People often ask me “what’s that browser you’re using” or “how the hell did you make it look like that”.

This article serves two purposes:

  1. answer these questions
  2. remind me what to do when Firefox frags the profile 😎

Theme

Nothing special here but my GTK and xfwm themes are dark so Firefox is … dark.

Firefox

I know I am wasting some space on toolbars but I need them so I just have to live with them.

Extensions

I use my Firefox like a Swiss Army knife which means that I have lot of extensions installed (which does contribute a bit to the instability I see from time to time).

  • Adblock Plus
    Adblocker (With Filter von Dr. Evil and ABPdk filter subscriptions)
  • CustomizeGoogle
    Adds extra information to search results (links to other search engines), removes spam and adds from the results and adds extra functionality like streaming results and much more
  • DownloadStatusbar
    View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar
  • DownThemAll
    The download manager for Firefox
  • Extended Statusbar
    A Statusbar with speed, percentage, time and loaded size (similar to Opera’s)
  • Fission
    Fission combines address bar and progress bar – Safari style
  • ForecastFox Enhanced
    Adds weather forecasts to the Firefox statusbar
  • Foxmarks
    Bookmark backup and synchronizer. An essential tool
  • FoxyProxy
    Proxy management, rules based. I need this at work
  • GreaseMonkey
    Considered by many to be the Swiss Army knife of Firefox – I use it a little, see further down
  • locationbar2
    Linkyfies the URL (like Chrome)
  • PermaTabs Mod
    Turn tabs of your choice into permanent tabs. PermaTabs can’t be closed accidentally no matter what you click (even actions like “Close other tabs” will not affect them) and will stick around between sessions.
  • Sage-Too
    (The best) sidebar RSS reader
  • Screen grab!
    Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page.
  • StumbleUpon
    Probably the greatest time waster ever invented

Greasemonkey scripts

  • AutoLoginJ
    Auto submits login forms if the username and password is saved in Firefox

Other hacks

The only other hack I have done so far is enabling TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1:

In about:config look for the key javascript.options.jit.chrome, change it to True

and restart the browser.

Various problems

One problem I’ve come across from time to time (with Firefox 3.1) is

  1. All downloads fail with the error
    > … could not be saved, because the source file could not be read

  2. The extension and themes list are empty

This fix has worked for me

  1. Shut down Firefox
  2. Start Firefox manually: firefox-3.1 -safe-mode
  3. Disable all extensions
  4. Restart Firefox
  5. When Firefox is back up and running, re-enable all extensions

DownThemAll not working

At some point DownThemAll stopped working, the dta manager hung with the message “loading”.

Looking through the dta bug tracker I found a Similar to mine; at least the fix was the same:

  1. In about:config search for extension.dta
  2. Reset all values to default