Yesterday, I was talking to some friends about how I think that we are living in the most exciting times. I used to envy my grandparents who saw the first cars, airplanes, and rockets. But now, I think that the creation of the Internet has trumped these prior innovations. Okay, I am sure that I will not get universal consensus on this, but you have to admit that the Internet is pretty darn great.

Since one of my favorite past times is surfing the Internet, I am always looking for Firefox tips and tricks. Here are 10 great firefox tips. For you power users I hope there is at least one in this list that you did not know about before. If there is, then I am going to consider this article a success.

• Customize your firefox toolbars – If you right click next to the Help menu, you can select customize. From this screen you can totally customize your toolbars. You can add items to toolbars and move items from one toolbar to another. This is a great way to regain valuable real estate with Firefox by getting rid of buttons you never use. You can consolidate two or more toolbars into one.

• FoxMarks Extension – If you work on more than one computer, this firefox extension is awesome. FoxMarks allows you to sync you firefox bookmarks on multiple computers. I hate when I bookmark something during the day at my work computer, and then go to read it at night on my home computer.

• Restore Closed Tabs – Have you even closed a tab by accident?  I am sure you have.  We all do it.  I usually swear a few times.  Well, now I won’t get yelled at by my wife for swearing.  If you hit Ctrl + Shft + T you can restore your closed tabs.

• Use Pipeline – Increase your page load speeds by turning on Firefox’s pipeline function.  You turn pipeline on by going into Firefox’s about:config screen.  To do that just type in about:config into the address bar.  From this screen enter true for network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining.  Then set the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8.  This will allow you to open up to 8 pages at one time.

• Delete the Go Button – Who uses the Go Button?  I don’t.  In fact it ticks me off that it is even there.  Well, I figured out how to delete it.  Again, go into the about:config screen and set the browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to true.

I hope that at least one of these tips was new for you.  The one that has significantly increased my love for Firefox is FoxMarks.  Maybe I will do a separate post just on this.  I hope you enjoy these firefox tips.  If you have any favorite firefox tips, share them in the comments.

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Here are some of the highlights for the release notes:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

More Security

• One click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed.
• Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. You can test it here (note: our blacklist of malware sites is not yet activated).
• New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. You can test it here.
• New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.
• Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.
• Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.
• Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
• Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Easier to Use

• Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
• Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files.
• Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
• Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.
• Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.
• Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
• Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
• Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.
• Text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph.
• Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
• Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
• Integration with Vista: Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.
• Integration with the Mac: Firefox now uses the OS X spellchecker and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.

More Personal

• Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
• Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
• Location bar & auto-complete: type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history; favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where results are coming from.
• Smart Places Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as you more frequently visited pages with the new smart places folder on your bookmark toolbar.
• Bookmarks and History Organizer: advanced search of your history and bookmarks with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.
• Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).
• Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

• New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
• Native Web page forms: HTML forms on Web pages now have a native look and feel on Mac OS X and Linux (Gnome) desktops.
• Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.
• Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).
• A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

• Reliability: A user’s bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.
• Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 1, and will show further gains in future Beta releases.
• Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

So if you are interested in testing the new Mozilla Firefox 3, go here to get your Firefox download.

1. Open a new tab by double clicking on an empty space in the firefox tab bar. This is the coolest firefox tip that I have recently learned. I hated going up to the file menu and clicking on the new tab button. Now I don’t have to!!

2. One of my favorite firefox addons is All-in-One Gestures. This firefox add on allows me to make gestures with my mouse and control my firefox browser. By right clicking my mouse and drag it to the left, I can go back to the last page I was browsing. I can close a tab by right clicking my mouse and moving it down and then to the left. I love how this speeds up my web browsing.

3. For those of you with blogs, I highly recommend installing the Scribe Fire Firefox addon. ScribeFire is a great blog editor that integrates with monzilla firefox.

4. You can go back a page by hitting the “Backspace” key. This is a very convenient way to move back a page.

5. Configure your Firefox addons by going to Tools => Add-ons and then right clicking the firefox addon you want to configure. I did not know that Firefox addons had options you could set. I would like to thank Geekenough.com for this tip!!

6. Did you know that you can tag your firefox bookmarks? Simply go to your firefox bookmarks folder, right click on a bookmark and then go to properties. On the properties page, you can assign a keyword to that bookmark. Then you can go to that bookmark by simply typing that keyword into your address bar. Thanks Lifehack.org!!

7. I am sure that many already know this trick, but I recently learned it. You can bookmark a site by hitting “Ctrl + D”. I am a little embarrassed that I did not know this until recently. You will notice that I added this tip to my blog template hoping that people will bookmark Newest on the Net. I would like to thank seologs.com for introducing me to this shortcut.

8. Another cool way to bookmark a site is to place your mouse pointer over the page’s favicon, left click and drag it to you bookmarks folder. This is a great tip. Thanks Techlicious.TV!!

9. The Mozilla Firefox website has a great list of all of the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. Instead of listing filling up this article with keyboard shortcuts, here is the complete list. I would like to thank WrongAdvices.com for leading me to this list.

10. Do you have several sites that you like to have open at all times? Well, Firefox allows you to open multiple home pages at one time when you launch Firefox. This save me a lot of time. To implement this go to Tools => Options => Main. From the Main menu you can ask Firefox to use a bookmark folder as your homepage. Put all of the websites that you want to automatically launch into a special bookmark folder and then select that bookmark folder to be your home page.

If you haven’t downloaded the latest mozilla Firefox browser, here is the latest Firefox download.

I hope that you liked this article. Please leave a firefox tip of your own in the comments.

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