Thursday, July 06, 2006

The Firefox Screencap Project: Vectorspace

Today's entry in The Firefox Screencap Project is from Vectorspace. Vectorspace is one of the Moderators on the MozillaZine Forums. He has also written a few Greasemonkey scripts, which you can find here. Take a look at his screencap to the left (click to see full-size).

Vectorspace writes,

I've been using Firefox since it was Firebird 0.6.1, (almost 3 years ago now, since it was mentioned on the news page of my favourite webcomic...) and have been helping on the forums for almost as long. In doing so I learned a great deal about Firefox, which is why I have so many customisations. Firefox has long since become by default browser, and I only ever touch IE now to test html & javascript I've written (or the occasional website that doesn't work properly in Firefox).

I currently have three versions of Firefox installed - 1.0.8, 1.5.0.4, and 2.0a3. My entry here is for 1.5.0.4 (my default) but I find myself using 2.0a3 more and more these days. Once 2.0 Beta1 arrives I'll probably switch over to that as default.
I'm so used to the tabbed browsing interface, middle-clicking, and Firefox's keyboard shortcuts that using any other browser (especially IE) seems slow and extremely inconvenient.

My customisations:

The theme is Qute Retro- a port of the default theme from FF 0.8.

Extensions:
BBCodeXtra 0.2.5.4- add bbcode from context menu
Bookmark Backup 0.3.3- auto back up any profile file on browser close
Clone Window 0.2.6 - new windows/tabs clone the content and history of the current page
Console² 0.3.5 - improved error console
DOM Inspector 1.8.0.4 - explore and dynamically alter the DOM of a page/window
Download Manager Tweak 0.7.1 - improved download manager
Download Scan 1.1 - automatically virus scan downloaded files
Forecastfox 0.9.2 - weather forecasts on the toolbar
Greasemonkey 0.6.4 - user script manager
IE View 1.2.7 - launch current page in IE from context and tools menu's
InfoLister 0.9c - list extensions/themes/plug-in info
Nightly Tester Tools 1.0.4 - override extension max versions
Popup ALT Attribute 1.3.2005092701 - show image alt tag contents in a tooltip
Show Image 0.4.1 - context menu item to reload an image that failed to load
SwitchProxy Tool 1.4 - set up and manage multiple proxy servers
Talkback 1.5.0.4 - sumbit crash report
Too many tabs! 0.5.4 - provides solutions to tab overflow
User Agent Switcher 0.6.8 - change browser's user agent

I've added a few extra buttons to the toolbars (report broken site, mail button, downloads, bookmarks, history, new tab, new window) and removed the bookmarks toolbar.

I moved the search bar to the menubar where there's more room, just to the left of the throbber, and lengthened it to 320px. I made a custom Google UK search plug-in - modified to search inside UK rather than everywhere - complete with a custom icon (Google 'G' plus corner of Union Flag). The custom icon is so I can tell it apart from the default Google search plug-in that searches the whole web.

I have some user.js settings; the cache setting set to check each time, find as you type set to search all text, memory trim on minimise enabled, prefetching disabled, and some of the performance tuning settings.

I have some userChrome.css code; the search bar set to a length of 320px, and the code to restore the Windows Classic look menus. In userContent.css I have some code to remove the ads on the MozillaZine Forums.

I also have a number of Greasemonkey scripts, many of which I've modified or written myself.

I have Firefox 1.0.8, 1.5.0.4 (this screencap) and 2.0a3 installed. The open folder on my taskbar is "Firefox Multiprofile" - it contains batch files to launch additional firefox.exe processes with specific profiles, alongside any already-running instances. They allow me to run the main profile(s), test profile, or profile manager for any version, even if a firefox.exe process is already running.