gmail.com or so. This is because the Gmail system just ignores any periods(.) in between your userid.
2. And here is another nice one. Again suppose your gmail id is kingjacc@gmail.com. Suppose you are using this id for some official use such as ‘customer feedback’or somehing. So now you can append any other word after your gmail id after a ‘+’ sign. So you can use the mail id ‘kingjacc+feedback@gmail.com‘ or ‘kingjacc+sports@gmail.com‘ or so. And if you want to forward to forward your mails addressed to ‘kingjacc+feedback@gmail.com‘ to another email id, if you need. You can configure this in the gmail settings > filters >

Is n’t it cool, checkout now.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Yesterday my friend sent me a link to a video in his site. I saw the video as streaming and I liked it. I just wanted to keep a copy of it in my collection. So as usual I went to keepvid, my favourite YouTube grabber site. But I couldn’t download the video because the site was not supported. Well these grabber sites do not support the majority of the streaming video sites, coz they are so many of them using different encoding  methods. It was then I thought of it – prior to playing the file, firefox (or any other browser) keeps a copy of the video in its local cache. So I googled to see if there is an option to save cached files, and came up with these..

Tool: Go to http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/video_cache_view.html, there you can download ‘Download VideoCacheView’. This tool will allow you to see all flv videos in your cache..Remember again – you can browse only flv videos using this tool. It is a freeware.

Or click here to download the file directly.

Trick: Ok here is a neat trick to save any file from your cache. If you are using firefox, in the address type about:cache and hit enter. The resultant page will display various information about your cache. On that page click on the link List Cache Entries, and you will get a detailed list of all files that are currently in firefox cache. If you want to save any of those files just browse to the cache folder – it is given at the bottom of the first page (about:cache). It looks something like this 'C:\Documents and Settings\copzz\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\j1l44nro.default\OfflineCache'. Now browse to this folder and copy and save the file you need into another location and change its extention to whatever it is, like .jpg .flv etc.

And you are done. Happy caching.

Popularity: 47% [?]

Most of us keep more than one email id. We may be keeping one for personal communication, one for business communication etc. But it is really difficult to keep up with multiple email ids. You have to check all these ids for any incoming message or to send any mail from those.

But now with gmail, you can completely manage your other email ids with a single id. For the case of incoming messages, you can set to forward all the  messages coming to that id to your gmail id.(ie, if you configure to forward your emails, you can read emails sent to jacc@yahoo.com from jack202@gmail.com). So the problem of incoming mail is saved for now. You can find the mail forwarding option in gmail >> settings >>forwarding >>

And if you want to send a mail from another account, that is also possible with gmail. In Gmail >> Settings >> Accounts >> , you can configure other email ids. Gmail will send a confirmation message and once you confirm the ownership of the other email id, you can start sending emails from those ids from your accounts.That is., if you set jacc@intellwiz.com.com to be your additional email id, then after confirmation you can send emails ‘from saurabh@intellwiz.com‘, right from the gmail id- jacc202@gmail.com. Nice isn’t it?

Popularity: 13% [?]

There is a simple way by which you can block any site from being accessible from your computer. There is a file called “hosts” located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Now open that file in Notepad. This file is used to map domain names with IP addresses, locally within your computer. So whenever you type a domain name (say google.com) in your browser, the browsr first checks if the domain entry is in this “hosts” file. If not present (in most cases), the browser will lookup external servers.

Now the trick, if you want to block google.com, assign the domain name google.com to the ip 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1 is the address of your own computer, commonly known as ‘localhost’) or assign it to any other value such as 127.0.x.x.

Now every time you enters google.com, it goes to 127.0.0.1, ie your own computer. So virtually you have blocked it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

This is the best way and has no side effects.

1)Open start>run
Then type “regedit” (without the quotes)

Now the windows registry editor will appear.

2) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\
Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WPAEvents\OOBETimer

and open it (just double click it). Then change some of the value data to anything else…add or delete some letters or do some thing.
now close regedit.

3)go to start > run > “%systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a” (again, dont type the quotes)

4) the activation screen will come up, click on register over telephone, then click on CHANGE PRODUCT KEY, enter in this key: JG28K-H9Q7X-BH6W4-3PDCQ-6XBFJ

Now you can even update your xp online.The validation thing will not worry you anymore.

Popularity: 43% [?]

It was Indian independence day and all of my classmates (including me) decided to change our orkut profile pictures to the indian tricolor (flag). But some were reluctant since they just liked their profile pictures and had no copy of it with them so that they could reinstate it once the independence day is over. They tried to save the pictures from their profile pages so that they could reuse them. But as a measure to avoid abuse, orkut makes it difficult to copy someones profile picture (including your own)…..

And there the problem lies, some websites donot allow us to copy or download any images from them. They employ genius programmers and spend money to implement complex scripts that make copying of their images difficult. But for every problem that seems to be complex, there is a solution that is too simple to accept… this applies here too.

All you need is a firefox browser. Open the web page in which your image of interest resides in firefox.

Now right click anywhere on the page and select ‘View Page Info’.

Or you can view page information by clicking on the favicon of the web page and clicking ‘More Information’.

Or you can simply select ‘Page Info’ from the tools tab. Now the Page Info window will show up. On it select the tab ‘Media’. There you will see a list of all images present in that web page.Clicking on any item in the list will show a preview of the image right in the window. Near to the display area, there is a button ‘Save As’ and save the image in your computer. That’s all.

Please let me  know if you know any other trick.

Popularity: 4% [?]