Here are a few tips on using your mouse scroll wheel in Firefox that could save you some time.

1. Closing Tabs
To close a tab just place your mouse cursor on a tab and click with the scroll wheel. This is more convenient and faster than clicking the small cross on the tabs, especially when you want to close several tabs.

2. Opening hyperlinks in a new tab
Very often we would like to open a link in a page in a new tab. The normal way to achieve this is by right-clicking on the the link and choosing ‘Open Link in New Tab‘. Here’s a much quicker way. Just click on the link with the scroll wheel. Presto! the link will open in a new tab. You can even click on the Home button or the Forward/Back button to open the respective url in a new tab.

3. Paste URL & Go
Sometimes you would need to copy a link from another source and paste it into the address bar and hit Enter to open the link. There is an easier alternative in Firefox. You can just press the scroll button in the content area to paste, and go to the url. By default this functionality is disabled in Firefox but you can enable it with two simple tweak in about:config. Why two tweaks? Because of a bug in Firefox, the ‘Paste URL & Go’ does not work if AutoScroll is enabled. So besides enabling the paste and go feature you need to disable autoscroll. So here we go. Enter about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Look for the Preference Name middlemouse.contentLoadURL and double-click on it to change it’s value to true.

Also look for the Preference Name general.autoScroll and change its value from true to false by double-cliking on it.

That’s all to it. Here are few different ways you can use the Paste URL & Go feature after you have copied a url.

• Pressing the wheel button in the content area pastes the url and loads the page in the current tab.
• Holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the wheel button opens the url in a new tab.
• Holding down the Shift key and pressing the wheel button opens the url in an entirely new Firefox instance.

4. Scrolling through the tabs
When you have many tabs open, an arrow appears on either end of the tab bar to let you scroll through the tab bar and view the hidden tabs. There is a much easier way. Just place your mouse cursor anywhere on the tab bar and scroll your mouse wheel up and down to scroll through the tab bar.

5. Moving Forward/Back
You can use the scroll wheel as an alternative to using the Forward and Back buttons on the toolbar. Hold down the Shift key and rotate the wheel forward to view the next page or rotate backward to see the previous page.

6. Zooming
To zoom into a page, hold the Ctrl key and turn the scroll wheel away from you. Similarly, to zoom out, hold the Ctrl key and rotate the scroll wheel towards you.

One way is to do the tweaking manually by accessing about:config and editing the parameters. Editing the configuration manually may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But there is a much easier and quicker way of doing the same: Firetune. Firetune is a free tool that will optimize several internal settings of Firefox for better performance according to your specific computer speed and Internet connection speed. Firetune works with all versions of Firefox, even the latest Firefox 3.0.

In three easy steps Firetune will make your favorite browser faster than ever:

1. Create backup of configuration
2. Choose the combination of your computer speed and your Internet connection speed.
3. Click on ‘Tune It’

Your Firefox should be now visibly faster.

There are a few other options under the tabs ‘Other Optimizations’ and ‘Other useful settings’. See if these can benefit you.

Download Firetune.

One of the most used area in a browser is the Address Bar or the Location Bar, as Firefox calls it. Functionally, the new Location Bar in Firefox 3 is pretty smart and has been dubbed as the Awesomebar.

As you start typing into it, it fetches the matching results from:

1. Web addresses from pages in history that match what you have typed
2. Page titles from history that match what you have typed
3. Bookmark titles that match what you have typed
4. Bookmarks with tag names that match what you’ve typed

When you first start using it, you may be a little confused with the number of results that appear in the list when you start typing an address. You may find apparently unrelated links showing at the top of the list. Some people even consider it an annoyance rather than a useful feature and tweak the about:config to get the Firefox 2 behavior.

But the fact is that, as you continue using it, you will find that the results are more relevant and you begin to see the usefulness of the navigation bar. Every time you type in some text and then choose a link from the displayed results, Firefox 3 remembers the text that you entered and the page that you selected. So the next time you make a similar search, the particular page will be displayed higher up in the list. Basically, the search results are ordered based on how frequently and how recently the page was accessed.

Once installed, you can open closed tabs by pressing the Alt and X keys together. It also supports a Quick Tab Style View, shown when you hit “Alt-Q”, which gives you thumbnails of the previous tabs you’ve closed (like the built-in IE Quick Tabs, but for previously closed tabs). You can then click on the thumbnail of the page you want to open in a new tab.

Download IE7 Open Last Closed Tab

While the trick works fine, you have to be online to read the magazines. I prefer to read such stuff offline and so was wondering if there could be a way to download and read all those magazines offline. I cranked my peanut sized brain and was able to find a simple way to download them.

The pages of magazines that you see are all images and as you flip through the pages, you see the next image. So basically what we want to do is download all the images that make up a magazine. Fortunately, all the images are serially numbered and that makes things easy for us.

Ok, let’s get started.

For this tutorial I assume that you have modified the useragent in Firefox to access the books at Zinio.

Step 1: Open up any book in zinio. Now Right-click on the image, select ‘Copy Image Location‘ and paste this link in some place. As you can see the link leads to an image, the name of which ends in ‘_1′ (assuming you copied the link from the first page). The second page will end as ‘_2′, third as ‘_3′ and so on. Suppose there are 150 pages in total, the links will range from ‘_1′ to ‘_150′. But you don’t have to copy all the 150 links one by one. Since we already have the first link we can easily create the other as shown in step 2.

Step 2: I used Microsoft Excel to create the remaining links. In the link, the part upto the underscore remains static, the number after the underscore increments by 1 and finally the link closes with a ‘.jpg’. So all we need to do is CONCATENATE the three parts to form a link. The screenshot below should be pretty self-explanatory.

The advantage is that, you can reuse this Excel worksheet for all the books that you wish to download from zinio. You just have to change the first part of the link. As for the number of links, it depends on the total number of pages in the magazine. It is better to have a little more than the maximum that you expect. Once the links are generated, just copy those cells, open up Notepad and paste it in Notepad. Save it as a text (.txt) file with whatever name you want. So now we have the links to all the images of the magazine. We just have to download them. If you do not have Microsoft Excel, you could use Zoho Sheet or a Spreadsheet in Google Docs to carry out the above step.

Step 3: For downloading all the images in the text file we created, we would be using a free tool called WinHTTrack. WinHTTrack is basically a website copier (aka offline browser). You can download a copy of WinHTTrack from here. Once you have downloaded, installed and fired up WinHTTrack you are ready to begin the download.

Create a new project.

In the next screen, for the ‘URL List (.txt)’, choose the text file that we created in Step 2. Press Next and then click on Finish.

HTTrack will begin downloading all the images in the links. Once the download completes, you can then view the images, which in fact are actually pages of the magazine.

You could actually combine the images into a pdf or a powerpoint file so that you just have to handle one single file.

Suppose you want to visit Digital Quest, instead of entering the full address like www.dq.winsila.com, you could just enter dq.winsila and press Ctrl+Enter. The www and .com are automatically added and Firefox starts fetching the site.

Similarly for adding .net extension press Shift+Enter. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter will add the .org extension.

As you can see, with this simple trick you could save a lot of keystrokes, and in the process, probably reduce the number of typos too. While pressing Ctrl+Enter works in Internet Explorer, the other two don’t.

However, if you are using Firefox of Opera browser, with a simple tweak you can work around the problem and actually see the images.

For Firefox:

• Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter.
• You will see a huge list of configurations. In the filter box on the top, type network.http.sendRefererHeader. (You could just copy the name and paste it in the filter).

• Double click on the ‘network.http.sendRefererHeader’ and change the value to 0 (zero).

That’s it. Now the frog should disappear and you should be able to see the image.

For Opera:

• Just press F12 and disable referrer logging.

If you have been using Firefox for quite some time, you might find that you hate to leave Firefox, even if it was for a short time. If that’s true, then what you need is IE Tab.

IE Tab is a Firefox extension that instructs Firefox to temporarily use Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. So you don’t have to fire up Internet Explorer separately if/when the necessity arises. The beauty of IE Tab is that just one tab in Firefox can be rendered as Internet Explorer while the other tabs continue to use the Firefox engine. And it can be done on the fly. Once you have installed IE Tab, a small Firefox icon appears in the bottom right corner of Firefox.

To switch a page from Firefox to Internet Explorer just click on the icon and the page reloads with IE engine or you could middle click on the icon to open a new Internet Explorer tab. The icon itself turns to the IE icon. To switch it back to Firefox click on it again.

Another advantage is that the browsing history and bookmarks are all still with Firefox.

Download IE Tab.

Check out some of the new features that you can find in the latest version.

1. Activities: Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

2. 

   For example, a user is interested in a restaurant and wants to see the location of it. This is the form of a “look up” Activity where the user selects the address and views an in-place view of the map using his favorite map service.

3. WebSlices: WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes. Internet Explorer 8 Users can discover WebSlices within a webpage and add them to the Favorites bar, a dedicated row below the Address bar for easy access to links. Internet Explorer 8 subscribes to the webpage, detects changes in the WebSlice, and notifies the user of updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favorites bar and click-through to the website to get more information.
4. Favorite Bar: In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8.

   

   It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. A user can easily add a link to the Favorites bar by using the Add to Favorites button and selecting the Add to Favorites Bar option.

5. Automatic Crash Recovery: Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.
6. Improved Phishing Filter: Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the “Safety Filter.”

The download links are now live on Microsoft website, so you can grab Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista, Server 2008, Server 2003 SP2, or XP SP2.

But then again, though you might be the only person who uses your home computer all the time or at least most of the time, there may be times when someone else happens to use it too. Like for instance, one of your friends or your guest might want to browse the web for a while. Your immediate thoughts are, what if they want to view one of the sites for which you have saved your password. Your browser would automatically log them in with your username and password. Worse still, anybody can just go to Tools>Options>Security and click on ‘Show Passwords’ and all your usernames and passwords are theirs for the taking. You just don’t want that to happen, do you?

Well, if you use Firefox, then you have a neat little solution built into it. Firefox has a feature called the ‘Master Password’ that’s just right for situations like the above. But not many people are aware of it or use it.

If you go to Tools>Options>Security, you would find that right below the ‘Remember passwords for sites’ checkbox which is enabled by default, there is another checkbox called ‘Use a master password‘ which, by default, is not enabled. If you enable this option, you will be prompted to set a master password. You can set a unique password here. Once you set the master password, whenever you visit a page (since you last launched Firefox) for which you’ve asked Firefox to remember the password, you’ll have to enter your master password first before Firefox fills up the password automatically. And without the master password, no one can use the ‘Show Passwords’ button to view the stored passwords. So, you can safely let your guest use your computer.