Tagged with firefox

How to search Google UK from the address bar in Firefox

Posted in Tutorial tagged with firefox Sat 26 Jun 2010 8:53 am

Searching using the default Google search from Firefox’s address bar will use Google US, but if you want to change this to Google UK, you can use the following method.

You can edit many of the Firefox’s preferences by opening Firefox and typing “about:config” (without the quotes) into the address bar. You will then be greeted by a screen that reads “Hear be dragons!”. Click the button that reads “I’ll be careful, I promise!” (and make sure you are), and the preferences list will appear. As you can see, there are loads. Type “keyword” into the “Filter:” search field at the top of the page and two preferences will be displayed, “keyword.URL” and “keyword.enabled”.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

Firstly, copy the line of text above and then double click on the “keyword.URL” preference. A pop-up box titled “Enter string value” will appear. Paste the text into the input field and click “OK”. Next, if the text in the “Value” column of the second preference “keyword.enabled” reads “false”, double click on the preference to change it to “true”. This will allow the search keyword we just set to be used. With this setting set to “false”, any search in the address bar will take you to the closest URL to your search term. You may like this functionality, but the sites you will be taken to will only be in relation to the URL, not in relation to any search engine page-rank or site quality.

Close the “about:config” tab or Firefox itself to close the preferences menu. Other resources on Firefox include my blog post How to view your Firefox bookmarks in a tab and MozillaZine’s About:config entries article.

Sloppily typed by Nick Pyett


How to view your Firefox bookmarks in a tab

Posted in Tutorial tagged with firefox Fri 14 May 2010 4:02 pm

There are many great add-ons for Firefox (the open-source web browser from Mozilla), some of which allow you to open your bookmarks in a formatted tab. Both Bookmarks Tab and MyBookmarks do this, but if you want something even simpler, copy and paste the following line into Firefox’s address bar.

chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksPanel.xul

Easy! If you want to be even craftier, you can bookmark the address, right click, choose “Properties”, check the box that says “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” and click “Save”. You now have a bookmark that will open all your bookmarks as normal when you left-click, or open in them in a new tab when you Ctrl+click or middle-click, just like opening a normal tab window.

Other great Firefox resources include the Basic Bookmarks add-on, a jimmyrcom YouTube tutorial showing you how to speed the browser up with about:config and LifeHacker’s guide to FF3.

Sloppily typed by Nick Pyett