Hacking Firefox - part 24 ppsx

F IGURE 12-8: Translate text while browsing with the Translator sidebar.Open Your Search Results Quickly with Linky Search engines give you pages and pages of links as results for your q

F IGURE 12-8: Translate text while browsing with the Translator sidebar.

Open Your Search Results Quickly with Linky

Search engines give you pages and pages of links as results for your queries That’s great, but you have to click on each link that you want to visit to open the site in a new tab If you’re interested in only one or two links, you’re okay, but what if you want to see four or five links?

Or all of the links on a page? That’s where the Linky extension comes in Linky adds the option to open some or all links in a page in new tabs or windows Just right-click anywhere in the page and pick from the Linky menu, shown in Figure 12-9 If you first highlight a part of the page containing links, you will have the option to open either the selected links or all the links on the page

Figure 12-10 shows the popup window that allows you to confirm which links you want to open Linky can also show all images from a web page in a new tab or window, or open images from a list of image links

F IGURE 12-9: The Linky extension’s context menu.

F IGURE 12-10: Linky’s open links confirmation window.

Linky can get you through your search results in a hurry.

You can find the Linky extension at http://gemal.dk/mozilla/linky.html

Turning Nonlinked Links into Linkable Links

Sometimes, in the course of your browsing, you’ll wind up on a page with a URL that isn’t a hyperlink You’d like to go to that site, but you’d have to cut and paste the URL into the loca-tion bar or take your hand off the mouse and type it When you find yourself in that situaloca-tion, fear not, for you have the Linkification extension

Linkification activates these text links and makes them clickable so you don’t have to do any pesky typing or highlighting Just right-click on the page, look for the Linkification context menu, and select Linkify Text Any text links in the page will become clickable, ready for your browsing needs There’s also a feature-rich options menu for Linkification available from the Extensions list

Figure 12-11 shows part of a Google results page with some links that are not clickable

F IGURE 12-11: Text links that cannot be clicked.

After using Linkification, some of those same links are now underlined and can be clicked, as shown in Figure 12-12

F IGURE 12-12: The same links after applying Linkification.

Linkification may not work on all text links, but it should work on those with the standard http://www.foo.com format

Get Linkification from http://www.beggarchooser.com/firefox/

Searching within the Web Page

You’ve been searching the web for information and you’ve finally found the page that contains what you need The trouble is that the page is filled with text and you’re not sure where your information is located What you need now is a search tool that works inside the web page You can access the Find command from the browser’s Edit menu to bring up the search toolbar and look for your term You can also press Ctrl+F to activate the search toolbar Or you can just type the term using Firefox’s Find-As-You-Type feature

To use Find-As-You-Type, click in the web page, type a forward slash (/), then the text of your

search Firefox jumps to the first instance of the characters you type and highlight the text it finds The search toolbar appears at the bottom of the browser window with your text in it, along with Find Next and Find Previous buttons (see Figure 12-13) To find text located in links on the page, type an apostrophe (’) followed by the text

If you really like the function, you can activate it all the time:

1 On the Options menu, under Advanced, look for the Accessibility items at the top of the

list

2 Check the box next to “Begin finding when you begin typing” and click OK.

Now you don’t need to use the leading forward slash or apostrophe to start your search; just start typing in the web page and Firefox locates your terms

F IGURE 12-13: Firefox’s Find-As-You-Type feature in action.

Once you stop typing your search terms, the toolbar disappears from the screen after a set time You can change the amount of time the toolbar is displayed by adjusting the setting in

about:config, as follows:

The default is 5000 milliseconds (equal to five seconds), so if you want to show the toolbar for ten seconds instead, change the setting to 10000 You’ll have to restart Firefox for this change

to take effect

Recommended Search Extensions

So far, we’ve discussed extensions that are behind the scenes, hiding until you need them Now let’s shift the focus to a few extensions that add visible search toolbars to Firefox and that go far beyond the search capabilities built into the browser

The most popular Internet search portals — Google, Yahoo!, MSN, to name a few — have created toolbars for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) that give users enhanced search benefits and also provide shortcuts to the portals’ special features Firefox users were initially left out so extension authors stepped in to create versions of these toolbars for Firefox While these unof-ficial versions don’t provide 100 percent of the functionality of their IE counterparts, they do give Firefox users most of the same abilities as the IE versions

Googlebar

One of the first add-on toolbars to appear was the Googlebar It provides most of the same functions for Firefox as the official Google toolbar for IE does for that browser Figure 12-14 shows the Googlebar in Firefox You can search for information on any of Google’s primary sites: Web, Images, News, and USENET newsgroups There are drop-down menus to search Google for specific computer-related information or scour university web sites There are even links to Google’s nonsearch features such as Gmail and Blogger Googlebar also provides con-text menu options within web pages and is highly configurable For example, if you want to add

a button to search Apple’s web site for search terms, take the following steps:

1 Right-click on the Googlebar.

2 Select Computer Searches.

3 Select Mac Search.

An iMac icon appears on the toolbar When you type your query into the search box and click the Mac button, Googlebar searches Apple’s web site for your information To choose a default university web site to search, click on the arrow next to the graduate cap icon and choose your preferred school from the alphabetical drop-down menu

F IGURE 12-14: Googlebar expands your Google search options in Firefox.

More Googlebar configuration options can be found on the extension’s Options window If you prefer to search one of Google’s international sites instead of the default U.S engine, you can set the Googlebar to use a different site on the Google Site Options tab This option is avail-able for Google News, as well

Googlebar is available at http://googlebar.mozdev.org

Ultrabar

The makers of Ultrabar looked at Googlebar and said, “That’s great, but what if I prefer a dif-ferent search engine?” Ultrabar is designed not only to allow you to choose difdif-ferent search engines within the toolbar, but also to give you easy access to tools to maintain your blog In addition to a standard search-only toolbar, you can download Ultrabars for Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and Bloglines blogs

Once installed, Ultrabar looks and feels similar to Googlebar but with more search sites and fewer buttons Figure 12-15 shows Ultrabar’s typical layout and list of search engines

F IGURE 12-15: Ultrabar gives you more search options from the toolbar.

You can find Ultrabar at http://www.firefoxtoolbar.com/download

Yahoo! Toolbar

Like Google, Yahoo! created its own toolbar for Internet Explorer that gave its users conve-nient access to searches, web mail, news, stock quotes, and many other features of their portal

Yahoo! has also developed a version of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox With the toolbar installed, you can sign into your Yahoo! account and configure the toolbar to show you the but-tons for portal services that you use most often For example, I play fantasy football through Yahoo!, so I configured my toolbar to put a Fantasy Sports icon next to the search box (see Figure 12-16)

F IGURE 12-16: Yahoo! Toolbar puts the portal’s features within easy reach.

Yahoo! Toolbar is found at http://toolbar.yahoo.com/firefox

Summary

This chapter explained different ways that Firefox can be modified to suit your searching habits It looked at a plethora of tools and extensions that let you search the Web from any-where in the browser, including search boxes, toolbars, and even within web pages It also explained how to define words and translate pages with a few mouse clicks You are now a web search master

Automation, Tools,

and Tricks

Chapter 13

Hacking Installation and Deployment

Chapter 14

Backing Up and Managing Your Profile/Settings

Chapter 15

Hacking Tools for Web Programmers

part

in this part