Some applications, especially editors and IDEs, allow you to add custom commands that will run an external application with the current document (or selection, folder, etc) as an argument. Also, file managers like Nautilus allow you to run arbitrary scripts against currently selected files.

My PowerBook was behaving quite strange lately, but never looked into it. It would slow down and the fan would spin up quite often. After I upgraded to Firefox 2 today the problem got worse and Firefox started behaving really strange, could not open the Preferences or Add-ons windows.

Turns out that Firefox was maxing out the processor, this is why the machine was slow and overheating. Starting Firefox in safe mode, which disables all the add-ons, solved the problem. So it was one of the extensions. After a bit of trial and error it turns out that it is a combination of extensions: Greasemonkey and Digg This Toolbar. Not sure which one is the culprit, Firefox gets crazy only if both are enabled. I am running Firefox 2 on a PowerBook G4, Greasemonkey is 0.6.6.20061017.0 and Digg This Toolbar is 0.1.2b.

I finally can see flash on my Ubuntu AMD64!

I run across the NSpluginwrapper: A cross-architecture browser plugin tool article today, downloaded NSpluginwrapper and followed the instructions on the Ubuntu forums:

1. Download the Plugin and the Viewer
2. Install alien and linux32, if not already installed.
3. Convert the downloaded rpm's to deb's
   

diggler was my all time favorite Mozilla/Firefox extension. Unfortunately it is not maintained anymore (version 0.9 was released in 2004) and it is not working in Firefox 1.5.

While customizing my toolbar I noticed a button called Up. It does almost the same thing as diggler! It turns out that this Up button is part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Update: There is a similar extension called Digger, this will add a context menu to the Go button (just right-click on it).

A very nice Firefox tip: Pasting Wrapped URLs. Just set the editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines hidden preference (about:config) to 3.

There is also an extension that helps with this: URL Link. It allows you to follown non-URL links and open wrapped URLs in emails.

Mozilla is working on a developer site with Wiki based documentation for web development: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Main_Page

An excellent idea, it would be great to get (X)HTML, CSS, XML... reference documentations here. At some point I was thinking that Wikibooks could host such documentation, but Mozilla is a better place I guess, more focused. I hope it will take off.

This script by Jesse Ruderman, AutoLoginJ user script, allows you to automatically login to sites that allow you to save the username and password. He is mentioning another similar script, AutoLogin, and an extension, named AutoLogin as well.

A few useful Thunderbird extensions:

• Display Mail User Agent - adds an icon showing the mail client used by the sender; it could add other icons for operating system and mailing list manager for example.
• Contacts Sidebar - adds a sidebar, below the accounts, with all your contacts; use F4 to toggle.
• Display Mailing List Header - a bit tricky to use a this point (it is at version 0.1), you have to show all headers (View / Headers / All) in order to see it; a menu entry specific for mailing list messages would be nice, it could also add actions like Reply to List and Reply to Sender Only.

A few themes and an extension that will integrate Firefox and Thunderbird nicely with Gnome:

• Mozilla New Mail Icon (Biff) - a Thunderbird (and Mozilla Mail) extension that displays an icon in the system tray when new mail arrives
• GNOME-Fx - a set of themes for Firefox which tries to let it look like a native GNOME application
• GNOME-Tb - a port of the GNOME stock icons for Thunderbird; it does not have a home page, just a forum thread and a download link

There is a very easy way to add the JavaScript Console to the sidebar or as a regular tab:

1. In Firefox select Bookmarks / Manage Bookmarks...
2. Select a folder and then click New Bookmark
3. Enter "JavaScript Console" as the name
4. Enter chrome://global/content/console.xul as the location
5. Check the Load this bookmark in the sidebar checkbox, or leave unchecked if you want to load the console as a browser tab
6. Click OK and try the new bookmark