Flush with victory over getting that extra third of an inch of depth in my Firefox browser window, I decided to tempt fate and upgrade to Firefox 2.0 on the main machines. I had been running on the test machine Ollie and, a few quirks aside, I was okay with it.
The upgrade process was quick, but not painless. It left my old Firefox installation alive and kicking in a sub-folder called Firefox 1.5. That caused some confusion. And it took a few starts and restarts before the old extensions got themselves worked out. (as an aside, the person responsible for changing the name extension to add-in must be the son of the keyboard designer for the original IBM keyboard, the one that was NOT based on the top-selling keyboard of the time, the IBM Selectric Typewriter. Change for change's sake is dumb).
My first reaction was to panic over some of the extensions I had lost. All-in-One Sidebar was working a little wonky, but the only one of my must-have list missing was Copy Image. That seemed replaced by a built-in version. So, no harm there. Bookmark Backup was also missing in action and that concerned me. As was Diggler. ColourfulTabs and WellRounded made me wistful for my old version. But the REAL problem, interface-wise, was the missing close tab button on the far right of the tab header row. I could live with the tab headers scrolling rather than showing a gazillion mini headers. But I needed that button back. Sure, each tab had it's own close button, but I used middle-click for that when I was in the vicinity. But when I just wanted to scan through a bunch of sites quickly, I needed the one-stop action of the right-hand-side close button.
I went looking for new “add-ins” and found some delightful ones. More of that later. What I didn't find was an add-in that would give me back the close tab button. Off to google for “firefox restore close button” and found instructions to do this.
Into the url field, type in About:config and hit enter. That takes you to the arcane Firefox configuration file. Scroll down until you find: browser.tabs.closeButtons and right click. Choose to modify and change the value from 0 or 1 to 3. Voila! You and I are happy again. If you want to get a more complete explanation, go to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButtons.
Diggler's ability to go back up a site tree has been replaced by ParentFolder. Not quite as all-knowing as Diggler, but it'll do. I also miss the left-hand-side NewFolder on the tab header bar, but I simply customized the menu to put it on the top row where I have the word menu plus the navigation toolbar.
Now for the new goodies. The ColorfulTabs are now a thing of the past. Replaced with AgingTabs. After loading this one, I changed the custom tab colour to Bright yellow with an aging target of dull yellow. The Highlight slected tab became light lime green and I told it to age every 60 seconds. I slid the aging amount slider to the middle. Perfect!
The other REALLY NEAT thing was TabsOpenRelative. This one meant any links I clicked on would open RIGHT after the tab I was currently on, rather than the far right. THIS, is a wonderful thing. Remember, I have folders of links I open with a single middle click. That gets my sports links, entertainment links and computer links up there already loaded as I go through them site by site. It was not unusual to be going through the sports stuff, see a link I wanted to load and do so. But it would load AFTER all of my other already-loaded links. So I was faced with the decision to read all of sports, then entertainment, then computers and finally go back to the sports link, or pop to the end and then come back. TabsOpenRelative solves that utterly and completely.
Firefox 2.0 is now VERY friendly with the wheel on your mouse or trackball. In the tab header area, the scroller will move the tab headers right and left. On a page, it scrolls as you expect and if you hold the control key down while using it, it moves the size of type up and down. Very nifty. And when you add the return of being able to use the space bar to page down, which I suspect TabBrowserPreferences ate a year ago, I can unequivocally say, UPGRADE!
Some goodies you MIGHT want to investigate include the GmailSpace and Check4Change add-ins which I have loaded but haven't used. BookmarkDuplicateDetector does what it says. PDFDownload and SourgeforgeDirectDownload help me with saving files to my drive in a quicker, smarter, less error-prone manner. And UndoClosedTabsButton will come in handy eventually. Probably.
Yep, the upgrade is the smart thing to do.
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