Having recently updated my Adobe Flash Player software for the umpteenth time on two different PCs, I discovered that if you download and install it in the normal way, you end up with a new and unwanted Adobe Download Manager Firefox extension that cannot be removed.

Here’s how to avoid this:

On the Adobe Flash Player download page, uncheck the “Free McAfee Security Scan Plus” option (who knows what that will add to your machine), then click on the yellow “Agree and install now” button:

This will take you to a ‘Thank You!’ page where the little yellow ‘Firefox prevented this site [yada yada from installing something] bar comes across the top of the browser . DON’’T click on the Allow button as normal:

INSTEAD, click on the ‘click here for troubleshooting information’ option’. This will take you to a ‘Common Flash Player download and installation issues (Windows)’ page. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will find the ‘If you are still having problems…’ option to download the  most current ‘install_flash_player.exe’ executable directly by clicking on the “Flash_Player_10_ Plugin_(All_other_Windows_ browsers)” option.

Run the executable and you will install the latest Flash plug-in, without the unwanted addition of an unnecessary and unremovable Firefox extension.

Note: The discussion below assumes you are using Firefox 3.0 and above.

A Word about ‘About:Config’

The tweaks below are made through Firefox’s ‘about:config’ page. It’s easy to use. To access the ‘about:config’ settings page enter ‘about:config’ into Firefox’s address bar (circled in green below).

You can scroll up and down the list to find the key you wish to modify (they are listed alphabetically). Click the key you wish to edit, change the value and click ‘OK’. Alternatively you can type the key (or the first few letters of it) in the Filter box (circled in red below) to narrow the list.

Notice that the bolded items in the ‘about:config’ list are keys that have been changed from their defaults by:

• you using about:config;
• Firefox as a result of changes you make to Firefox’s default settings in the ‘Tools/Options’ page; or
• Firefox extensions/add-ons that you have installed.

Speeding Up Firefox:

Frankly, I don’t know if the following pipelining changes work any more. They did in the early days of Firefox. I suspect most ISPs and websites have blocked the bandwidth hogging that these tweaks engender. But, hey, I’ll keep using them until its proven they are ineffective. In the early days they dramatically increased the speed of Firefox – especially if you open multiple tabs simultaneously as I always do:

Pipelining:

Network pipelining allows Firefox to open multiple connections to multiple website at once. To turn pipelining on, modify the following keys on the ‘about:config’ page:

• Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30 to increase the maximum number of requests for content that Firefox can make simultaneously
• Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Setting the Time Out Value:

Ideally Firefox would start to display content as it comes in. However, it often doesn’t. It waits until a certain percentage of a page arrives before displaying it. To change the amount of time Firefox waits before it displays information it receives:

• Right-click anywhere on the ‘about:config’ page to add a new ‘key’
• select New-> Integer.
• Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay”
• set its value to “0″.

Bookmark Synchronization

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

I run Firefox on a half dozen different PCs. I browse by tabbed groups. Almost daily I adjust my tabbed groups on one PC. I want changes made on any PC to be synchronized across all my PCs. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer is THE first add-on I install on every new installation. It automatically keeps my bookmarks, passwords and other settings synchronized across all my Firefox browsers. Synchronizing with Internet Explorer is now in beta. It’s a marvellous add-on. It just works. I highly recommend it.

See my prior post: Synchronize Firefox 3 Bookmarks with foxmarks

Tabbed Browsing

Replaceable Tabs Extension 1

Critical to my tabbed-browsing approach to web surfing is the ability to open multiple tabs at once. In doing so I want the new tabs to overwrite any open tabs. This is how Firefox used to work before Firefox 3. Instead of overwriting, Firefox adds the new tabs along side the existing tabs. This quickly results in a real rats nest of tabs if you browse as I do.

For several months after Firefox 3 was released I used various work-arounds to make Firefox work that way again. Ultimately Martin Warger wrote ‘ReplaceTabs Extension 1’ to solve this problem.

• Click here to download/install Martin’s “ReplaceTabs Extension 1“ extension.
• Open the downloaded .xpi file with Firefox to install the extension (drag and drop the file onto Firefox or right click on the downloaded file and use the ‘Open with…’ option to open it with  Firefox).
• Restart Firefox once installed
• Once restarted, set the following about:config key as follows:

browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace = true

If you are interested in this topic I wrote about it extensively in this post:  Fix For Firefox 3’s ‘Open in Tabs’ Overwrite Bug

Key:  browser.tabs.closeButtons

I prefer having the close tab ‘x’ button available on each tab to quickly close unwanted tabs. To set up a close tab ‘x’ button on each tab, modify this key as follows:

• Modified Value: 1 (display x on every tab)
• Default: 4 (display only on current tab)
• Alternate Modified Value: 2 (don’t display any close tab buttons)

Key: browser.tabs.maxOpenBeforeWarn

While I tend to keep my tab groups to around 15 or less, I don’t want to be nagged each time I exceed that number of open tabs. Accordingly I change the key as follows:

• Modified Value: 25
• Default: 15

Key: browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

As you open multiple tabs, and fill the tab bar, by default tabs start scrolling off the edge to the right. You then must scroll left and right to see your open tabs. You can set the minimum width in pixels for your tabs before this starts happening. I cut the minimum pixel width to 1/4 of the default:

• Modified Value: 25 (effectively shut this function off)
• Default: 100
• Alternate: 50 (will give you twice the default number of tabs before scrolling)

Key: browser.tabs.warnOnClose

I do not need to be babysat when I close tabs. So I change this key:

• Modified Value: false
• Default: true

Extensions For Gmail

Better Gmail 2

The Better Gmail 2 extension provides a number of enhancements (like hierarchical labels, row highlights, macros, file attachment icons) when viewing Gmail in Firefox. I use it for one reason – its ‘Folders4Gmail’ function.

My primary criticism of Gmail remains that users cannot organize emails into folders. I have 10’s of thousands of emails sent/received over a dozen years organized in more than 1,000 hierarchical folders, sub-folders etc. When I used iMap to sync my email between Outlook 2007 and Google Apps Gmail, all those folders are displayed as an enormously long list of Labels within Gmail – which is not only useless to me, but results in Gmail’s left margin being ridiculously long.

The ‘Folders4Gmail’ function of Better Gmail 2 organizes those Labels back into hierarchal folders and subfolders within Gmail – exactly how they appear in Outlook 2007.  Click the image on the left for a larger view of how this looks inside of Gmail.

Gmail Notifier

The Gmail Notifier extension does one thing that I care about. It beeps when a new email comes in. That’s it. Since Outlook 2007 already beeps when new emails come in, I only install this extension on computers where Outlook is not installed.

There are a couple  things I don’t like about Gmail Notifier:

• It beeps every time I start Firefox whether or not there are new emails there; and
• It keeps a running tally in the bottom right corner of Firefox of the total number of unopened Gmail emails. This is useless. I want to know how many new emails have come in since the last time I checked – not the total number of unopened emails – which will always be a high number.

Modify Default Search Engines

I use Google, Wikipedia, IMDb and Live Search more than any other search engines. Consequently, I modify both the contents and the order of the search engines listed in the search engine pull-down menu on the top right of the Firefox browser to place these search engines on the top of the list.

I delete those that I don’t use (obviously not depicted here) and add others that I want.

Click on the ‘Manage Search Engines’ option at the bottom of the list (circled in red on the right) to open the ‘Manage Search Engine List’ page – depicted below.

To reorganize the list, select the  search engine you want to move (IMDb is selected in the image). Then click on the ‘Move Up’ or ‘Move Down’ button as necessary to move the engine up or down the list. Click on the ‘Remove’ button to remove any you don’t use. You can also click on the ‘Get more search engines’ link (circled in red) to add more. There is a large and growing number of search engines available for use with Firefox.

Miscellaneous Extensions

ColorfulTabs

What can I say … this one is frivolous eye-candy. But I like the ColorfulTabs extension. All it does for me is change the color of my many open tabs.

TinyURL Creator

I’m an active Twitterer. I use the TinyURL Creator extension to automatically turn the URL of a web page I’m reading into a tiny URL suitable for inclusion in a tweet. Activating the extension both generates the the tiny URL and places it on your clipboard. All you need to do is write the tweet, paste the URL and your set.

Suggestions?

As you can see I only use a few judiciously chosen Firefox add-ons. I find that beyond a half dozen or so, Firefox can slows down and/or becomes unstable. But, I’m always interested in hearing about add-ons that speed up or enhance tabbed browsing or make working with Gmail via Firefox a better experience.

If you have any suggestions, please, do tell in the comment section below?

I’m delighted to report that thanks to Martijn Warger (see comment 57 here), there is now a tiny Firefox extension that completely solves the problem.

The Problem

For as long as I’ve been using Firefox (a couple years now), middle clicking on any group of tabs in a folder would open all the tabs in the group while simultaneously overwriting all currently open tabs – a very valuable function when you routinely browse by folders as I do.

This was the case when when the about:config

browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace

option was set to true – its default setting.

From the early Firefox 3 betas up through to the current Firefox 3.0.1 version, this has been broken. No matter how that option was set, opening new tab groups appended the new tabs to open tabs instead of overwriting them (more details in my original post).

The Solution

[June 30,009 Update: Martijn has updated the ReplaceTabs Extension to work with Firefox 3.5. Read about it on the Bugzilla here or download it here. I have tested it both on the iMac and on Windows 7 RC and it works just fine. Do not used the old one crossed-out below if you have Firefox 3.5 or above]

Click here to download/install Martijn’s "ReplaceTabs Extension 1". You will need to open the.xpi file with Firefox to install the extension. after installation, Firefox will need to be restarted for the solution to take affect. Once restarted, make sure the about:config option (see picture below) is set as follows:

browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace = true

For those new to "about:config", type "about:config" into the Firefox navigation bar (see picture) and press enter. That will bring up Firefox’s about:config screen (the place to futz with Firefox’s advanced settings). Scroll down to the ‘browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace’ option and make sure its ‘Value’ is set to ‘true’ as pictured below. If it is set to ‘false’, double left click it to turn it to true. That’s all that’s to it.

From then on, middle clicking on a tab group will open those tabs and overwrite the currently open tabs just as Firefox has done for years. Thanks so much Martijn!

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[Nov 8. 2008 Update: There is a new add-on from the Mozilla add-on directly to solve the problem: ‘Openintabs-erase’. If you try it, please let us know how it went for you in the comment section  below. I haven’t tried it because I’m happy with Martijn’s solution (below).]

[June 30, 2009 Update: Martijn has updated the ReplaceTabs Extension to work with Firefox 3.5. Read about it on the Bugzilla here or download it here. I have tested it both on the iMac and on Windows 7 RC and it works just fine. Do not used the old one crossed-out below if you have Firefox 3.5 or above]

————-

[Update: August 1, 2008: We have a solution! Martijn Warger posted the "ReplaceTabs Extension 1" available here that completely solves the problem! I have replaced all the add-ons discussed below with this tiny Firefox extension (open the downloaded .xpi file with Firefox), and set the about:config 'browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace' option to 'true'. Browsing with folder groups in Firefox 3.0.1 now works just as it did in earlier versions of Firefox - overwriting open tabs with your new tabs.  For complete details see my new Fix for Firefox 3's 'Open in Tabs' Overwrite Bug post. Thanks so much Martijn!]

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Firefox allows you to organize bookmarks into folders. You can simultaneously open all bookmarks in a given folder by either: 1)  clicking on the " Open all in Tabs" option in the folder; or by 2) middle clicking on the folder itself.

When I use Firefox to browse the Internet, I almost exclusively use this feature to browse by folder groups rather than browsing one site of a time. For example, when I want to catch up on the news, I middle click on the "News" folder on my toolbar. When I wish to read my forums, I middle click on the " Forums" folder on my toolbar. I use dozens of such folders, set up on my Firefox toolbar and in my bookmark hierarchy, to navigate the Internet on any given day.

The Problem

For as long as I’ve been using Firefox (a couple years now), middle clicking on any folder group (the "Forums" folder, in the example above) would overwrite all previously opened tabs (the "News" folder tabs in the example above) . So, for example, if the "News" folder contained eight sites and the "Forums" folder contained 10 sites, after middle clicking on the ‘Forums’ folder, just 10 open tabs would remain.

Starting with Firefox 3, when a new folder group is opened, new tabs are appended to the previously opened tabs rather than overwriting them. So, in the example above, after middle clicking on the ‘Forums’ folder, 18 tabs would remain open instead of 10.

You can see then that, if you browse by folders, as I do, within a short time you could have 100 or more open tabs. This becomes untenable very quickly!

Prior to Firefox 3, if user wanted tab groups be appended, as they are in Firefox 3 by default, they could have set the following ‘about:config’ option to "false" instead of the default  "true".

browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace

That about:config option no longer works. Along the way to FF3 a bug crept in and, regardless of whether ‘browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace’ is set to ‘true’ or ‘false’, newly clicked tab groups are always appended to open tabs. Open tabs are never overwritten. There is no functioning option at all in Firefox 3 to set it up to overwrite tabs when opening groups the way Firefox has always worked.

I have no problem with the Mozilla developers choosing to change the default group tab navigation behaviour by setting this option to ‘true’ by default instead of ‘false’. Just please fix the bug so that we can set the option to “true” and return overwriting as an option.

There are numerous bug reports on Bugzilla about this. See, for example, here (Bug 175124) and here (Bug 395024). Nonetheless the developers have knowingly decided to release Firefox 3 without fixing the bug.

Four Possible Workarounds (So Far)

[June 19, 2008 Update: This post is getting a lot of attention (for my blog anyway - more than 200 views in one day yesterday).  Workarounds keep coming in. I’ll keep adding better workrounds as they come in.]

Work Around 1:  Second ‘Tab Mix Plus’ Extension (Right Click) Option

[June 19, 2008 Update: Thanks to ajm786 on the Bugzilla forum here and for François X’s subsequent clarification in an email to me, I’m back to using the Tab Mix Plus extension.]

Unbeknownst to me when I wrote the Tab Mix Plus (middle click) option below, by default, the Tab Mix Plus extension has an easy to use right-click workaround. [Update: Aug 1, 2008:  Version. 0.3.7pre.080728 of the Tab Mix Plus extension is downloadable here – note the download page labels it as version…0.3.6.1.080406 but it isn't - it seems the developer keeps linking to the newest build without updating the download page. Note also that this newest version is needed for the newest Firefox version 3.0.1].

As you can see below, if you right click on a folder of tabs (in my case I have several folders on my tool bar) the first option in the dialogue box is “Open All in Tabs”. When Tab Mix Plus is installed by default selecting this option results in the new tabs overwriting the old – just the way we like it.

This is my current favourite workaround. It’s still a two click solution but its a bit faster and easier than the two-click workarounds below – at least for me.

Work Around 2: The ‘Tab Clicking  Option 0.6.9’ Extension Option

[June 18, 2008 Update: Thanks to cooch for suggesting Tab Clicking Options 0.6.9 (download here) on June 18, 2008 in the comments below.]

Tab Clicking Options 0.6.9 extension does the same thing as the Tab Mix Plus workaround (below) with a lot less overhead.

Note: The two extensions are mutually incompatible. You can choose only one or other.

As shown below, after downloading and installing the Tab Clicking Options extension, open the Options screen, select the “middle click” tab and chose “Close all Tabs” for the ‘on a tab” option.

Once done, you can middle click on any open tab to close all the currently open tabs before selecting the next group of tabs to open. A two step process, but the best I’ve found so far.

If you don’t need/want all the functionality that ‘’Tab Mix Plus’ extension gives you, this is a light-weight solution.

Work Around 3:  First “Tab Mix Plus’ Extension (Middle Click) Option

[May 28, 2008 Update: This 'Tab Mix Plus' section is an update to the original post .]

Thanks to benWorks (here) for pointing out that there is a stable development build (v. 0.3.6.1.080406 of Tab Mix Plus here) that works with Firefox 3 RC1. It does not provide the exact function I’m after that Tab Browser Preferences does in pre-Firefox 3 releases, but it’s a tiny bit better than the Toolbar Button method mentioned below.

In Tab Mix Plus there is a setting to customize what middle clicking on a Tab does. As, you can see below, I set the ‘Middle-click – on a tab’ option to ‘Close all Tabs’.

Now when I want to open a new group of tabs I middle-click on any open tab  and then immediately middle-click on the tab group I want to view next. There’s no need to hunt down the little red as I did above before opening a new tab group.

Admittedly not a huge difference, but a slight improvement that works better for me.

Work Around 4: The ‘Toolbar Buttons’ Extension Option

[Update: The following was written before I discovered the other extensions above.]

Despite many hours of Google searching I have not found an elegant solution to this problem. None of the Firefox extensions that contain group tab functionality work with Firefox 3. And, I suspect that, even if they did they all rely on the now buggy ‘browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace’ option and would thereby be ineffective at providing group tab overwriting functionality.

The only original option I came up with was to close all open tabs prior to opening a new group of tabs. This can be manually done in Firefox by right clicking on any tab and then choosing ‘Close Other Tabs’ before opening the new tab group. The downside, of course, is that this takes multiple clicks and mouse movements and still results in one of the original tabs remaining open.

I also searched through all the Firefox 3 compatible extensions and, as expected, I could not find one that provides a 1-click ‘Close all Tabs’ option.

The first work around I found uses the Toolbar Button 0.5.0.4 extension.

This nifty extension allows you to add any of dozens of buttons to Firefox 3′a toolbar. One such button is the " Close Other Tabs" button . By installing this button on your Firefox 3 toolbar you can, as you’d expect, use it to close all open tabs save one, prior to opening your next group of tabs’.

Toolbar Button also contains a "Close All" button . While it does indeed close all open tabs as you’d expect, it is much slower than using the ‘Close Other Tabs’ button .

To add this button, after installing the Toolbar Button 0.5.0.4 extension, right click anywhere on the Firefox 3 toolbar, click ‘Customize’, find it in the group of buttons, then drag and drop it onto your Firefox toolbar.

Incidentally, Toolbar Button contains many other useful buttons making it a worthy addition to your FireFox 3 extension library in any event.

Please add a comment below if you have a better solution.