Month: September 2015

My Firefox add-ons after a Firefox Refresh

So I had this problem that Firefox did not remember my toolbar customizations. I created a new profile and re-synced that, but it did not seem to help. Today I discovered that Firefox has a “Refresh Firefox” feature that clears everything and starts fresh, so I tried that and it seems to work. Since all my add-ons were removed, I the chance to only install those that I really need. The list is not very minimal, but I spend a lot of time in my browser, and making being able to do stuff faster saves a lot of time, but most of all, reduces frustration.

Blocking unwanted things

Then there are the add-ons that take care of usability issues (that should not exist to begin with):

  • Customizable Shortcuts: CMD-Left Arrow is mapped to “Navigate Back” and in all other applications on OS X, it is mapped to “go to the beginning of the line”. You can see how this becomes a problem when editing text in a text field.
  • Lazarus: Form Recovery – Have you ever by accident navigated away from a page and had to fill in all the form fields again? Lazarus saves everything you type in to form fields. It even has multiple versions of the stuff. Also, if you use a web interface for adminsitrative stuff and have to fill in the same stuff lots of times, Lazarus can help you there.
  • warn-before-quit: Sometimes I hit Cmd-Q instead of Cmd-W when I want to close a window and end up quitting Firefox.

I like Firefox, especially now that I refreshed it and it got faster. Panorama an automatic unloading of unused tabs are fantastic. But sometimes I need to use other browsers and when I do, I want to have access to my bookmarks and passwords, so I need cross browser sync for that:

  • 1Password: Your passwords and other credentials everywhere.
  • Xmarks: Xmarks almost died, but got saved by a crowd funding campaign.

The browser is great for browsing, not so much for saving, so I have add-ons to get stuff out from the browser. In many cases a simple bookmarklet is enough, but as in Evernote’s case, the add-on is more than just the bookmarklet functionality.

Finally I use Zotero for my academic reference management:

  • Zotero: A reference manager that adds references and their associated PDFs directly from the page you found them on. Zotero is also unaffiliated with any publishing house. Mendeley got sold to Elsevier, Papers got bought by Springer Nature.
  • Zotero Better Bib(La)Tex: for generating .bib files. Better Bib(La)Tex allows for setting your own cite keys and can automatically update a .bib file that you have exported (e.g. a bib file of a subset of you collection)
  • Zotero Storage Scanner Plugin:
  • ZoteroQuickLook: enables QuickLook in Zotero.
  • ZotFile: Better attachment renaming rules, and the possibility of moving PDFs out from the Zotero store to e.g. a Dropbox folder.

Fortunately for me however Tab Mix Plus and Session Manager can export and import settings. Zotero and its add-ons however, I had to re-configure manually (I took screenshots of the preferences before the refresh).

Stuff not on the list

  • Tab Mix Plus is not on this list because I think it was responsible for the toolbar issue in the first place. Otherwise it is great: multiple rows of tabs, visual feedback on tabs with regard to whether they are unloaded, unread + progressbar for each tab.
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