THREE MUST-HAVE EXTENSIONS
Add-ons, also known as Extensions, are what set Firefox apart from the
crowd—be it the stuffy inflexibility of IE or the all-inclusive weight of
Opera. You may not need built-in RSS, BitTorrent, or mail clients, or you
might merely want the opportunity to pick the best available extras to
construct your ideal browser a la carte. There are thousands of Add-ons
for Firefox to suit every personality and preference. But there are three
we think everyone can benefit from. FireGestures (http://tinyurl.com/38qlcl): Once you’ve used mouse
gestures to navigate, you’ll wonder what you ever did without them.
There are many mouse gesture extensions out there, but we like this
one the best, and it’s already Firefox 3 compatible. Shareaholic (http://tinyurl.com/33q9lo): Share links on Digg, Reddit,
del.icio.us, Facebook, and many other sites from a single drop-down
button. Foxmarks (http://tinyurl.com/s2ed9): Automatically sync your
bookmarks between multiple computers. A beta version supports
Firefox 3, as well as profi les—keep your work bookmarks and home
bookmarks separate, but access them from anywhere.http://www.maximumpc.com | AUG 08 | MAXIMUMPC | 53
Shareaholic makes sharing links with your friends and social networks easy.In Firefox 3, the whole page resizes, not just text—buh-bye,
layout snafus. snafus!
FORCE OLD EXTENSIONS
Tired of waiting for someone to update your favorite extension for
Firefox 3? Good news: Many older extensions work fi ne in Firefox 3.
You just have to disable the compatibility check. Point your browser
to about:confi g, then create a new entry. Call it extensions.check-
Compatibility and set its value to “false.” Then restart Firefox. Presto!
Your old extensions are back! Proceed with caution, though—some
extensions (mainly bookmark extensions like Foxymarks, extensions
related to the Firefox 2 location bar, and tab-related extensions like
ChromaTabs) genuinely aren’t compatible due to changes in Firefox 3,
so if you fi nd Firefox is acting wonky, change this value back to “true”
and hope your favorite extension developer gets up to speed.ZOOM IN, ZOOM OUT
Firefox 3 fi nally introduces full-page zoom. Previous ver-
sions of Firefox resized only text, breaking layouts, tables,
and hearts. No longer. Press Ctrl- to zoom out, Ctrl+ to
zoom in, or just hold Ctrl and zoom in and out with your
mouse wheel. Firefox 3 even remembers your zoom prefer-
ences for each website—set it once and forget about it! Or
if you’re old fashioned, disable full-page zoom by going to
View > Zoom > Zoom Text Only.