Dress Up Your Browser

Image via CrunchBase

I just installed Personas for Firefox last night. How long has this been around? I'm not sure, but I'm really loving it. Personas lets you dress up your browser with easy to install and easy to change 'skins' for Firefox.

watch a quick video demonstration:

Getting Started with Personas from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

Not only can you choose from the many 'skins' available on the site, you can even create your own. The instructions are right on the page. Here are some my brother, who found this first, has created - Personas by krayeg.

I had a little trouble getting this to work at first, I think because I had a theme installed. When I went back to the default firefox theme and restarted my browser, it worked just fine. The fun with Personas is that you can very easily change the look of your browser, and you don't have to restart your browser for the changes to take effect. You can even preview the look before you intall simply by mousing over the designs in the gallery. I'm having a lot of fun doing that, but you don't have to visit the Personas gallery. You can choose and change your selected Persona any time simply by clicking on the little fox mask in the lower left-hand corner of your browser window.

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Learn Firefox

I finally downloaded and installed the Read it Later extension I mentioned earlier. After I downloaded, installed, and restarted Firefox, I got a box asking me to drag the 'read later' and 'reading list' buttons to my toolbar. I hit OK, and it opened a box for me, but I didn't see those buttons to drag. I ended up closing the box, and then I couldn't figure out how I got it. I finally figured it out - right-click on the toolbar, and select 'Customize' - so that was pretty easy. When I reopened it, the buttons I was looking for were there. I simply dragged them to the toolbar, and they are waiting for me to use them.

Somehow I found this page that explained it all. I'm looking through the pages I was on, and I still can't figure out how I got there. One of these days I am going to keep track of my path through the Web. It would be quite interesting. I did pay attention to the main site that this page is a part of, and I think it should be quite useful. It's called Learn Firefox, and it's a visual guide to the Firefox browser. I just jumped in, downloaded, and started using the browser, but I don't think it can hurt to go back and see if there's something I can use here. For instance, there's a page here called Rearrange the Order of Your Tabs. I wish I had read this earlier, because I was using Firefox for ages, and loving the tabs, before I realized I could rearrange my tabs.

Learn Firefox has different categories such as themes, extensions, bookmarks, news, and more. It's nicely organized and easy to read, and it just might help you learn something you didn't know about Firefox.

Comment Pop-Ups

For a while now, I've had problems with the comment pop-ups on Blogger. If someone has selected 'show comments in a popup window' in their blog settings, whenever anyone clicks on the comments link, it opens a pop-up window with all the comments and the comment form. While I don't know why someone would want this option, it wouldn't cause a problem, except - the pop-up window is this tall, skinny box. It can't be resized or maximized, and only about three words show up on each line. Actually trying to type a comment in? Practically impossible. If word verification has been enabled? Completely impossible, because none of the letters can even be seen, let alone typed into the box.

Now, I'm not willing to go away without commenting, so there must be a way to get around this. Yes, there is. First, I mouse over the comments link. If the link ends in 'Popup=true' I right-click and select 'Open Link in New Tab'. Then I go to that new tab to submit my comment. It opens full size, and I can read all the comments and type my comment in easily.

Now, if someone can explain to me why so many pop-ups, and not just in Blogger, are popping up in such strange sizes, I would really appreciate it.

What Browser Do You Use?

I've been using Firefox for quite a while now. Before that I used Netscape, and I still use it when I need to create or edit a web page. I'm linking to the Netscape Browser Archive because, when they came out with version 8, I think, it was just a browser. I like the complete Netscape package - browser, email, and composer. Those people who never create or edit a web page don't need the composer, so they don't really miss it. I haven't upgraded since version 7.1, and I probably won't. I appreciate that they keep the older versions available here so that you can download and install the version that meets your needs.

I know there are people who use that browser that comes with their Windows operating system, but I refuse to use it. There are a few times I have to open it to see what a web page looks like in IE, but I even try to avoid that. Usually I can assume that, no matter how nice the page might look in any other browser, it is going to be messed up in IE. I don't know why that is, but it irritates me to no end, and I usually don't know how to fix it.

In Firefox, I have the IE Tab extension installed so that I can check things, without opening that other browser. That's pretty handy. There are over a thousand useful add-ons for Firefox, making it easy to customize your browser and make it do what you want. Usually I just start browsing and installing the ones that interest me, but today I found this list of the Best Firefox Extensions - compiled and broken down into categories. Each one has a brief description of the extension and what it does, and the link to download it. Instead of having to browse through endless extensions trying to find the right ones, you might appreciate starting with this list. I'll be going through it to see what great extensions I've missed and don't have yet.

Also, in the future, I will be listing my favorite extensions here, too. Maybe I like some that haven't made this list.