Firefox Quick Searches

I guess I have never really explored the full functionality of Firefox, otherwise I would have seen this ages ago! But there you go.

I have a friend at work who is constantly singing the virtues of the Opera web browser to me, trying to get me to adopt it. So far he has failed, but one of the features I do love if the ability to use shortcuts in the address bar for searches. For example if he wants to do a Wikipedia search he heads to the address bar and types in: wiki #whatever which takes him directly to the Wikipedia search results for #whatever. OK so its not so difficult to open a wiki page form your bookmarks and type it in there but it always bugged me that I couldn't find a Firefox extension to do this. That would be because Firefox has this functionality built right in!

Firefox Quick Searches provides exactly this functionality, a way to add custom shortcuts for addresses. That is all very well assuming you know the links for the search shortcut you want to use, fear not. The folks over at Lifehacker have put together their top 15 Quick searches in a handy downloadable (right click and save as) HTML file that you can import straight into your existing Firefox bookmarks.

Unfortunately, they are a bit US centric so I hope they won't mind that I have put together a UK version (right click and save as). The only link that doesn't seem to have liked the move is the Yahoo Local search, but I'll work on that.

Of course the list is totally customizable and its really easy once you know how. Of course with the use of Foxmarks these quick searches will be copied to all the PC's you use Firefox on!

Reduce Firefoxes Memory Use

When I'm at work I like to use my Portable Firefox to browse the web (on my lunch break obviously!). However, working in a support environment I tend to need to have lots of programs running, documents open and remote sessions active. As such I like to make the memory footprint of my software as small as possible. Here are some tips to minimizing Firefoxes memory usage:

Mozilla Knowledge Base article on reducing memory usage.
Mozilla Knowledge Base article on running in Safe Mode
Trim Firefox memory usage when minimized - Lifehacker article
Clear out browser session history to improve memory usage
Speed up page loading in Firefox

I'm sure there are many other tips and tricks to make Firefox more memory efficient, but I have tried and tested these and found them to provide a real world improvements.

Firefox addons to make the most of the Eee PC screen

After installing Crunchee here are a couple of Firefox extensions I've installed to make the most of the screen real estate.

1) Disable Menu (press alt-m to show or hide the main menu)
2) Hide Nav Bar (press F2 to show / hide the navigation bar)
3) Foxmarks (a great tool for syncing bookmarks between PC's, it includes a nifty work / personal profile facility.)
4) Shareholic (customizable list of options to allow you to share the site you are reading through a variety of mediums like twitter or your tumblr blog.)
5) Better Gmail and Better Greader (obviously)
6) Read it later (a great bookmarking tool when you want to 'read it later')
7) and of course Greasemokey with the following scripts:
- Google Apps sidebar remover (removes the adds from Gmail),
- Google Reader Minimalistic (gives you some hot key options to hide the top panes, w, and the side pane, u.)
- Writing Room 4 Google Documents - allows you to toggle the Google header on or off.

Many of these additions help to make the most of the small screen on the Eee PC 901.