Monday, June 16, 2008

Firefox 3 Download Day

The Mozilla Foundation has declared tomorrow, June 17th 2008, as Download Day. In an attempt to set a Guiness World Record for software downloads, they are encouraging everyone to participate by downloading Firefox 3 tomorrow.

I have been a fan of the Firefox Browser for a number of years now, however I will admit, that only recently have I started using their latest release candidate. This is because there are some add ons in Firefox, that I just cannot live without. Thankfully, the following add ons are now available and supported for the Firefox 3 platform:

Delicious BookMarks
If you are not familiar with the social networking site del.icio.us, it is a site that you can set and share bookmarks. By creating bookmarks and tagging them, those bookmarks become searchable by the social community. This is a great, but I really use it to keep my bookmarks in sync with the many computers that I work on. With this add on, you can log into your del.icio.us account, and use your bookmarks in Firefox.

FireGestures
In my view, Mouse Gestures is another one of those productivity boosters that is great to have in your arsenal. Instead of relying on clicking different buttons in the toolbar or using the Menu system in Firefox, you can simply use the mouse, and wave it across the screen while holding down the right click button, and Firefox will do your bidding. This is one of those features that I often take for granted on my machine, and expect to be available on others. I am disappointed often when I try to perform a Mouse Gesture, only to be greeted with the Context Menu that comes up when you right click on a web page.

Good luck Mozilla Foundation in breaking that Guiness World Record. You can count on my support.

2 comments:

Jon Schneider said...

Hey Carlus,

I'll be getting FireFox 3 today! I'm interested in some of the features that I've heard about around being able to tag bookmarks -- I haven't seen the feature in detail yet, but I'm hoping it will work something like tags in del.icio.us, or like tagging emails in Gmail.

Anyway, a question for you. I've never gotten into mouse gestures in the past, but I've heard good things about using them. What specific actions do you typically use gestures to perform?

Carlus Henry said...

Hey Jon,

Regarding Mouse Gestures, there are plenty of them out there, however the ones that I use the most include:

Back / Forward
By holding down the right mouse button and dragging to the left, it is the same as clicking on the Back button in the Toolbar. Dragging to the right is the same as clicking the forward button.

Open New Tab
By holding down the right mouse button and dragging up you will open a new tab. If you do this across a link, it will open that link in a new tab.

Like I said before, there are plenty of other gestures available, but those are the ones that I have committed to reflex.

Enjoy...